In Memory of Joseph Forshaw IV

Posted on by Brenda Talent
Joseph Forshaw IV
January 10, 1952 – November 11, 2025

It is with deep sadness that I share the news of the passing of Joseph Forshaw IV, longtime member of the Show-Me Institute’s Board of Directors, former treasurer, and past chairman of the board.

Joe was more than a board member to us. He was a steadfast champion of the Show-Me Institute’s mission, a source of wisdom and clarity, an incredible mentor, and a man whose integrity and good humor strengthened everyone around him.

A lifelong St. Louisan, Joe brought to our organization the same qualities that defined his life: intellectual curiosity, disciplined thinking, and generosity of spirit. Before joining the Show-Me Institute, he served for 30 years as president of Forshaw of St. Louis, the family business founded in 1871. His deep understanding of entrepreneurship and free enterprise made him an invaluable voice on our board and a trusted adviser to our team.

Joe served with humility and conviction, and he cared deeply about Missouri’s future. He was an extraordinary mentor to many of us, always ready to offer thoughtful counsel, encouragement, and the perspective that comes from a life well lived. Whether asking the question no one else had considered or reminding us to stay focused on the people we serve, he did so with grace, steadiness, and genuine kindness. His presence made our work better, and his passion for ideas strengthened the entire organization.

I extend my heartfelt condolences to his beloved wife, Liza; their children Sr. Maria Battista, Juliet, and J. Alexander; his grandson Aidan; and the entire Forshaw family. Joe’s leadership, generosity, and friendship will be deeply missed.

Details about visitation and services can be found here.

We’re Destroying Meritocracy

Posted on by Scott Tanner

A report released earlier this month by the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) gives some startling numbers. UCSD is an elite public university—it ranks 6th among public colleges and 29th overall in U.S. News & World Report’s 2026 rankings—yet a growing share of its incoming students lack even basic math skills.

The report is from an admissions workgroup consisting of university faculty and a handful of administrators. It focuses on a remedial math course UCSD introduced in 2016 to help freshmen fill gaps in high school–level math. The course initially enrolled about one percent of incoming students. However, instructors began to realize many students lacked even more fundamental middle- and elementary-level math skills. In response, the math department split the course into two courses: one focused on elementary and middle school math, and the other on high school math.

By 2024, more than 900 students—12.5 percent of the entering freshman class at UCSD—placed into these remedial courses.

To give a sense of the skill deficiencies among students in these remedial courses, the report shows specific math problems along with the fractions of students who could answer them correctly. Here are three example questions at the elementary level (edited very lightly for presentation here):

1. Fill in the blank: 7 + 2 = __ + 6

2. Round the number 374518 to the nearest hundred.

3. Find (13/16) ÷ 2

While it would be reasonable to expect every student who is accepted into an elite public university to be able to answer these questions correctly, many tested students could not. Just 75, 39, and 34 percent of test takers gave the correct answers to these questions, respectively.

The report identifies several factors that contribute to these disturbing—and frankly embarrassing—outcomes, including grade inflation in California’s K-12 schools that allows students to graduate with good grades but weak skills, the pandemic (every educator’s favorite scapegoat), and the UC system’s stubborn refusal to require standardized tests for admissions. But beneath all of this lies a deeper issue: a system-wide erosion of meritocracy. When merit is downplayed and standards are continually lowered, you end up with students arriving at elite universities unable to do elementary math.

To be clear, UCSD is not the only institution that has this problem, and I don’t want to punish it unduly for being transparent. In fact, the report talks about similar problems at other UC campuses, and what it describes aligns with my own experience as a professor at the University of Missouri.

There is evidence all around us of the shift away from meritocracy in education. Nationally and in Missouri, student grades, and high school and college graduation rates, are at historic or near-historic highs despite clear evidence of declining academic skills. Educational administrators at all levels of schooling have demonstrated a blatant disregard for excellence.

