Ed Hassinger, Chief Engineer at the Missouri Department of Transportation, and Joseph Miller, Show-Me Institute Policy Analyst, discuss the state of I-70 and the options for improving it.
Second All-Girls Charter School to Open
This school year, Hawthorn Leadership Academy opened its doors as the first all-girls public charter school in Missouri. Now, the state Board of Education has approved an application for a second all-girls public charter school—Tessera Hall.
Tessera Hall will open to sixth- and seventh-graders, but will expand to include grades 8 through 12 in South St. Louis City during the 2016–2017 academic year. As the Post-Dispatch reported, a group of St. Elizabeth Academy alumni started working to build the school after St. Elizabeth closed in 2013.
Like the once private, religious De La Salle Middle School, which reopened this year as a public charter school, St. Elizabeth struggled with enrollment. Mike McShane, who recently joined the Show-Me Institute as the Director of Education Policy, wrote about this phenomenon in Sector Switchers: Why Catholic Schools Convert to Charters and What Happens Next. While charters like La Salle no longer deliver a religious education, access to public dollars allows them to remain open, ultimately carrying on their mission—providing a quality educational service to a low-income population.
Tessera Hall’s charter school application says it plans to recruit young women in low-performing schools like Roosevelt High School, where 70% of girls score below basic in mathematics. The application reads:
The proposed mission, curriculum, teaching methods and services of Tessera Hall Academy are designed to meet the particular needs of the adolescent urban girls of St. Louis by providing an inclusive and academically challenging experience in a safe, affirming, and empowering environment that enables these young women to achieve success in college, become civicminded leaders, and be resilient life-long learners.
I look forward to hearing more about the state’s second single gender public charter school, as well as other future charter school options. The Missouri State Board of Education accepts charter school applications up until the December board meeting.
Single gender or mixed, students need more quality educational choices.
A Good Idea from the Post-Dispatch
David Nicklaus’ latest column, “Tax credit would be better for workers than minimum wage hike,” is one well worth reading. In it, he talks about how those opposed to a minimum wage increase need to offer an alternative policy proposal instead of just saying no. Mr. Nicklaus suggests that Missouri create a state Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) to supplement the federal credit and increase the incomes of the working poor.
Economists across the political spectrum have been recommending this for years. The Congressional Budget Office, David Neumark, and even Christina Romer find the EITC is a better policy option than the minimum wage for helping low-income households.
There a couple of reasons why the EITC is a better policy option than the minimum wage. First, it is specifically targeted to help low-income households. The minimum wage isn’t as well targeted. For example, a teen flipping burgers and making the minimum wage would benefit from a higher minimum wage even if both of her parents are surgeons. The EITC only goes to households making below a certain amount. Secondly, the EITC doesn’t increase labor costs. Increasing the minimum wage means employers will have to pay their employees more per hour. The EITC is a direct government benefit, so businesses won’t have those increased costs.
The EITC is not a perfect program. It makes a lot of improper payments , costing taxpayers billions. Also, its complicated nature makes it necessary for many people to hire professional tax preparers so that they can receive the credit.
Despite these drawbacks, the EITC is still a superior alternative to the minimum wage
Taxicab Commission Still Stonewalling Uber, Residents
At long last, UberX has begun operating in Saint Louis.
Just not legally.
On 10:00 A.M., Uber, a prominent national ridesharing company, simultaneously filed an anti-trust lawsuit against the Saint Louis Metropolitan Taxicab Commission (MTC) and launched UberX in defiance of that commission. This move followed the breakdown of negotiations between the MTC, Uber, and local government officials over new ridesharing regulations. Some MTC commissioners claim they have made all the concessions they can, and that they are simply enforcing state statutes on fingerprinting and background checks. However, Uber and other local officials claim that remaining regulatory barriers are unnecessary and will prevent Uber from serving the metropolitan area.
In addition to its inability to end Saint Louis’s status as the largest city in the United States without cheap ridesharing, the MTC continues to embarrass the city in its spare time. The latest incident came when a local resident submitted a sunshine request asking for comments and complaints received by the MTC in the last 18 months. One might expect a body whose core mission is to ensure quality cab service to have readily accessible complaint data, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. According to the MTC, complaints are not “readily kept in the ordinary course of our record keeping.” They charged the resident nearly $500 dollars, an amazing sum for files that most governmental organizations would have aggregated and digitized. Those who have read about the MTC’s reaction to a Show-Me Institute sunshine request will be unsurprised by the MTC’s lack of professionalism.
