Open-Source Alternatives May Disrupt Billion-Dollar Textbook Industry

Posted on by Brittany Wagner

Affton School District in St. Louis will take part in the U.S. Department of Education’s #GoOpen campaign, a new federal effort that aims to disrupt the $14 billion dollar textbook industry.  #GoOpen encourages school districts to develop best practices around using free digital textbooks and Affton is one of only ten school districts in the nation selected to participate.

As part of the campaign, the Department of Education has proposed a new regulation that would require all copyrightable intellectual property created with Department grant funds to have an open license. If the federal government pays for it, citizens (who actually paid for it) must be able to access it for free.

What would happen if public schools no longer had to purchase new textbooks every five to seven years? How much would schools save?

Though textbooks only make up 1 percent of overall education spending, over time, these costs add up. Between 2012 and 2014, Francis Howell School District in Saint Charles spent nearly $3.5 million on textbook purchases. Using open-source textbooks could cut expenses in half or more.

For example, a 2008 edition of a high school Biology textbook can be purchased for about $100 dollars. An Amazon Fire tablet with Wi-Fi goes for $49.99, and with that tablet the Kindle edition of CK-12 Biology can be accessed for free. CK-12 Biology is just one of hundreds of textbooks available to students at no cost.

In addition to reducing costs, digital textbooks provide differentiation opportunities for teachers. One study looked at the science performance of 1,651 high school students from three states. The researchers found that reading ability was just as important to a student’s state test score as the amount of science knowledge the student had.

With a digital textbook, the text can be manipulated to provide the same subject matter at multiple reading levels. Just as easily, the textbook can be updated throughout the year in response to new discoveries—how many students in Missouri would you think are using a textbook that says Pluto is a regular old planet?

I’m excited to see where innovation in the textbook industry takes learning in Missouri. I hope when it’s time for other school districts to enter the digital age, as Affton has, they are ready.  

Universal Pre-K May Destroy the Preschool Marketplace

Posted on by Brittany Wagner

In the 1950s, economist Milton Friedman proposed the use of educational vouchers in public education. Under a voucher program, parents can direct public funds toward the school that best serves their child’s needs, be that public or private.

Today, more than half of all U.S. states have a private school choice program, but Missouri is not among those states.

It may be the fear of change that prevents opponents of school choice from envisioning what the current K-12 public education system would look like if replaced by a system of choice and competition.

As I found out in my search for the perfect preschool for my three-year-old son, if you want to see Friedman’s vision of a vibrant school marketplace in action, you don’t have to look much further than Missouri’s own preschool market.

In contrast to the increasingly standardized classrooms you might find in the K-12 sector, there are literally hundreds of options in early learning. This includes the Montessori approach, where children learn through their own experiences, as well as the Waldorf approach, where children are provided with a consistent routine in a homelike setting. There are language immersion preschools, religious preschools, and even preschools where children learn through nature, like the preschool program at the St. Louis Zoo.

Picking the right preschool requires consideration of a child’s strengths and weaknesses. My own son, for instance, could use some practice with early numeracy skills like counting, but he dislikes structured educational activities. For him, the play-based preschool approach is best.

Once I found a few preschools offering play-based learning in the St. Louis area, I had to find something in my price range. One of the arguments politicians often make for universal preschool or “preschool for all” is that preschool isn’t affordable for even middle-income households like mine. Therefore, they reason, it should be subsidized for everyone.

In reality, many preschools I found in the area were quite reasonably priced. When you consider that traditional public schools spend over $10,000 per student per year, the $3,500 tuition First Congregational Preschool charges begins to feel manageable.

Why the difference in costs? In the public school system, parents don’t pay for schooling directly and have little choice in where their kids go to school, so it shouldn’t surprise us when we see high costs and low quality. But in the private preschool market, competition (and picking up the tab ourselves) drives costs down.

This isn’t to say that squeezing $3,500 into an already-tight budget will be an easy feat. Obviously, it would be great to save $3,500 per year and send my son to the local school district tuition-free.

But then I remember a simple truth: making something free doesn’t make it quality. And as is the case with many parents, quality is my number one priority. Take Normandy School District: Would providing universal preschool fix the failing district’s problems? Or would it just add another grade onto an already failing school system?

Making preschool free for all could have other unintended consequences, like putting quality preschools out of business and diluting innovation in early learning with standardization and regulation.