(Disclosure: I am a proud —though less so by the day—alumnus of UC San Diego, where I received my BA, MA, and Ph.D.)

The 4-Day School Week Doesn’t Improve Teacher Recruitment or Retention

Posted on by Scott Tanner

This is the headline finding from a recent study I conducted with researchers from several universities.

The four-day school week (4DSW) has expanded rapidly nationwide and especially in Missouri, where roughly one-in-three districts now use it. The model is most common in rural areas, with a few exceptions.

Why is it so popular? We interviewed 36 Missouri educators—20 superintendents, 4 principals, and 12 teachers—to understand districts’ motivations. Nearly all said the 4DSW boosts teacher recruitment and retention, and they cited this as the primary reason for adopting it.

We paired these interviews with a quantitative analysis of teacher employment data from Missouri districts between 2009 and 2024. Using a difference-in-differences research design, we compare districts that adopted the 4DSW with similar districts that did not to estimate the policy’s effects on turnover and hiring.

The bottom line: We find no evidence that the 4DSW reduces teacher turnover, even six or more years after adoption, and no evidence that it improves recruitment. In short, it is not a solution to districts’ staffing challenges.

This disconnect between perception and reality is puzzling. Our study can’t pinpoint the cause, but we offer several explanations. One is that while teachers value the 4DSW, they may not value it enough to change their employment decisions; as one teacher told us, the 4DSW “made [the] job a little bit more enjoyable” but didn’t affect whether they stayed. Confirmation bias may also play a role, with educators noticing success stories while overlooking cases where the policy had no impact.

Whatever the reason, our findings show a significant gap between the common perception of the 4DSW and the reality on the ground. Moreover, our conclusions are not unique—recent studies in other states reach similar conclusions about the 4DSW’s limited labor-market effects (e.g., see here and here). This is especially concerning given that most prior research shows that the 4DSW harms student achievement (e.g., see here).

Missouri districts may or may not prefer the 4DSW, but we should be clear about what it does and doesn’t do. The research shows it doesn’t improve student learning, and it doesn’t help with staffing. Framing the 4DSW as a strategy to improve educational quality is a dubious proposition.

St. Louis Needs to Stop Dating and Settle Down

Posted on by Scott Tanner

I’ve often argued that cities need to have more self-respect—especially when it comes to dealing with sports teams. We love our teams, but they make it clear that if we want them to love us back, it’s going to cost us.

But a recent news story gave another twist to the idea of cities as romantic partners.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that NorthPoint Development called off a $120 million apartment complex of over 300 units and will soon sell the site. Why? Because the city was constantly making additional demands. What started as a yes was becoming a maybe. NorthPoint backed out.

The Post-Dispatch quoted St. Louis Development Corp. Executive Director Otis Williams as saying, “if we just stuck to whatever we said we wanted to do,” the project would have continued.

Alderman Michael Browning alleged the city wasn’t “good-faith negotiators. With all of the unpredictable things in development, the city does not need to be the thing that constantly changes.”

Yes, the city needs to be consistent. But that does not mean the city should crank the subsidy spigot to full blast.

The story notes the number of projects receiving subsidies from the St. Louis Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority (LCRA) has dropped since 2018. The chairman of the LCRA, Matt McBride, argued that because there are so few developers wanting to work with the city, “we need to be encouraging of those who are taking the risks to do so.” I suspect by “encourage” he means, “subsidize.” The folks who hand out subsidies always want more to hand out.

Perhaps there is another way. Perhaps, instead of overregulating the market, instead of demanding ever increasing concessions, instead of imposing costly application, permitting, and approval stages, the city just got out of the way of those who want to build in St. Louis?

City leaders should work to address barriers to development rather than leaving them in place and cutting checks to offset them. They’ve already shown a willingness to do so with liquor regulations and parking mandates.

