David Stokes has a recurring spot on McGraw Milhaven’s KTRS radio program. In this appearance, Stokes and the host discuss topics such as the proposed reduction in size for the Saint Louis Board of Alderman, the effects of increasing proportional representation, the lower speed limit on Forest Park Parkway in Saint Louis, the proposed Central West End TIF, and David Stokes’ status as a Republican elector.
Although just more than half of students in the Saint Louis Public Schools graduate in four years and the district has an abysmally low ACT score of 16.5, the Missouri Board of Education granted the school district provisional accreditation status, and rightfully so. After all, the district met the minimum requirements for provisional accreditation under the evaluation system in place when the district filed its request. Rather than quibble about whether they should or should not have been given provisional accreditation, it is time to reassess how we evaluate schools and school districts.
In college track and field, the NCAA sets both provisional and automatic marks for athletes to qualify for the national competition. The marks are set very high and often, not many athletes qualify automatically or even provisionally. In contrast, the state’s board of education has set the bar for accreditation and provisional accreditation very low; so low, in fact, that the distinctions are essentially meaningless.
The distinctions are also inconsequential because they change very little for the district besides the label. And as Shakespeare noted, “a low-performing school district by any other name would smell like a low-performing school district.” OK, maybe Shakespeare did not say that exactly, but you get the point; call the district what you will, the label has no real impact on students.
The state is moving to a new accreditation system this coming year. While the new system will be an improvement, it still leaves much to be desired. Both the old system and the new system accredit school districts, not schools. This was very important in the accreditation decision of Saint Louis Public Schools, where magnet schools drove up the district’s average performance. District level evaluations, especially in large urban districts, give parents very little information when they are deciding where to send their children to school.
Missouri’s current method of accrediting school districts does little more than give grown-ups something to argue about and has few real implications for schools or students. The state would be doing a real service to families if it moved to a school report card format, where schools are graded on a scale from “A” to “F.” A school grading system would allow families to be more informed, hold their local school more accountable, and express choice more wisely. Isn’t the goal to have parents become informed and engaged?
The current system pre-supposes that the state can hold schools accountable by accrediting the school district, when in reality, school accountability is best achieved when families are allowed to hold their child’s school accountable. The state can help in this effort if it makes school performance more transparent at the school level. If the reclassification of the Saint Louis Public School District proves anything, it is that the state’s standards are much lower than parents’ standards.
James V. Shuls is the education policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.
Non-smokers may think they have nothing to lose if they vote to increase taxes on tobacco products in Missouri. And if the resulting revenues are set aside in a “lock box” for public education, one might think this is a real win-win proposition — both discouraging a bad habit and raising more money for our schools.
That is the argument that proponents of Proposition B are making in calling for a whopping 429 percent increase in Missouri’s cigarette tax (from 17 cents a pack to 90 cents). But there are good reasons for rejecting this argument.
First, tobacco taxes are regressive in nature and disproportionately harm the poor. It is wrong to place a higher tax burden on people who are least able to afford it simply because they are engaged in an activity that is not popular.
Second, no one should trust the security of the so-called “lock box.” Though Proposition B states the revenue directed to K-12 education should be “in addition to” funds from the school funding formula, it is likely the new money will replace other state funds. A provision in the bill allows tobacco dollars to be used in the school funding formula if it is underfunded, which currently it is. The lock box is already open and there is little reason to expect legislators to close it.
Third, and most importantly, more money does not necessarily mean the quality of education will improve. According to the Digest of Education Statistics, Missouri increased per-pupil spending on education by almost 40 percent in inflation adjusted dollars between 1992 and 2008. Despite that, Missouri’s achievement scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress have remained almost flat.
Making sure our kids get a great education is a moral imperative. It is also politically popular. Yet, specifically targeting politically unpopular and vulnerable groups in order to raise money for education is the wrong approach to fixing our schools. We all know that smoking leads to a variety of health problems. But that does not give the government license to inflict punitive taxes on people engaged in a legal activity. This is behavior modification through taxation and is the equivalent of taxing milkshakes in order to fund road construction.
