Show-Me Institute Education Policy Research Assistant Brittany Wagner discusses one of the reasons she decided to leave her career in teaching and join the Show-Me Institute.
Teacher Tenure: Good for Teachers, Bad for Students
“Wait ‘til you have tenure, then you can do that,” was my former colleague’s favorite line. Although the tenured teacher referenced here is an outstanding educator, this axiom is more often used as a justification for poor behavior than a co-worker’s quip.
Missouri teachers are tenured, or become permanent teachers, once they have taught for five consecutive years within the same district. According to the American Federation of Teachers, a Missouri tenured teacher may be fired only in the following circumstances:
(1) physical or mental condition unfitting him to instruct or associate with children;
(2) immoral conduct;
(3) incompetency, inefficiency or insubordination in the line of duty;
(4) willful or persistent violation of, or failure to obey, the school laws of the state or the published regulations of the board of education of the school district;
(5) excessive or unreasonable absence from performance of duties; or
(6) conviction of a felony or a crime involving moral turpitude.
This law is meant to protect Missouri teachers, but does it provide Missouri students with protection from bad teachers? A Los Angeles Superior Court Judge recently considered this question.
Judge Rolf Treu found on Tuesday that teacher tenure protections “disproportionately affect poor and/or minority students.” The ruling cited Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court case that declared segregated schools are not equal. Judge Treu said:
All sides to this litigation agree that competent teachers are a critical, if not the most important, component of success of a child’s in-school educational experience. All sides agree that grossly ineffective teachers substantially undermine the ability of that child to succeed in school.
California’s teacher tenure laws may differ from Missouri’s, but the problems are the same. One Missouri superintendent reported, “Teacher tenure is the greatest restraint to student performance!” If we hope to provide all students with at least a chance at success, we must consider Missouri tenure reform.
School Choice – As American As Individual Liberty
Peter Greene is at it again. Previously, he argued conservatives should not support school choice. Now, he is arguing that school choice is un-American. I explained why he was wrong before and I did so again last Friday on the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice’s blog.
One of his main arguments is that private schools may teach objectionable content. I respond with this:
For as long as anyone can remember, there have been disagreements about what is being taught in public schools. That is because parents are compelled to send their children to public schools—if they can’t afford something different—and taxpayers are compelled to support public education through their tax dollars.
However, individuals have different values and beliefs. Of course, when parents disagree with their child’s public school they can pay for private school tuition, accept the school’s actions, or seize control and make the school change its position. Still, in all three of those scenarios, some people are being compelled to fund a school that teaches material with which they disagree.
There is simply no getting around the fact that someone’s beliefs or conscience will be compromised in the levying of taxes to support education…
Therefore, do those who oppose private school choice for this reason believe their rights are more important than others who object to content in public schools—but are compelled to support them anyway?
When the district where I taught banned Slaughterhouse-Five and Twenty Boy Summer, few progressive thinkers applauded the district for acquiescing to a parent’s wishes. They deemed the district backwards and lampooned the individual who led the effort to ban the books.
Peter Greene and other opponents of school choice programs might not mind Philadelphia’s decision to include A People’s History of the United States—a highly controversial book written by socialist Howard Zinn—in the public school curriculum, but many people do mind.
Greene does not seem interested in protecting all citizens from being compelled to fund schools that violate their beliefs, only the ones that think like he does.
Rather than compel students to attend schools that violate their convictions, school choice allows individuals to choose the school that aligns with their ideals. That is why I say, “School choice is about promoting individual liberty, and it doesn’t get more American than that.”
Ballpark Village Crushing It . . .
It seems that state and local development officials hit a home run when they decided to subsidize the construction of Ballpark Village. Yet, as I mentioned in my post last month, other local businesses feared that while Ballpark Village would do well, they would suffer losses. Their fear is now turning into reality.
As reported in the St. Louis Business Journal, bars and restaurants are taking serious hits to their sales. For example, Paddy O’s, a popular bar for pre-game and post-game activities, is expecting to draw $1.3 million in revenue this baseball season, a far cry from the $2.5 million they received last year. The Flying Saucer, another restaurant located near Busch Stadium, is looking at a 20-25 percent drop in business. These reports are anecdotal, but they fall in line with what economists find when they examine subsidies for similar types of developments, such as sports stadiums. While the subsidized development might do well, in many cases, it comes at the expense of other businesses in the area. Little to no actual wealth is actually created.