Unfortunately, Megan Green, president of the board of aldermen, wants to further increase the city’s demands of developers regarding affordable housing and community benefits. But that will just increase the costs for developers and, in turn, increase the amount of taxpayer subsidies. “St. Louis,” she says, “has been a cheap date for way too long, and we should not be a cheap date.”

It calls to mind the bawdy punchline: ‘We’ve already established that, madam. Now we’re just haggling over the price.”

Unfortunately, taxpayers are picking up the tab for these dalliances. Instead of seeking more expensive dates, St. Louis should make itself a more attractive partner by ditching its baggage and focusing on stable, long-term relationships.

Checking Medicaid’s Pulse

Posted on by Scott Tanner

Are dead people on Missouri’s Medicaid program? Shockingly, the answer appears to be yes. Last month, the Missouri State Auditor’s Office released a scathing audit of the state’s Medicaid program. One of the most notable findings is that the state lacks a working system to check the program’s enrollment against death records. In other words, we don’t know whether we’re paying for dead people’s health coverage. (If we don’t know, then the answer is almost surely yes.)

Unfortunately, that shocking finding is only one piece of the bad news included in the report. The same audit also revealed that thousands of people have remained enrolled on Missouri’s Medicaid program for up to ten years without the state checking whether they’re still eligible. Federal law requires annual eligibility reviews, but Missouri’s outdated IT systems somehow blocked the state’s Department of Social Services from checking the information of around 10,000 recipients for up to a decade. To be fair, some of these individuals might still qualify for benefits, but many probably do not. The point is that the state doesn’t know one way or the other.

The issues outlined in the audit are a perfect illustration of the many problems with Missouri’s Medicaid program that I’ve been writing about for years. This is an enormously expensive program that is riddled with waste and relies on outdated computer systems that are only making things worse.

Given Missouri’s budgetary uncertainty, it’s even more important that Medicaid benefits only go to people who are eligible for them. Eligibility reviews aren’t just bureaucratic hurdles with no purpose. Circumstances that make people eligible to receive welfare benefits change all the time. They find a job. They get married. They might even die. It’s essential that the state’s computer systems know this information as soon as possible to ensure that tax dollars aren’t being misspent.

Perhaps the worst part of the audit report is the recognition that these troubling findings aren’t new problems at all. Previous reports highlighted both the “death match” issue as well as the recipients who weren’t getting their eligibility checked. Some might remember that Medicaid eligibility redeterminations were a hot topic while they were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s important to point out that these issues predate 2020, so we can’t just blame the pandemic.

This is another reason why some of the reforms I outlined from the One Big Beautiful Bill are so needed. Modernizing the state’s computer systems and improving eligibility verification so that errors like these don’t happen should be a top priority. Medicaid is far too expensive, and its costs are growing at far too an alarming rate for this level of waste to continue. What’s the point of having eligibility rules if they aren’t going to be enforced?

Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right

Posted on by Mike Ederer

A proposed bill in St. Louis County would mandate the imposition of several burdensome regulations on many more projects and developments within the county. Bill 182 would apply three new rules: prevailing wages, participation rates for woman- and minority-owned businesses (also known as disadvantaged business enterprises, or DBEs), and apprenticeship programs, to any project in the county that receives any form of tax incentive or subsidy. These three requirements are common, unfortunately, for government-funded projects, but this is a dramatic expansion of their use.

Prevailing wage laws are harmful because they inflate the cost of projects taxpayers pay for or, in these cases, subsidize. Research on the subject suggests that prevailing wage laws can increase the total cost of public construction projects by as much as 25 percent. For local governments with many projects needing to be built, that could mean lower-priority but beneficial projects will go undone for lack of funding. Repeated year after year, the harm done by leaving these projects uncompleted compounds, leaving the community with fewer and inferior government services compared to what market labor rates would have otherwise allowed.

DBE programs require that a certain amount of work involved in a project go to contractors and subcontractors owned by women or minorities. DBE programs also inflate the cost of projects for taxpayers and have often been vehicles for fraud and abuse. Increasing costs and encouraging criminal activity . . . where do I sign up?