Real improvement in education will come from making Missouri a place that attracts business and educational entrepreneurs; a place where parents are free to choose and schools are free to innovate. Making smokers cough up more tax dollars for education will not achieve these goals and will do little to provide a strong, sustainable educational system for future generations.
Michael Rathbone is a policy researcher and James V. Shuls is the education policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.
After we released my new paper, The Salary Straitjacket, I quickly received a message from a friend who happens to be a teacher. He was a bit concerned about what I say in the paper; I suggest school districts should be able to “reward teachers for their unique contribution” to their school, rather than pay all teachers in the same lock-step fashion.
My friend’s concerns are many, but he has two main questions. Is it fair to pay teachers of one subject more than teachers of another? And, if we paid math and science (a.k.a. STEM) teachers more, wouldn’t it lead to shortages in other fields?
In the paper, I tried to focus on what is practical and logical from what we know about teaching and the job market. Because STEM teachers are in high demand and short supply, it does not make logical sense to pay them the same amount as teachers of other subjects who are in abundant supply. Fairness, of course, is a subjective term and paying teachers of some subjects more may seem unfair to some; but as I say in the paper, “it seems more unfair . . . to not recognize teachers for their specific skills and talents. Not all teachers are the same and not all skills are equally demanded.”
It is also important to remember that schools are not in the business of adult fairness, they are in the business of educating children. To that end, single salary schedules put a straitjacket on school officials and prevent them from having the ability to attract and retain teachers.
School districts need to be released from their straitjackets so they can begin paying teachers for their unique contributions. Schools districts then would have more leverage to attract high-quality teachers in STEM fields. If this creates shortages in other fields, the market would need to adjust. That is the beauty of the free market; it has an uncanny way of adjusting to supply and demand, whereas our current system is inflexible and perpetuates the problem of shortages in STEM subjects.
If you ran a small business and had to fill two vacancies, one in an area where you were sure to get many applicants and another position that was chronically hard to staff, what would be the logical thing to do? Any wise business person would hold constant (or lower) the salary offered for the job with an abundant supply, and raise the salary for the hard to staff position. Many schools in the state face just this problem, yet they have bought into a system that has put them in a straitjacket regarding making important staffing decisions, such as paying some teachers more.
Today, the Show-Me Institute released my new paper, The Salary Straitjacket: The Pitfalls of Paying all Teachers the Same. In the paper, I detail some startling information that I discovered. The average math and science teacher in Missouri makes less than the average teacher, including teachers of non-core subjects.
This happens because most school districts pay teachers based on a single salary schedule. This means all teachers, regardless of subject, earn the same salary as long as they are on the same step on the schedule. This type of system would be perfectly fine if all teachers were of the same quality and in the same supply. In reality, we know that teachers of math and science are in high demand and short supply.
The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) regularly notes that there are shortages in these areas. We do not just have a short supply; people with math and science skills might also have more alternative career options than other teachers. This means they would be more likely to leave the teaching profession. The straitjacket does not allow school districts to adjust to the needs of the market, meaning schools and students suffer.
Read the full paper to find out more about this topic and my solutions to help make Missouri more competitive.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch published an editorial in support of Proposition S, the proposed tax increase for the Special School District of Saint Louis County (SSD). Saint Louis County residents are currently taxed at$1 per $100 of assessed valuation, or 1 percent of assessed value. Proposition S would increase that by 19 cents to $1.19 per $100. (For a $200,000 house, that would be a tax increase of $72.) The Post-Dispatch offers valid reasons for supporting the initiative, but I think there is a little more nuance that voters should consider.
The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) reports the SSD spends more than $161,000 per-pupil, but SSD reports their per-pupil expenditure to be just above $14,000. The figure from DESE is calculated using the district’s average daily attendance. This is problematic for the SSD because the district “serves more than 21,000 students for whom it does not take attendance.”