It is exactly one year and seven months since Lyft, another ridesharing company, attempted to enter the Saint Louis market. Since that time, the MTC has constantly resisted reform, treated requests for information with contempt, insulted the public, and engaged in offensive infighting. How can a commission that cannot regulate its own behavior be expected to regulate the taxi market? How long must residents put up with this self-serving commission? As we’ve suggested before, it may be time for the state to disband the taxicab commission altogether.
A Better Way of Doing Saint Louis’ Dirty Work
In 1992, Patrick Geraty founded St. Louis Composting. Patrick was in the landscaping industry and was looking for a way to diversify his business. “I was also wondering what to do with all this yard waste,” he tells me. His solution was to recycle the dead plant matter into mulch and compost, which can then be used to enrich topsoil.
As his business grew, he began taking on local governments as clients. Many public spaces produce plant waste that needs to be disposed of, and cities also need mulch to cover ground in public parks.
Privatization can be controversial, but there are some instances where everyone agrees privatization is a smart move. Municipal mulching services seem to be one such case.
In 2010, the city of St. Louis contracted out its green waste disposal to St. Louis Composting. The move saved the city an estimated quarter-million dollars annually.
“Privatization just made sense,” said Greg Hayes, St. Louis’s forestry commissioner. “Antiquated equipment made our operation inefficient. It saved the city from having to invest a significant sum in new specialized machinery. St. Louis Composting is a well-capitalized, accomplished specialist that knows the business inside and out.”
This seems to be a common story. As a city’s older machinery needs to be replaced, it makes sense to contract out with a specialist like St. Louis Composting rather than burdening a city with the purchase of expensive new machinery.
Patrick estimates that his company now has contracts with around 20 to 25 cities in the eastern half of Missouri. His company even handles much of the animal bedding for the St. Louis Zoo.
I asked Patrick about the environmental aspect of his business and he tells me that soil quality has decreased in the last 30 to 40 years. Recycling organic matter back into the topsoil helps fix this problem. “You feel good about what you do” he said.
School Visit Series: The Homeschooling Choice
As someone who often writes about alternative educational opportunities, I’m ashamed to admit that even I had some misconceptions about homeschooling prior to attending the Greater Saint Louis Home Educators Expo in March.
I had always imagined that homeschoolers, as their name implies, stayed at home all day with little or no contact with the outside world. I thought that a homeschooler’s academic success depended solely on their mom's or dad’s ability to teach math, science, and reading at every grade level—a feat that few certified teachers could accomplish.
I was happy to learn that this couldn't be further from the truth.
I recently visited the Pillar Foundation, a private, charitable, educational foundation that functions as a resource center for homeschooling families. Some refer to the Pillar Foundation, which offers high school–level courses to homeschooling families at no cost, as a “co-op,”
What is a co-op? That’s the question I asked back in March when a parent started to explain her child’s schedule and slipped the word into our conversation.
According to one homeschooling mom, “co-ops are groups of homeschooling families who join together to enrich their homeschooling experience by learning from and with one another. Often these groups will participate in field trips, sports, classes, etc.” Parents involved in co-ops usually teach coursework they have a background in. So the mother with a biology degree teaches science, the history buff teaches history, and the artist teaches art. No one makes money, but every parent benefits from the academic expertise of another parent.
In short, co-ops are to education as Uber is to the taxi industry. It's education’s take on the sharing economy.
The Pillar Foundation is different from a traditional co-op in that volunteers, not parents, teach the courses. This semester, for example, state Representative Kurt Bahr is teaching a US Government & Constitution class. For day 1 of the 4-month course, Bahr provided about twenty 10th- to 12th-graders with a walk-through of the Declaration of Independence, using his personal experiences in the Missouri House to explain dense material.
To give students some context for the line in the Declaration of Independence that reads “He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant…” Bahr explained that sometimes, “politics simply is you get your way, because you are willing to outwork or outwait the other side.” What a great opportunity for kids to learn about a founding document from an elected official!
