In Missouri, a small fuel tax increase would have drivers pay a little more for roads, and could head off proposals that would force all Missourians to subsidize driving. For more information on funding MoDOT read Funding The Missouri Department of Transportation and The State Highway System.
An Informed Public: Poor Policy’s Worst Enemy
For the time being, it seems that plans to tear down Kansas City International Airport (MCI) and build a $1.2 billion new terminal have been shelved. Public polling indicated that about 60% of city voters, whose approval was required for a bond issuance, remained opposed.
Supporters of a new terminal lamented this pause and argued that voters were not sufficiently informed of what was before them. Some even propose a more aggressive public education campaign. Sadly, this is what serious policy discussions often come down to—not thoughtful exchanges of ideas, but rather an uncompromising proposal stubbornly marketed and shouted in various ways at a busy public. And if they still don’t agree . . . shout louder!
In fact, after years of public debate, voters in Kansas City (and everyone who uses the airport) knew exactly what was being asked of them. Few issues have been discussed in more or at greater length than the airport. There have been numerous public meetings, TV and radio segments, and print news articles on the matter. A group of citizens even collected signatures to make sure the public had a vote. The public knew exactly what was being proposed.
Because MCI is a cheap airport for airlines to serve, we get more service. We have more direct flights than other markets our size. American Airlines and Southwest continue to expand service and in recent years we’ve attracted additional smaller discount airlines such as Allegiant and Spirit. These are not warning signs of a failing airport.
There are risks to taking on big builds. In Sacramento, San Jose, and Cincinnati, localities invested heavily in new airports. They increased airline fees to pay down the debt and saw airline service decline. This is a simple enough economic reality: when you charge more for something, you sell less of it. It really is that simple. Any effort to improve MCI must make sure that we retain our competitive advantage: a cheap and convenient airport.
Those in St. Joseph and across the region have a stake in the matter, but they won’t have a vote. Frequent travelers would be well served to make sure their friends in Kansas City are educated on the benefits and risks of a new terminal.
Local Control in Education, Properly Understood
If you head West on I-70, past the inner-ring suburbs of St. Louis and over the Missouri river, you’ll happen upon the hamlet of Lake St. Louis and the body of water that is its namesake. Built as a resort community in the 1960s, its population has boomed in recent years as St. Louisans move west out of the decaying core of the city toward St. Charles County’s greener pastures.
What was farmland near the lake not long ago is now subdivisions teeming with young families. Over the past 20 years, the Wentzville School District, where Lake St. Louis is located, has grown nearly 200 percent, adding an average of almost 500 students each year. That population growth is the talk of the town today, as it is going to require the school district to build at least one new school in the near future. In doing so, the school board will change the boundaries of the existing schools. This process will likely uproot hundreds of children from schools they already attend and force them to go somewhere else.
Folks are not happy. Petitions are being circulated. Facebook posts are being shared. The community is in turmoil.
This drama is not unique to Lake St. Louis, to Missouri, or even to 2016. As the American educational system evolved and matured, small schools and small school districts consolidated into larger and larger political units, from more than 170,000 public school districts in 1949 to the 14,000 or so bodies that oversee K-12 education today. This has empowered a smaller and smaller number of school boards to make decisions like where to locate schools, where to demarcate attendance boundaries, with whom to contract for busing and food services, how to compensate teachers, and many, many other decisions. At every point in this journey, as you might imagine, there was controversy.
Still though, it is popular to offer paens to local control, irrespective of political orientation. When education reformers tried to amend the Missouri constitution to change how teachers are evaluated, the Missouri’s NEA affiliate’s headline screamed “local control of public schools takes a hit.” When the NEA’s Michigan affiliate wanted to praise the recent Every Student Succeeds Act, they said that it “puts students ahead of politics; educators ahead of politicians; and local control ahead of federal mandates.” Similarly, Sen. Ted Cruz’s website states that “education decisions should be made on the state and local level, where parents and communities can be more involved and find solutions better suited to their kids’ needs.”
De Tocqueville wrote long ago, “local assemblies of citizens constitute the strength of free nations.” Unfortunately, our local institutions governing education have been weakening in recent decades. On the other side of the Show-Me State, the recent school board elections in the Kansas City School District didn’t have a single name on the ballot. Only one candidate got the necessary number of signatures to run in the election and was thus automatically elected, and the three other seats had to be filled entirely by write-in candidates.
To turn a phrase of left wing activists around, is this what democracy looks like? Or, more pointedly for conservatives, what does local control mean in education today?
Local control is not simply a tyranny of the majority on a small scale. Local control, properly understood, means empowering families, those “little platoons” that another lover of local control, Edmund Burke, so valorized, to make the best educational decisions for their children. It means allowing local community organizations like nonprofits and churches to operate schools where students are free to use their state support to finance their education. It means interpersonal networks within communities coming together to share information about what schools are doing, which ones are better than others, and where children might thrive.
In short, is has nothing to do with having a school board.
Local educational bureaucracies have unfortunately become 14,000 mini-monopolies. They routinely fight charter school or private school choice programs that would give families more choices as to where they send their children to school. In fact, the National Association of School Boards officially opposes private school choice and makes anti-voucher talking points available on its website. As the University of Pennsylvania’s Marc Meredith has shown, they purposefully schedule elections to drive down turnout to make it easier to get their desired outcome. Rather than represent the will of the people, they represent the needs of the bureaucracy.