The government should not be subsidizing private developments. Even the ones that actually do well, such as Ballpark Village, just end up shifting consumer spending from one location to another. Instead, the government should be focusing its spending on areas that can benefit the public at large, such as public safety.
Lake Of The Ozarks To Waste Sales Tax Monies On Passenger Rail
As Missourians consider whether or not to vote for a transportation sales tax, localities and regions are writing up their wish lists for how the new money will be spent in their areas. The Lake of the Ozarks is no exception. Some of the projects that area counties have proposed have merit, including reasonable road and sidewalk improvements. Others do not, such as what is at the top of Camden County’s list: passenger rail from Jefferson City to Camden County.
While a detailed plan has yet to surface, it is certain that any passenger rail extension from Jefferson City to Camden County would be incredibly expensive. How expensive? The distance from Jefferson City to Camden County is more than 50 miles, and new rail construction can cost up to $25 million per mile, more if they need to acquire right-of-way or build new bridges. Even simple rehabilitation of existing track can be very expensive, as the Missouri Department of Transportation’s (MoDOT) recent $48 million expenditure to improve 10 miles of track demonstrates.
What would be the demand for this line? The Missouri River runner, which connects major Missouri population centers along the Missouri River, has had difficulty gaining passengers and runs a significant operating deficit ($8 million to $9 million per year). If a link between Saint Louis, Jefferson City, and Kansas City has insufficient demand to cover costs, what are the chances for a rail line that simply connects Jefferson City to Camden County?
To get a sense of the ridiculousness of the project, consider how one might go about using this rail line. If one were planning to go from Saint Louis to the Lake of the Ozarks via this route, there would be two options. First would be to drive to Jefferson City, get out of the car, and take the rail the last 50 miles. The second option would be to go to the St. Louis Civic Center, catch one of the two daily River Runner trains to Jefferson City, and then transfer to the rail line. With both options, given the spread out nature of the Lake of the Ozarks, it is likely that anyone taking the train would have to rent a car upon arrival. It is immediately obvious that no one would consider this a reasonable transportation solution; the only market would be rail enthusiasts.
This rail project demonstrates the folly of using a sales tax to pay for transportation in Missouri. When users of highways are the ones paying for highways, the amount available to spend on new construction and maintenance is controlled by underlying demand for those assets. When everyone pays a sales tax for anything that can be called transportation, the money gets spent on politically popular projects, regardless of feasibility or demand. So it goes that if the sales tax passes, shoppers in Saint Louis will fund an empty train to Camden County.
Breaking: New Study Supports Old Show-Me Institute Study
I admit that I like to spend a good portion of my spare time at the casino. I gamble even though I know that the odds favor the house. At least I’m gambling with my own money. Public employee pension systems, on the other hand, make bets with other people’s money. Increasingly, they are taking riskier bets in the hope of hitting the jackpot. That’s what the Pew Charitable Trust found in their new study. As the study’s authors show in the figure below, public pensions are shifting away from safer investments (e.g., U.S. Treasuries and Corporate Bonds) and toward riskier assets (such as equities and commodities) that are expected to deliver higher returns on investment.
This behavior is taking place in Missouri. For example, in the late 1990s, the Missouri Department of Transportation and Highway Patrol Employees Retirement System (MPERS) had 42 percent of their assets in fixed income and cash. Equities and alternative investments such as real estate made up the rest. Now, MPERS has 22 percent of its assets in cash and fixed income.
The pensions are doing this “to deliver higher long-term returns in order to keep funding costs low . . .” In fact, in one of our previous policy studies, Andrew Biggs noted this phenomenon when examining how Missouri’s public pensions value their liabilities: “U.S. public sector plans, by contrast, have taken on greater investment risk, because doing so allows them to lower the accounting value of their liabilities and put off difficult decisions such as raising contributions or lowering benefits.”
I don’t have a problem with a pension plan seeking higher returns, but if these investments don’t deliver as hoped, then Missouri taxpayers will be on the hook to make up the shortfall. That is why I favor retirement plans such as defined contribution plans or cash balance plans that limit the exposure of the taxpayers to investments failing to generate expected returns. Hopefully, we can make a shift before one of these risky bets fails to pay off.
U.S. public
sector plans, by contrast, have taken on
greater investment risk, because doing so
allows them to lower the accounting value
of their liabilities and put off difficult
decisions such as raising contributions or
lowering benefits
Governor Should Veto Data Center Tax Exemption Legislation
The legislative session may be over but that doesn’t mean the lawmaking is done. Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has a plethora of bills before him at this writing that he can either veto, sign, or let pass into law without his signature. Among them is a battery of sales tax exemption changes that deserve the additional scrutiny the governor is giving them.