Finally, the proposed law requires that bidders offer apprentice-training programs, which are generally found in union shops. There is nothing wrong with apprenticeship programs, but instituting such a mandate is blatant favoritism for union shops over nonunion competitors. It would be a substantial burden for a typical independent, nonunion company to create an apprentice program before it could bid for a project. Whatever that burden may be, the county council has absolutely no business mandating it. This is a blatant ploy to guarantee that union companies will win all county bids.

Not surprisingly, much of the language in the bill was put in by unions, according to the Post-Dispatch story.

I am a strong opponent of tax incentives and subsidies for businesses, but imposing these types of regulations on all sorts of projects in St. Louis County is a terrible abuse of the political process. St. Louis County has no business making these rules, and, indeed, I question its legal authority to do so in some of these cases. Local government should address the major issue of incentive and subsidy abuse by saying “No” far more often. Saying “Yes, but with a bunch of new regulations and red tape” is the worst policy of all.

Two Missouri Public School Districts Opt into MOScholars

Posted on by Scott Tanner

Two public school districts—Hallsville R-IV and Atlanta C-3—are the first districts in Missouri to participate in MOScholars.

MOScholars is Missouri’s education savings account (ESA) program. It provides scholarships to eligible families to use on a variety of educational expenses: tuition, tutoring, lessons, and more. The decision by Hallsville and Atlanta to join the program is noteworthy because MOScholars is viewed primarily as a vehicle for private school tuition. Their participation is a reminder that these scholarships can also enable nonresident students to attend public schools outside of their assigned districts.

The move is significant for two reasons. First, it signals a willingness among public schools to compete for students within a choice-driven landscape. Contrary to the notion that public schools wilt under competition, districts like Hallsville and Atlanta are demonstrating initiative. As Patrick Wolf, Distinguished Professor of Education Policy at the University of Arkansas, explains, “this idea that public schools are a fragile ecosystem, and they can only serve students if they have no competition . . . that claim has been completely debunked.”

Second, the move effectively serves as a workaround to Missouri’s lack of statewide interdistrict open enrollment. Students in Missouri typically cannot attend a public school outside their residential district. By participating in MOScholars, Hallsville and Atlanta are using the program to facilitate student transfers across district lines, with the scholarship serving as the funding mechanism rather than state formula dollars.

Given the limited size and scope of the MOScholars program as currently funded, it is unlikely that there will be significant enrollment shifts in these districts due to their participation. Still, their decision points to underlying demand for more school choice and is another step toward a more flexible and responsive public education system in Missouri.

Want Cheaper Housing? Create More Units, Not More Rules

Posted on by Scott Tanner

Recent data from The Wall Street Journal suggest that renters across the country—including in Kansas City—are gaining leverage. Rents are flattening, vacancy rates are ticking up, and landlords are offering incentives. The reason? More housing is finally coming online.

This is a timely reminder for Kansas City officials: if the goal is to help renters and low-income residents, the most effective solution is to build more housing—not to add new layers of regulation.

Kansas City has wrestled with housing affordability and tenant protections for years. Activists often push for stricter rules on landlords. But these approaches treat symptoms, not causes. When developers can’t build efficiently due to restrictive zoning, long permitting delays, or uncertain rules, the supply crunch only worsens.

The Journal article shows what happens when supply catches up with demand: rents stabilize, landlords compete, and renters benefit. That’s the dynamic Kansas City needs more of.

Some argue regulation is necessary to prevent abuse. That is a fair point about some regulations in some circumstances. But policymakers must also weigh how each new rule might deter investment or slow construction. A better strategy is to remove barriers that prevent new housing from being built—especially infill development (building on vacant or underutilized land), duplexes, and apartments near transit.

If Kansas City is serious about affordability, it needs to stop chasing complex fixes and start enabling more housing.

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