The people of Lake St. Louis tax themselves to provide for a quality education for the children that live in their community. What if rather than being geographically assigned to schools, students were free to attend whatever school in the district they wanted to? What if they could take the funds levied for their education to schools in neighboring communities or to local private schools because they were the schools that best fit their needs? That would not be incompatible with the purpose of public education or the intent of their neighbors. In fact, it would more tightly align with what the children themselves, not the bureaucracy that has arisen over the years, actually want.
It is long past time that we, in the spirit of Confucius, rectify the name of local control. It does not have to be synonymous with monopoly. It does not have to fight innovation. What it needs to do is empower—and reflect the will of—citizens and families. That is the vision of de Tocqueville and Burke, and that is something worth pursuing.
House Wisely Overrides Veto on Funding Formula Cap
Yesterday, the Missouri house voted 113-43 to override Gov. Nixon’s veto of SB 586, which reinstates a 5% cap on the growth of the foundation formula target for education spending in the state. This follows the Senate’s 25-7 override vote on the same measure. To borrow from Martha Stewart: this is a good thing.
When Missouri’s funding formula was rewritten in 2005, lawmakers prudently placed a limit on just how much the state’s obligation to fund education could grow from year to year. In 2009, believing gambling tax revenue was going to flush the system full of cash, lawmakers removed the cap, and the amount has grown and grown to an absurd degree. This year, the formula required almost $500 million more than the state was willing to pay.
My colleague James Shuls has been all over this issue for years. As he wrote recently:
When I make a payment on my credit card debt, the next month’s payment is lower. However, when lawmakers increase funding for the foundation formula, it triggers an increase in the funding that will be required for the next go-round. This occurs because the formula is updated bi-annually based on how much a select group of districts spend per pupil. The legislature gives districts more money, the formula gets recalculated based on this new spending, and the target moves ever upward.
We have created a vicious circle in which more spending begets more spending.
Now, the legislature is considering reinstating the five-percent cap. This would not necessarily fix the perpetually increasing funding cycle, but it would slow it down. It would make it more feasible for lawmakers to fully fund the foundation formula.
Ending the vicious cycle is a great first step. Here’s hoping this turns the legislature’s attention to broader issues of education reform, like the ones we outlined in 20 for 2020.
Are Property Taxes for Education Fair?
NPR has reported that property taxes make public education unfair because some school districts receive more property tax revenue than other districts. However, property taxes are set locally. Don’t voters and their elected officials get to set higher property taxes and choose to spend that money on schools as they see fit?
The Crown Center Blight Expansion Is Bad Policy. Period.
The City Council of Kansas City just voted 10 to 1 to declare some asphalt parking lots and grass fields just south of Crown Center as blighted so that the area can qualify for public subsidies. Even the Kansas City Business Journal’s headline was skeptical of the effort, declaring, “Officials hold noses and declare $80M Crown Center development site blighted.”
Council members Quinton Lucas and Heather Hall voiced reservations. Hall found it “really hard for me to swallow that pill.” But she did. Lucas said the blight claim “sure doesn’t seem to pass the smell test of what blight is.” Yet he voted to support it. Only Councilwoman Alissia Canady voted against the measure.
The Journal concluded, “What we are hearing from staff is that once something is blighted, it’s always blighted…” Hall added. “That’s got to stop.”
Then stop it. All the hand-wringing and nose-holding in the world doesn’t matter if councilmembers continually vote yes.
Rural Schools Need Course Access
Mike McShane talks about expanding educational opportunity to rural communities in Missouri through course access. Read our recent papers on Rural School Reform and Course Access.
Moving Forward on MCI
Given the significant opposition from the public and likely from members of the City Council, Kansas City Mayor Sly James has suspended his pursuit of a new terminal for 2016. This is welcome news on a proposal that the Show-Me Institute has criticized from the beginning.
Just days ago the Mayor was calling a new terminal inevitable, echoing a similar claim in 2012 from former City Councilman Ed Ford (who subsequently apologized for the comment). Indeed there may someday be changes proposed for MCI—changes welcomed by airlines and voters alike—but how do we get there from here?
The first thing Kansas City needs to do is jettison anything having to do with this new terminal process. Despite years of hearings, presentations, and public forums on the matter, a large swath of voters remains skeptical. Second, Kansas City needs a new Aviation Department director with experience running an airport, perhaps even building a new terminal, and most importantly who possesses integrity, a commitment to transparency, and a respect for the airlines and the people they serve. That search should be nationwide and should begin immediately.
Once installed, that person needs to assess MCI’s condition and capabilities. (One can only imagine the state of Terminal A right now.) Where MCI needs maintenance, it should get it. Where it needs rehabilitation, it should get it. And perhaps, if it needs a major structural overhaul, it should get that too. That will only come once the public trust has been restored. The city manager and Council have an opportunity to rebuild that trust with a new Aviation Department director.
Kansas City Airport Ballot Measure Halted
Kansas City has decided against a ballot measure that would have financed the demolition and rebuilding of MCI airport. Patrick Tuohey of the Show-Me Institute explains why this is good for the city.