When the legislative session started, talk about sales tax exemption changes generally focused on a problem the legislature actually needed to address — whether personal training services should constitute “entertainment” for sales tax purposes. Unfortunately, that evolved into a package of legislation (encompassing several bills) that also included sales tax exemptions for manufactured homes, data centers, electricity transmission, and more. The governor is predicting that the cost to the state for the bills could be upwards of $400 million, with hundreds of millions more in costs at the local level.
Whether that top-line total is exactly correct, it is clear that many of these sales tax carve-outs look a great deal like special interest income tax credits when it comes to the narrowness of the benefits and the political considerations that went into extending them. Indeed, legislators have been trying to direct tax credits to data centers in the state for years now. That the legislature decided to throw money at the industry through a different section of the tax laws comes, unfortunately, as little surprise.
The legislature is right to cut taxes for Missourians, but cutting big special deals for favored industries, whether through tax credits or exemptions, should be a non-starter. More to the point, the governor should veto the data center legislation even though doing so would mean better tax policies — which were bound to the fate of the questionable exemptions — will have to be reintroduced next session. If he does, next year, the legislature should take what the state would have foregone with the business exemptions and apply much of it instead to broad tax cuts for businesses. If the state can do without the millions in revenue assigned to many of these special exemptions, it can continue to do without that revenue — but this time through broad tax cuts. That would be a better policy.
When It Comes To Privatization In Education, We Say Opaa!
My colleague David Stokes has a terrific paper about the privatization of public services in which he highlights many examples of public/private partnerships that benefit society. I thought of his paper when I read this story about a Kansas school district that recently announced it is privatizing its food service:
A decision made Friday morning by the USD 382 Board of Education will result in some changes in the school cafeteria next August — a greater variety of food, more made-from-scratch items, and a possible reconfiguration of space to enhance food presentation and improve efficiency.
A change more visible to the board and administrators will be a hoped-for move of the food service budget out of the red and into the black.
At a special meeting, the Board approved a contract with Opaa!, a Missouri-based company, to manage food service for the district.
The contract is projected to save the district between $30,000 and $60,000.
Opaa! is a family-owned and operated company located in Chesterfield, Mo. The company is partnering with more than 100 public school districts to provide nutritious meals.
This is another example of how private companies can provide services that public entities once provided. It also goes to show that “privatization” need not be such a scary word in education.
A Student Is More Than Five Numbers
On my first day of student teaching in a low-income community, one child cursed at me; another jumped out of her seat, fell flat on her face, and had to be sent to the nurse’s office with a bloody nose; and a third knocked an iPad out of my hands, cracking the screen. I wanted to cry, or quit, or yell and stomp my feet, but I didn’t do these things. I became a teacher to make a difference, so instead, I explained my classroom expectations, wrote the nurse’s pass, and picked the shattered glass off the floor.
Over the next few months, homework completion increased, behavior improved, and I felt like I was accomplishing something. However, one day, I noticed a child staring out the window at the construction site adjacent to the building. The student mumbled to himself, “if only school was doing construction work, then I’d have an A-plus.” I was disappointed. How much pedagogy had I applied to the classroom? Flipped instruction, technology-based learning, Socratic circles, multiple intelligences — had these research-based methods not worked?
The truth is that this child, like many in Saint Louis, is a victim: a victim of poverty, a victim of bad teachers, a victim of a weak system, where a child’s future relies on five numbers.
Maybe this student wouldn’t have done better had he been born to a family from the 63017 ZIP code. But what if he had a choice to go to Shining Rivers Waldorf School, where students are encouraged to learn through hands-on activities, or Construction Careers Center, where students prepare for technical careers, while pursuing academic excellence? If he had a choice, he would have a chance.
Just as I became a teacher to make a difference, I joined the Show-Me Institute team to make a difference. During my time in the classroom, I realized that many of the problems students and teachers face cannot be fixed by a single individual. Many of the problems require us to rethink how we operate our public school system. That is why I am excited to be part of the Show-Me Institute policy team. Our mission is clear — to expand opportunities for students.
I invite you to engage with us and share your ideas. Together, we can build a system that ensures that all students, regardless of the five numbers of their ZIP codes, have access to great schools that meet their needs.