Some policy leaders in Missouri and across the nation want to make preschool free for every child. But if we’ve learned anything from the failures of the K12 system, it's that we have to figure out how to leverage the marketplace that already exists, not destroy it. Efforts like Minnesota’s Early Learning Scholarship Program, for example, offer scholarships of up to $7,500 to low-income families to help them afford preschool options. Low-income children gain access to preschool, and the marketplace is preserved—it’s a win-win solution.

I am excited to send my son to a preschool that fits his needs. If Missouri wants to give low-income families that same opportunity, universal pre-K is the not the answer. 

The New Education Philanthropy

Posted on by Michael Q. McShane

Last week, Harvard Education Press released The New Education Philanthropy, to which I was happy to contribute a chapter (along with my friend and collaborator Jenn Hatfield). It brings together education policy experts to examine philanthropy in education from a variety of different angles and collect lessons that have been learned in effective (and ineffective) education philanthropy efforts over the past decade.

For those interested in how philanthropy shapes education policy, the book is a great resource, compiling research on the activities of philanthropic organizations and their effects.  It is also a great way for anyone affiliated with a foundation to learn from the successes and failures of other philanthropic efforts.

The chapter Jenn and I wrote deals specifically with the backlash that education philanthropy often receives.  Even a cursory web search of “Gates Foundation” or “Walton Foundation” and "education" will turn up reams of criticism. We analyzed news coverage of philanthropy to mark changes in public opinion, and we interviewed critics from across the political spectrum to understand their qualms with the work of the foundations most associated with education reform.

The main lesson that we took away is that any education initiative (philanthropic or otherwise) must be done with people, not to them.  Education is an incredibly decentralized system, and individual teachers have a great degree of latitude in what they choose to do once they’ve closed their classroom doors.  If folks want to change teacher practice, or the curriculum, or the ways schools function, they have to do the hard work of making their case to the people who will see the changes through.  Too often it appears that organizations win over a few high-ranking decision makers, but find that new policies are adopted either in name only, or without the buy-in from teachers or principals. By the time the policy trickles down to them, teachers are frustrated, confused, and upset that they didn’t have more input in the process.

Philanthropists have an incredible opportunity to change the world of education for the better.  But they have to realize that they will not ultimately be the ones making policy work. That falls to teachers and principals, and unless they are brought into the program, it's never going to happen.  Reading The New Education Philanthropy should help cement that principle, among other insights that can make philanthropists more effective at what they do.

Fuel Taxes Back on the Table in 2016

Posted on by Joseph Miller

The tumultuous finale of the Missouri legislature’s 2015 session meant that a fair number of policy conundrums were left unresolved, perhaps none more pressing than budget problems for MoDOT and the State Highway System. Despite warnings that a failure to act jeopardized the condition of Missouri’s most important roads and bridges, last minute solutions—such as an increase to the fuel tax or allowing tolling for major highway projects—failed to pass.

With the 2016 legislative session approaching, there is more hope than ever that Missouri policymakers will focus on stabilizing MoDOT funding. The new Speaker of the House previously indicated that transportation will be a major focus in the next session. This is promising, especially recalling that it was the Missouri House, and not the Senate, that fatally delayed previous bills designed to increase revenue for the State Highway System.

Recently, Missouri legislators began to pre-file bills, and we are already seeing action on transportation funding. Three bills propose to increase fuel taxes. SB 638 would increase regular fuel taxes by 1.5 cents per gallon and diesel fuel taxes by 3.5 cents per gallon. HB 1381 would increase all fuel taxes by 2 cents per gallon. Finally, HB 1581 would increase regular fuel taxes by 7 seven cents and diesel fuel taxes by eight cents.  

We’ve argued many times that if Missouri needs more money to maintain highways, these funds should come from user fees like fuel taxes. Missouri’s fuel taxes, which are the main source of state revenue for highways, are the 5th lowest in country. As a general rule, keeping taxes low is excellent for Missouri, but when those taxes are so low that they cannot maintain the highways they were meant to fund, an increase is reasonable.

We’ll continue to keep an eye on these bills, and any others that are introduced, as the legislative session unfolds. 

