Tax Credit Scholarships Leave Parents ‘Very Satisfied’

Posted on by James V. Shuls

There is a new report out from the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, “More than Scores: An Analysis of Why and How Parents Choose Private Schools.” The study examines survey responses from 754 parents with students in Georgia’s GOAL Scholarship Program, an organization that awards scholarships under the state’s tax credit scholarship law.

Here are the some of the key findings:

  1. Surveyed parents were overwhelmingly satisfied with their private school choice, with 98.6 percent of  parents being “very satisfied” or “satisfied” with  their decision to send their children to a private school using a GOAL scholarship.

  2. The top five reasons parents chose a private school for their children are all related to school  climate and classroom management, including  “better student discipline” (50.9 percent), “better  learning environment” (50.8 percent), “smaller class  sizes” (48.9 percent), “improved student safety” (46.8 percent), and “more individual attention for  my child” (39.3 percent).

  3. Student performance on standardized test scores is  one of the least important pieces of information upon which parents base their decision regarding the private school to which they send their children. Only 10.2 percent of the parents who completed the survey listed higher standardized test scores as one of their top five reasons they chose a particular private school for their child.

  4. Contrary to the assertions of some school choice opponents, low-income parents, single parents, African-American parents, and parents with less than a college education are willing and able to be informed and active education consumers on behalf of their children.

This study is just another example of the benefits that can come from expanding school choice. Moreover, it helps demonstrate that tax credit scholarships can be an effective tool in expanding options for families. As I have written before, tax credit scholarships would be a great option for families in Missouri.

Morningline, Tuesdays on KWTO

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

James Shuls, Ph.D., Policy Analyst with the Show-Me Institute, talks with Tim Keithley of News Talk 560AM in Springfield, MO. Shuls and Keithley talk about how Missouri tax dollars are being used to keep taxes high.

Previously on Morningline:

 

The Re-Repackaging Of ‘Obamacaid’ In Missouri

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

One would think that at this point, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would be an unwelcome topic in the Missouri Legislature. Along with all of the technical problems, the program’s website has actually been more effective at adding people to Medicaid rolls than it has been at getting people into private health insurance. Boosting rolls in a broken entitlement is bad enough, but expanding the pool of people who could join those rolls — which Obamacare would have Missouri do with Medicaid — would make matters even worse.

Thankfully, the state has not yet agreed to double down on Medicaid’s problems, but that doesn’t mean legislators won’t do their best to justify taking the Obamacare cash next year, hawking Medicaid plans they say aren’t “Obamacare”… but of course are. Early last month, the Wall Street Journal wrote an exceptional editorial about the coming marketing strategy with the headline “Obamacaid,” explaining exactly what’s coming down the pike in the state legislatures. (Emphasis mine.)

The feds are dangling the promise of paying for all the costs of the new beneficiaries, at least for the next three years. This subsidy honeypot can’t last forever, and Governors are right to worry about taking on fiscal obligations that will increase 13% on average in 2014 under new Medicaid, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation state budget survey.

The Beltway boys and their allies in the hospital industry who are ravenous for more federal revenue are stunned that their bribery failed. So the new line of assault is to declare that the 26 conscientious objector states must hate poor people, or racial minorities, or Saint Peter and Christianity itself.

…If the sojourners for Medicaid were serious about helping the least fortunate, they’d try to repair its current dysfunctions. Start by prioritizing spending, and then give Governors waivers to manage case loads and make operations more efficient.

But the truth is that liberals view Medicaid as a national model, not a national disgrace. Coverage on ObamaCare’s nominally private exchanges largely clones Medicaid’s narrow networks of doctors and hospitals, low reimbursements, limited patient choice and heavy federal regulation. It might be more accurate to call it Obamacaid.

Medicaid reform is laudable and necessary, but proposals being circulated in Jefferson City seem to put the cart before the horse. The buzzword being used in Missouri to get the expansion over the top is “Medicaid transformation,” but the proposals almost invariably start with a demand for Medicaid expansion, with the prospect of reform a secondary consideration. “Reform,” in the present construction, only happens with expansion.

That’s an utterly unacceptable prioritization of policy objectives. Medicaid is a broken program rife with waste, fraud and abuse, and may in some cases be worse for its patients than if they were completely uninsured. Compassion demands fixing a broken program, not forcing even more people into it. And that’s to say nothing of the fiscal irresponsibility of using public debt indefinitely to deliver contemporaneous benefits.

Moreover, it is perplexing that some of the same people pushing a giant expansion of government through Medicaid also opposed allowing doctors to give free care to patients earlier this year. To be blunt: What sort of a worldview supports the expansion of a broken government bureaucracy and, at the same time, tries to prevent doctors from freely attending to the medical needs of their fellow Americans? It’s an incredible contrast.

If proponents of a “transformation” aren’t willing to reform Medicaid without an expansion, then I think it’s fair to assume that they’d be about as happy to have the expansion without reform. That should be a non-starter. I hope that the leaders of the Medicaid “transformation” groups can and will proceed with reform but without expansion as a prerequisite.

Missouri Students: Still Stuck In The Middle

Posted on by James V. Shuls

2013-naep-gains

Last fall, I wrote about how Missouri’s education system was stuck in the middle and showing little sign of improvement. On a number of assessments, we rank right in the middle of the pack. This week, the most recent scores for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were released. Once again, we rank in the middle.

