Page 531 – Show-Me Institute

Easing Concerns About My Salary Straitjacket Solutions

Posted on October 31, 2012May 5, 2026 by James V. Shuls

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.

Teacher Salary Straitjacket

Posted on October 30, 2012May 5, 2026 by James V. Shuls

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.

Proposition S: A Little More Nuanced

Posted on October 29, 2012May 5, 2026 by James V. Shuls

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.

Bieber Fever

Posted on October 29, 2012May 5, 2026 by Kacie Barnes (Galbraith)

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.

Watch Live Tonight: John Fund, Denise Lieberman, and A Debate on Voter ID

Posted on October 25, 2012May 5, 2026 by Patrick Ishmael

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.

Video streaming by Ustream

Kansas Cuts Taxes . . . Missouri Businesses Suffer?

Posted on October 25, 2012May 5, 2026 by Michael Rathbone

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.

Voter ID Debate Tonight In Clayton Featuring John Fund

Posted on October 25, 2012May 5, 2026 by Patrick Ishmael

Tonight, the Federalist Society and the Show-Me Institute host an important and timely event, “Suppressing the Vote or Stopping Fraud: The Voter ID Debate.” The event features John Fund, senior editor at the American Spectator and a former columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and Denise Lieberman, senior attorney at the Voter Protection Program of the Advancement Project. The event starts at 6 p.m. at:

Crowne Plaza Hotel – Crystal Ballroom
7750 Carondelet Avenue
St. Louis, MO 63105

Parking is free. A cash bar will follow. Everyone is welcome to attend.

Administrative Bloat In K-12 Education

Posted on October 25, 2012May 5, 2026 by James V. Shuls

Yesterday, the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice released a new paper on the Decades of Employment Growth in America’s Public Schools. This paper may help explain a previous post I wrote on Missouri’s education system. As I noted, our state’s educational system is suffering from a case of Baumol’s disease. Because teaching is a labor-intensive industry (although it may not have to be), there is a tendency for the cost to rise without corresponding increases in achievement.

As the chart below shows, inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending has increased almost 40 percent since 1992, but student achievement has essentially been flat.

The Friedman study addresses one of the reasons spending has increased so dramatically: the number of individuals that schools employ, and not just teachers. From 1950 to 2009, the total number of students in U.S. schools increased by 96 percent. During the same time period, the percentage of teachers increased 252 percent and the number of administrators increased by 702 percent!

State figures do not go back as far as the national ones, but we do have accurate data from 1992 to 2009. During that time period, Missouri saw an increase of 8.9 percent in the student population. Consequently, there was a 29.2 percent increase in the number of teachers and a 34.5 percent increase in the number of administrators and non-teaching staff. This all occurred during a period of time when the number of school districts declined in Missouri from 4,891 in 1952 to less than 580 now. One would presume that that would lead to a decrease in the number of administrators required, though it is possible many of those consolidated districts had only one teacher and zero administrators.

What have we received from our increased spending and this “administrative bloat,” as Jay Greene calls it? Essentially nothing; student achievement scores remain flat.

Some are calling for raising Missouri’s tobacco taxes to increase spending for education. Of course the claims that those funds will actually accumulate are somewhat dubious, but setting that aside, we must realize that the problem with our education system is not simply a lack of money or a lack of teachers. The problem is a lack of innovation.

We need fundamental change, and that can only happen when we begin to empower schools to innovate and equip parents to choose.

Feeling At Home In The Dome

Posted on October 24, 2012May 5, 2026 by Michael Rathbone

I recently attended a St. Louis Rams football game at the Edward Jones Dome. The Rams were playing the Green Bay Packers and much to my dismay, the visiting Packers fans seemed to outnumber the Rams fans (if the Packers fans in attendance were not a majority of the crowd, they were at least a significant minority). This fact was distressing in and of itself, but after watching the Rams get shellacked, I remembered something worse. The Rams want the public to help finance upgrades to the Edward Jones Dome.

The Rams want to massively upgrade their stadium, and have the taxpayers pay for a large part of it. Yet the Rams struggle to even fill more than half the stadium on game day with their own fans. I oppose public subsidies for sports stadiums on principle and it makes even less sense to give public subsidies to a team that struggles to fill the stands.

There is no economically compelling reason that the public should subsidize sports stadium construction, whether or not the team sells out every home game. It is also hard to see, with the Rams at least, that there is a quality of life case to be made. If the Rams want to risk their own money to renovate their stadium, they should be free to do so, but the only way I am willing to help Stan Kroenke, the Rams’ owner, foot the bill is to shop at Wal-Mart.

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