The Student Debt Paradox

Posted on by Michael Q. McShane

A couple of weeks ago, my colleague Brittany Wagner had some fun with a spokeswoman for the Million Student March and her call for the abolition of all student debt in America.  Apparently not chastened by that embarrassing episode, folks continue to push to either erase current student debt, or make college free in the first place. To buttress their arguments, proponents of such measures often cite the “crushing,” sometimes six-figure debt levels that some students have incurred. 

The important point that these discussions often miss is that it isn’t the folks with six-figure loan debt who are defaulting. By and large, it is low-amount borrowers.  In fact, the average amount of debt from federal loans in default is only $14,014.

How can that be?

Well, think about who takes out large loans to pay for college. We’re talking lawyers, doctors, and folks getting MBAs.  Sure, they rack up a lot of debt, but they also make a lot of money, so they’re able to pay it off.  The people who can’t pay off their debts are the usually the ones who took out loans to pay for a year or two of college but then didn’t complete it.  They incurred the debt and years of lost wages, but will not see the wage premium from that college degree.

The Washington Center for Equitable Growth just released a helpful interactive map that illustrates this phenomenon perfectly. It allows you to search, by zip code, the average loan balance and the delinquency rate of student borrowers anywhere in the country.  As a reference, it gives the median household income of the zip code as well.

Look, for example, at Kansas City’s 64113 zip code. Median income? $113,536. Average loan balance? Extremely high. Delinquency rate? Extremely Low.  St. Louis’s 63105 is the same story, with a median income of $86,031 and extremely high levels of student debt but extremely low rates of delinquency.

At the other end of the spectrum is St. Louis County’s 63140.  There we see a median income of only $21,750 and a low average loan balance, but a high rate of delinquency. The same is true in Kansas City’s 64126, which has a median income of $25,009, extremely high delinquency rate, but moderately low levels of student debt.

When we realize that it is low-amount borrowers who are struggling, our focus should shift from trying to make college free to trying to make college better. Those policy prescriptions don’t fit easily on a bumper sticker, but they’d do a lot more good than the slogans that do.

No Child Left Behind Has One Foot in the Grave

Posted on by Michael Q. McShane

After the pigs got clearing for takeoff and the weather reports from Hell came back with a temperature below 32 degrees, the United States House of Representatives passed a bipartisan reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) by a vote of 359 to 64. Most of you know ESEA by its most recent iteration, No Child Left Behind, which has been waiting for years to be reauthorized. The new bill, which now heads to the Senate, is termed the Every Student Succeeds Act.

Education Week has a detailed cheat sheet on the ins and outs of the bill, but the Associated Press’s summary cuts to the core of the issue, “The bill would return to the states the authority to decide how to use students' test performance in assessing teachers and schools, and it would end federal efforts to encourage academic standards such as Common Core.”

I want to underscore just how important this is. In education, as in most policy areas, federal involvement is a one-way ratchet. Federal influence in education has been on the rise since the days of Sputnik, accelerated by President Johnson as part of the War on Poverty, and brought to its apex by No Child Left Behind. This looks to be the first time that trend has been reversed.

The tide is turning because people across the country and across the political spectrum have realized that the federal government is in a terrible place to try and dictate education policy. We have 100,000 schools in 14,000 school districts spread all across our vast and diverse nation. Trying to centrally determine how to hold schools accountable is simply too great a challenge. Those decisions are much better made by individuals closer to children and the communities where they live.

The bill still has to pass the Senate and be signed by the President, but all indicators point to that happening relatively soon. If and when it does, Missouri will have much more control over its educational future, and the hard work of creating a world-class education system without Uncle Sam breathing down our neck can begin.

Physician Survey: Direct Primary Care Growing In Popularity, Particularly With Younger Doctors

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

Jacqueline DiChiara has a great piece this week about the impact of physician shortages on the future of medicine. Hit the link for the full article, but I want to highlight one section that addresses the growth of direct primary care (DPC) and the interest that doctors—especially younger ones—have in the model.

Seven percent of primary care physicians—i.e. internists, family doctors, and pediatricians—offer direct pay/concierge medicine, reports the Physician Foundation in a 2014 physician survey with 20,000 respondents.
 
Thirteen percent of respondents say they plan to transition to this type of practice to some extent, either in whole or in part. Additionally, 17 percent of those physicians age 45 or younger confirm they will make this transition in due time.
 
Affordable direct primary care may be becoming a more mainstreamed option within both the short-term and long-term future of the healthcare industry.