The press release from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) suggests that Missouri’s scores are holding steady. That is true, our scores are relatively unchanged. But while we hold steady, many other states are showing significant learning gains. Missouri showed a net gain of 2.5 points on fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math. Meanwhile, Washington, D.C., gained a net of 22.2 points. Add D.C. to the 27 states that made larger gains than Missouri, placing us below the national average for growth.

We are still stuck and something must be done.

(Hat tip to Matt Ladner for the graph.)

Is Texas Gov. Rick Perry Guilty of “Stealing” Missouri Jobs?

Posted on by Andrew B. Wilson

As appearing in the Springfield News-Leader on October 23, 2013:

If “stealing jobs” were as bad as — and essentially no different than — stealing cars or stealing horses, Texas Gov. Rick Perry might expect to wind up at the end of a rope — the traditional fate in cowboy movies for horse thieves and cattle rustlers in the Lone Star State.

While that is not about to happen, the Texas governor has clearly been having a fun time infuriating some of his fellow governors in going to their states to pitch CEOs on the idea of relocating their businesses to Texas — one of only nine states (the others being Alaska, Florida, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Washington and Wyoming) with no state income tax on personal income. In venturing into California, Illinois, New York and several other high-spending, high-tax blue states, Perry has made a lot of speeches and spent some $2 million in TV ads singing the virtues of “limited government, low taxes and a fair legal system.”

Perry also made two visits to Missouri — in August and again in late September. In the earlier trip, he took Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, to task for promising to veto the first tax cut in Missouri’s income tax in many years. As it turned out, even with heavy majorities in both houses of the Missouri legislature, Republicans were unable to override Nixon’s veto.

“Vetoing a tax cut is the same thing as raising your taxes,” Perry said in the commercials aired in several Missouri cities. “But there is a state where businesses flourish and jobs are created — Texas.”

That brought out the usual charges of “stealing jobs” in the two big-city, liberal dailies — the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Kansas City Star.

But if someone is guilty of “stealing” a job, someone else must own the job. But who?

How about no one? As Harry Stonecipher, the outspoken former CEO of Boeing, liked to say, “Only the customer can guarantee your job.”

In a competitive marketplace, no one really owns a job — not the jobholder, not the company providing the job and certainly not the governor of any state. Companies naturally gravitate to — and create employment within — the jurisdictions that provide the lowest costs of production, and taxes are an important part of the cost of production.

At the end of the day, there is no such thing as “stealing” a job. Like it or not, the states are in competition with one another in trying to attract and retain businesses focused on creating the greatest value for their customers, shareholders and employees. One of the keys to doing that is keeping the “tax price” in your location below that of competing jurisdictions.

Missouri should be focused on lowering the tax burden for all businesses. The best way to promote growth (and compete for jobs) is to get rid of all income taxes on business. Let the people who have earned the money put it back to work in their own businesses.

Andrew B. Wilson is a resident fellow and senior writer at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.

 

Show-Me at the Lake, Thursday Mornings on KRMS

Posted on by David Stokes

David Stokes weekly appearance with Manny Haley of KRMS. In the November 21 show, Stokes and Haley discussed zoning for parking for Lazy Gators and Shady Gators before talking about a resolution to the private road dispute in Camdenton.

David Stokes’s previous appearances with Manny Haley:

 

 

 

 

Is Common Core A ‘Victory For Everyone’?

Posted on by James V. Shuls

On Tuesday, Chester Finn and Mike Petrilli, from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, had an op-ed supporting the Common Core State Standards published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. They have placed this same op-ed in a half dozen other newspapers over the past few months. To which, Neal McCluskey and Ann Marie Banfield wrote an excellent response back in July.

Let’s start with Finn and Petrilli’s argument that [Missourians] should embrace Common Core in part because the state “has already invested time and money to implement the new standards.” Basically, Washington successfully coerced [Missouri] into sinking money into Common Core, so we had better stick with it.

McCluskey and Banfield note that the Fordham piece mischaracterized the nature of Common Core’s development.

Common Core was created by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers, associations that neither represent states nor the people of [Missouri]. Legislators represent you, and the NGA doesn’t speak for states just because governors are elected. NGA decisions have no binding ramifications for states, and it’s doubtful anyone has ever voted for a gubernatorial candidate based on what they thought he or she would do in the NGA. Governors simply have very little incentive to care what the NGA does.

Next, the Obama administration didn’t just “promote” the standards, it coerced their adoption with real ramifications. At the nadir of the “Great Recession,” it told states that to fully compete in the $4.35 billion Race to the Top program they had to promise to adopt Common Core. That is exactly what most did, before the final standards were even published. Adoption was cemented by making it one of only two ways states could meet requirements for waivers from the No Child Left Behind Act.

Finn and Petrilli claim that the Common Core doesn’t dictate curriculum and is good for school choice.

That’s like saying that government requiring you to ride a bike, but letting you pick the color and a banana seat, doesn’t constrain your transportation options. Similarly, they suggested that because lots of people are scrambling to produce Core-aligned materials, it’s fostering innovation. That’s basically proclaiming that with all car and airplane manufacturers suddenly making bikes, travel innovation will explode.

Readers shouldn’t be fooled by the folks at Fordham; the Common Core is definitely not a “victory for everyone,” as they would have you believe.

(Hat tip to John Combest for pointing out all the places the Fordham piece was published.)

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