Co-ops and resource centers like the Pillar Foundation aren't well known outside of the homeschooling community, but if more people knew about the resources out there, they would see that homeschooling is a viable option for their children. I hope that more families with young kids who are thinking about how best to educate their children look into the exciting opportunities available to them in the homeschooling world. As a parent to a soon-to-be four-year-old, I know I will be.
Convention Mania Spreads
In Heywood Sanders’ book Convention Follies, he writes about the failure of convention centers and hotels to lead to economic development—or even recoup the costs of the investments themselves. No sooner had we written about the same slim prospects for success in Kansas City than we learned of plans for a similar project in Camden County, Missouri. Thankfully, at least one local leader is skeptical.
Lake News Online was kind enough to publish our take on the matter. You can read more here.
Who is Missouri’s Teacherpreneur of the Year?
California teacher Laura Randazzo is not just a teacher—she’s a teacherpreneur.
The website teacherspayteachers.com, which allows educators to sell original lesson plans, worksheets, and curriculum materials, has provided Ms. Randazzo with an outlet to sell 4,000 copies of her original worksheet, “Whose Cell Phone Is This?” priced at $1 dollar per sheet. Between all of the resources she has made available for high school grammar, vocabulary, and literature, she has grossed $100,000 in sales.
In Teacherpreneur: Innovative Teachers Who Lead But Don’t Leave, the Center for Teacher Quality advocated for this new type of educator. Teacherpreneurs spend a portion of their time teaching in the classroom and then serve in other educational roles outside the classroom. Some, like Ms. Randazzo, develop materials that they then sell. Others help out as teacher leaders in their schools, mentoring new teachers and developing strong curricula for other classes to use. Some even get involved in the policy process, working with district, state, and national leaders to influence the rules and regulations that govern public schools.
Unfortunately, as the authors point out, today’s “archaic” work schedule may limit opportunities for teacherpreneurs. Teaching 2030 cowriter Ariel Sacks explained in 2010 why it’s important for teacherpreneurs to split time both as an educator and an entrepreneur:
Many teachers like myself could play any number of teacherpreneurial roles depending on the needs of my school and the funding source—community organization, think tank, or university. Right now, many of us are developing curriculum materials, mentoring teachers, or creating partnerships between our schools and other organizations. And I can imagine more: I could do policy work outside my school and/or be a freelance writer, with perhaps only half of my salary paid by the school itself.
The beauty of a hybrid, teacherpreneurial role is that I would always maintain a classroom teaching practice. Teaching is the soul of my work in education. If I lose that, I think I’d feel disconnected from my purpose and passion—and my colleagues. At least in my own mind, my work would lose relevance and, understandably, I would lose credibility with my teaching peers.
Today’s school environment is hardly a hotbed for teacherpreneurs, so it’s worth considering what types of policy reforms, either at the local or state level, would allow teacherpreneurs to thrive. Expanding virtual teaching opportunities, for example, may allow educators to stay in the classroom while taking on other roles. They could create online modules or allow students in other schools or districts to join their class via Skype or other video-conferencing software. For every module that a student uses or every student who joins their class, they could get paid.
One day we might not only award an educator with the title of Missouri Teacher of the Year, but recognize a teacherpreneur as well.
“This Time It’ll Be Different”
I’ll bet that’s what Phelps County officials are thinking as they set out to create a new tax increment financing (TIF) district in Rolla. This time they want a new marketplace on the north side of Interstate 44. Despite their optimism, policymakers should be aware that Missouri cities and counties have been using TIF for years now and the record of success just isn’t there.
Numerous studies show that the use of TIF does not lead to economic growth for the area and isn’t a financial boon to the jurisdictions that use it. For example, studies of the use of TIF in Iowa and Chicago both found that TIF does not deliver tangible economic benefits. A more recent study in Indiana found “. . . uniform negative impacts of TIFs on traditional measures of economic development such as employment, the number of business establishments, and sales tax revenue.”
So why do Phelps County and Osage Beach (which approved TIF for a senior living center earlier this year) think that their projects will be different in the face of so much evidence to the contrary? It would be a nice to know an answer to that question, but in the meantime, the proliferation of TIF districts continues.
It is easy to understand the appeal of using TIF to redevelop vacant property. If the project gets completed, a new development is in place instead of a deserted lot, and all without “costing” taxpayers. However, development can occur without TIF. It has in Olivette, and it can happen in Rolla, too.