 

You can find the Physician Foundation's study here. I have talked extensively about why DPC innovations are important not only for patients, but for doctors as well. Patients can generally expect to see cost and access improvements when they join a DPC program; meanwhile, doctors can generally expect to see lower costs and greater control over their practices. Indeed, for many doctors, moving to a DPC model offers them a way to remain in the field of primary care rather than be pushed out of it.

Expanding insurance—as Obamacare has attempted to do—fundamentally doesn't accommodate these cost, access, and professional control priorities. Instead, the Affordable Care Act doubles down on a broken status quo that ignores the system's effect on a host of important policy considerations, including the prices for care paid by patients and the supply of doctors serving the system. Gayle Brekke, a health insurance actuary writing for the Benjamin Rush Institute, captures the quandary well:

In the health care system, when a 3rd party (insurance company, government) is paying the bill from the first dollar of coverage, patients (consumers) do not have an incentive to shop for value. They are not spending their own money at the point of service. In fact, patients often feel like they pay high insurance premiums so they want to consume more health care in order to feel like they are getting value from their insurance coverage.

Until the health care industry grapples with its longstanding cost and, relatedly, access problems, patients will continue to be let down by the system and primary care doctors will continue to get squeezed by it.

The Unspeakable in Full Pursuit of – a Football Stadium

Posted on by Andrew B. Wilson

Oscar Wilde described fox-hunting as “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.” We can make the same point about Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, Saint Louis Rams Football Owner Stan Kroenke, and the Great Riverfront Stadium Hunt.

Nixon and Kroenke are two squires cut from the same cloth – a trophy-hunting governor who thinks he can pick winners and losers and a super-rich developer with a long history of currying favor from government entities.

In this situation, we may debate the question of whether it is worse (i.e., more “unspeakable”) to give or to receive. Here we are talking about the award of hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ assistance to a hugely profitable sports business that does nothing to advance the public good.

It is at least appropriate that the object of the hunt is made largely of concrete.  Along with the unwarranted subsidies, that makes it doubly indigestible – both from a gastronomic and an economic viewpoint.

County Residents on the Hook for Trolley Folly-Since When?

Posted on by Joseph Miller

Those who read this blog will know that the Loop Trolley is $8 million over budget, and Saint Louis County residents are getting stuck with the bill. We’ve also discussed that, despite the news breaking only a couple of weeks ago, regional officials have planned for overruns since mid-July, and may have known about problems much earlier. As Saint Louis County officials prepare to allocate mass transit funds to bail out the project, it is instructive to look at what the public was told about possible cost overruns during the planning phase—because they weren’t told that county taxpayers would be on the hook.

Flashback to July 16, 2012: On that day, University City held a special meeting on the Loop Trolley, at which Doug Campion (project manager for the trolley), presented an overview of the project. One of the council members asked Mr. Campion how much planners were setting aside for contingency (going over budget) and what would happen if the Trolley’s budget were exceeded. According to the meeting’s minutes:

“Mr. Campion said it would be normal to have between a 10 and 20 percent set up for contingency for the project. At the moment they have a 17.2 percent contingency. Mr. Campion said in the event that something would happen the TDD [transportation development district] could issue revenue bonds against it.”

Later, Mr. Campion reiterated that:

“…if there was an overrun the TDD would float a revenue bond to fund it.”

It is now clear that “something” has indeed happened, and the 17.2 percent contingency was not at all adequate. However, the TDD is not floating a revenue bond to cover the overruns, despite what Mr. Campion said when asked about this exact scenario. Nor did Trolley planners propose a special sales tax for the district or an increase in proposed fares, both of which could have been used to match an additional federal grant for the project. Instead, Saint Louis County is expected to pay for that match (and then some) with Proposition A funds. For those who have forgotten, Proposition A is a half-cent sales tax for mass transit. County residents were told that the tax was necessary to save bus service and improve existing transit so that people could get to work. Would voters have approved such a tax if they had known millions would be peeled off for pet trolley projects?

Saint Louis County residents were told that the Loop Trolley project would cost $43 million, and that construction contingencies were well in place. They were told that federal government and TDD revenues, not county taxes, would pay for the project and any cost overruns. They were told that Proposition A funds were about getting people to work and improving essential transportation. And now they’re being told to forget all that. 

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