Earlier this month, the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) released a report on implementing tolling on I-70 across Missouri. Show-Me Institute Policy Analyst Joseph Miller talks about the report’s findings.
Missouri Ranks 33rd on New Quality Counts Report
As they do at the beginning of every year, Education Week released their “Quality Counts” state report cards. Once again, Missouri ranks in the middle of the pack, 33rd overall with a C- grade. For regular readers of the Show-Me Daily blog, this should come as no surprise. Missouri has been stuck in the middle for years.
Why is Missouri perpetually in the middle when it comes to academic rankings? After all, we are several years into an initiative launched by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to get Missouri into the top 10 by 2020. This initiative has spawned changes at nearly every stage of education, from pre-kindergarten to teacher preparation. One could argue that these changes just haven’t had time to take root, and once they do, Missouri students will be making academic gains like gangbusters. I doubt it.
Missouri is not likely to make significant improvements, because Missouri’s education policies are predicated on getting things right—if we get certification right, teachers will get better; if we get standards right, instruction will improve; if we get accountability tests right, achievement will rise. The list could go on and on. The problem is that we don’t know the “right” way to do these things for every child and every teacher in every school, and we never will. Until our education policies shift from a “getting things right” mentality to one that fosters continuous improvement, we should not expect marketable differences in outcomes.
How do we do this? Andy Smarick outlines a nice plan in his book, The Urban School System of the Future. He starts with a somewhat controversial but true premise, “The traditional urban public school system is broken, and it cannot be fixed. It must be replaced.” Smarick goes on to substantiate this claim and offer a solution, creating an educational market where new schools regularly open and bad schools regularly close. This is how improvement happens in every other sector.
Smarick’s proposal would require substantial legislative changes, but here are two easy places for Missouri to start moving in the right direction.
- Allow charter schools to enroll students across district boundaries.
- Expand options for students by establishing an Equal Opportunity Scholarship program.
These changes themselves will not get us anywhere near what The Urban School System of the Future outlined. They will, however, begin moving Missouri toward that system of continuous improvement.
School Visit Series: A Charter School With a Goal
The South Building of Ewing Marion Kauffman School in Kansas City looks much more like a new academic building than a charter school serving low-income middle-school students. Streams of natural light flood the high-ceilinged lobby. On the wall next to the entrance is a portrait of the school’s late benefactor paired with the former Kansas City Royals owner’s quote, “You, you, and every one of you can go to college if you choose.”
Kauffman’s goal to “create college graduates” pervades the three-building campus. University flags hang on the walls. Students are divided into groups named after the universities teaching faculty attended. Teachers connect with students by sharing personal photographs, fight songs, and university traditions from their own college years. “It continues to invest kids in this idea that the people around you want you to have the same opportunities as they had and we don’t want socioeconomic status or zip code to hold you back from that,” said Candace Potter, talent recruiter for the school.
“Kids who grow up in low-income communities, about 10 percent graduate from college by the age of 24 … and we want to break that statistic,” she added. The school seems to be on its way.
Though 82.4 percent of students are eligible for free-reduced lunch, Kauffman earned 88.6 percent of possible points on the state’s Annual Progress Report. This means the charter is only 1.4 percentage points from being classified as Accredited with Distinction, which is stunning considering, according to Potter, most students begin below grade level.
One of those students is fifth-grader Aunecia Smith. She reports both her behavior and academics have improved since arriving at Kauffman, having previously attended George Melcher Elementary, a Kansas City public school. “It’s really not like this school. Their expectations weren’t as good,” she said.
Aside from rigorous academic expectations, the school invests in four PREP values, which serve as “current and future tools for success.” At frequent awards ceremonies, students are recognized with “PREP stars.” Aunecia, who wants to be a pediatrician when she grows up, has received two. “I have to change the channel on the TV when I see kids with cancer,” she said.
Quality charter schools like Ewing Marion Kauffman exemplify how school choice can set students on the course for success. Aunecia is just one student for which a charter school has made a difference, but if charters were able to expand regardless of district accreditation status or geographic location, many more students might be affected.
Before heading back to class, Aunecia said to me, “Every kid should go to a charter school.” I think what Aunecia really means is that every child should have access to the type of high-quality education she is receiving.
School Choice, Let Me Be Me
Where did you go to high school?
“The question” is as much a part of the Saint Louis identity as the Gateway Arch, Cardinals baseball, or Gooey Butter Cake. Last year, I decided that I’d take a stand against high school-based judgments by asking a question myself: What high school do you think I attended?
From there, it got interesting. “Ladue, Incarnate Word, Lafayette” are just a few school names that I heard. The variety and wide range of schools was interesting to hear, but no one came close to the school I actually attended. The truth is that I graduated from an often-underperforming, low-income public high school just below the Saint Louis City line. In 2013, only 20 percent of graduates had completed a four-year degree, according to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
For many students who attend a high school within their zip code, their school often is not a reflection of who they are. They must fit in, instead of choosing a school that fits. With school choice, a high school becomes less of a description about where the student lives and how much money the student’s family has, and more about what makes the student unique.
Join us in Saint Louis or Kansas City to learn more about how educational options allow students to be themselves. If you plan on attending, use the hashtag, #letmebeme, for all event-related tweets.