Most of those students are counted in the average daily attendance figures of their local school district, which means local taxpayers give money to their local school district and to the Special School District. To my knowledge, this is the only system like this in the state. One would think that because the special needs students are primarily served via the SSD that the local property tax could be lower. After all, most school districts throughout the state educate their special needs students with local, state, and federal dollars without an extra SSD.
As it turns out, the average tax rate for operating funds in Saint Louis County school districts is 4.0 percent, ranging from 2.75 percent in Ladue to 5.3411 percent in Hazelwood (2011 data source). The state average is 3.3 percent. When the additional 1 percent for the SSD is placed on top of the local taxes, Saint Louis County school districts have an average tax rate that is approximately 50 percent higher than the state average. Add an additional .19 percent on this and the tax rate will be more than 55 percent higher.
I am all for supporting services for special needs students, but there may be other ways we can do this. For starters, maybe some of that money could be used to provide opportunity scholarships for special needs students to attend the private school of their choice.
Here at the Show-Me Daily blog, we typically write about Missouri state and local policy issues. But this weekend, something way more exciting happened. JUSTIN BIEBER PERFORMED IN SAINT LOUIS! The Bieber fever was so overwhelming that colleague Josh Smith and I went down to the Scotttrade Center on Saturday to check out the concert.
OK, so we did not actually go into the concert. And this post is not really about teen heartthrob Justin Bieber. But we did have conversations with some friendly folks about their tickets for the concert. We will release a video of these interviews in the upcoming weeks. Did you know that Ticketmaster, venues, and sports teams want to use a new paperless ticketing technology that limits what we can do with our event tickets?
These paperless tickets may sound convenient and good for the environment (waste fewer trees), but they restrict our choices of how we can buy, share, or resell tickets. Most people feel that when they buy an event ticket, they own it and can do what they want with it. And rightfully so. If you buy a Justin Bieber CD and decide you do not want it anymore, do you have to return it to the store? Of course not.
We should not be forced to return our event tickets to Ticketmaster if we get sick, have a conflict, or simply want to give them to a friend. Ticketmaster claims they would be protecting us from the free market. But a recent investigation revealed that only 7 percent of tickets to a Justin Bieber concert in Nashville were directly available to fans. It does not look like Ticketmaster has the typical event-goer’s welfare in mind.
Click below for live video of tonight’s policy event — “Suppressing the Vote or Stopping Fraud: the Voter ID Debate” — which begins at about 6 p.m. CDT. Tonight’s speakers are John Fund of the American Spectator and Denise Lieberman of the Advancement Project, with the Hon. Robert Dierker of the 22nd Judicial Circuit Court of Missouri moderating.
We have blogged a lot about the tax cuts that Kansas passed earlier this year. This is not an abstract concept. This tax cut not only affects people and businesses in Kansas, it also affects people and businesses in the surrounding states.
For example, Chris Seyer is a friend of mine from business school who helps run his family’s aerospace manufacturing firm, Seyer Industries. His family’s company pays taxes at the individual level. Many of Seyer’s rivals, such as Harlow Aerostructures LLC, are located in Wichita, Kan. Chris told me that if a competitor like Harlow is able to benefit from the reduced tax rates in Kansas, then it will have a competitive advantage. For example, if Seyer and Harlow both made $5 million before taxes, Seyer would have to pay $300,000 in taxes, while Harlow would not pay anything. Harlow could use that extra $300,000 for capital expenditures, or it could hire a couple of new employees, or it could save it for future needs.
Missouri should not be picking winners and losers by handing out special tax breaks or incentives. Instead, the state should make it as easy as possible for companies located within its borders to succeed and thrive on their own. Kansas took a large step in making businesses in the state competitive. Missouri is lagging behind. One possible way for Missouri to make up some ground on Kansas is to eliminate the state’s corporate income tax. Missouri could also look into phasing out the tax on pass-through entities. That would help Seyer Industries and a lot of other companies in Missouri.