Thoughts on the Latest Rams Press Conference
With the recent news that Rams owner Stan Kroenke is planning to build a new football stadium, the chances of the Rams leaving Saint Louis have increased substantially. Late last year, Gov. Nixon appointed a two-person team whose mission was to investigate options for keeping the NFL in Saint Louis. The team, which consists of former Anheuser-Busch executive Dave Peacock and Clayton area attorney Bob Blitz, presented their report on Friday. Below are key points raised in that report:
- Plans are for a new stadium located on the riverfront, north of Lumiere Casino and northeast of the Edward Jones Dome.
- The stadium also would be available for professional soccer.
- It would be a public asset owned by a public entity and leased to the team. Also, the new stadium would come with a new lease, 30 years or more.
- Cost estimate: $860-$985 million, at least half of which would be privately financed (minimum $200 million from Stan Kroenke and another $200 million from the NFL).
- No new tax burden, although there would be public money involved.
- Estimated completion date: 2020.
After listening to the press conference and going over some of the points raised here, I have my misgivings about this project. First, I would like to know specifically where the money is coming from to pay for this new stadium. During the press conference, Peacock said that the sources of public financing would not be ascertained until there was a commitment from the NFL and from the Rams on moving forward with this project. Second, the $860-$985 million price tag would only be for the new stadium. Additional money (it wasn’t said how much) would be needed to upgrade the current Dome so it will be a full-time convention center. How are we going to pay for that as well?
My biggest misgiving is the fact that we will be publicly subsidizing this thing at all. Kroenke’s proposal in Los Angeles would be completely privately financed. Why should the public put up money when Kroenke can afford to pay for the costs himself? The most recent trend in stadium construction is toward private investment. That’s what happened in San Francisco and New York, so why should Saint Louis be different?
I know it is easy to be wowed by beautiful pictures of sparkling developments like the one above. Yet, nice pictures aside, these kinds of plans do not produce the economic benefits that would make these developments worthwhile. I want Saint Louis to remain an NFL town, but I don’t want to spend taxpayer dollars to do it.
Show-Me Now! School Choice: Let Me Be Me
At the end of this month, the Show-Me Institute will be sponsoring National School Choice Week events in Saint Louis and Kansas City. Please join us for School Choice: Let Me Be Me. Register now for Kansas City and/or Saint Louis.
Should Missouri Use an A Through F System to Grade Public Schools?
The practice of grading organizations using an A through F grading scale has been utilized by many types of industries. This legislative session, elected officials will decide if the system is right for Missouri’s public schools. Senate Bill 28 “requires the State Board of Education to develop a simplified annual school report card for each school attendance center using a letter grade of A to F.”
To understand Missouri’s current accountability system, the MSIP-5, a parent must first have access to the Internet. The Comprehensive Guide can be located using the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s (DESE) website. Navigating the site is notoriously difficult, especially for a first-time user. Once the document is found, the parent must read through 104 pages of confusing tables and formulas just to, hopefully, understand the accreditation process on page 56.
The table below shows Missouri’s accreditation scheme. Although there are only four categories, words like “partially accredited” are not intuitively associated with the word “underperforming,” as the letters C and D are.
To gain a different perspective, imagine if restaurants were evaluated using the MSIP-5—“How about dinner at Barcelona in Clayton? It got an APR of 73; oh, but its MPI was Floor.” Simply saying the restaurant has three and half stars on YELP indicates the restaurant is good, but perhaps some have had a not-so-good experience.
Our familiarity with letter grades, stars, and even “$$” provides us with simple indications of the type of service we should expect to receive. States such as Florida, Oklahoma, and Indiana have developed similar A through F school grading schemes. Some criticisms state that the systems are “oversimplified” or “have arbitrary cutoffs.” With any system, including the MSIP-5, there may be questionable cutoff points.
Ultimately, an A through F grading scale would allow parents a better understanding of what a school offers, turning them into more effective consumers of educational services.
Streetcars Continue to Fail
In September we highlighted the problems with streetcar cost overruns in Charlotte, North Carolina. Now it appears streetcar efforts are collapsing everywhere. According to POLITICO:
From D.C. to Atlanta, from San Antonio to Salt Lake City, streetcar projects have run into delays, cutbacks and other snags, and some have been scrapped altogether. The most dramatic recent example was November’s demise of a $550 million, state-aided streetcar project in the liberal, traditionally pro-transit D.C. suburb of Arlington County, Va., which had turned politically toxic as its price tag more than doubled. (DOT rejected an application for federal funds for that project, but supporters believed a second attempt would succeed.)
The project in Arlington, Virginia, has come to a complete stop because of problems. This is noteworthy because the region was held up as a positive example by streetcar booster Councilman Russ Johnson at the two-mile starter line’s groundbreaking. According to POLITICO:
In D.C., the H Street line is three years late in opening, marred by missteps like a test run in which the streetcar had to stand still for 15 minutes while an ambulance blocked its path. This fall, the District cut the size of its planned streetcar network from 20 miles to eight miles.
Kansas City voters wisely rejected a streetcar expansion effort in November, but city leaders seem intent on putting it on the ballot again. If city leadership won’t listen to voters, perhaps they will heed their peers around the country who are rethinking their positions.
Show-Me Now! Public Dollars for the Edward Jones Dome?
Michael Rathbone notes that the St. Louis Rams may be moving to LA. Should St. Louis taxpayers offer to build a new stadium or improve the Edward Jones Dome to keep the Rams in town? No.
