Listen Up!

Posted on by Dave Roland

This week, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to spend two consecutive afternoons being interviewed on St. Louis’ WGNU, a radio station with programming directed to the city’s African-American population. On Monday afternoon, I spent an hour as part of a panel conversation (with Sheila Rendon and Romona Williams of the North Side Community Benefits Alliance) discussing eminent domain and the proposed NorthSide Regeneration Project on Kuumba Nia’s radio show. (Audio available here.)

The conversation went so well that I was invited back the following afternoon to spend another hour discussing the same topic with co-hosts state Sen. Robin Wright-Jones and John Bowman on her show, “The Wright Side of Politics.” (Audio available here.) My conversation partners the second day were Barbara Manzara and Keith Marquard, also of the North Side Community Benefits Alliance. If you’re interested in hearing from those on the front lines of the upcoming battle over the proposed redevelopment effort, give these two shows a listen!

Proposed Variant of the Public Service Academy

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

By way of the Panama City Renaissance School blog, I’ve learned that an executive director of a teachers’ union in Nevada wants to start a charter school for the purpose of preparing future teachers.

The proposal has some characteristics in common with the apocryphal public service academy:

  1. Its goal is to teach high school students how to be teachers, and most teachers work for public schools. Teacher training is de facto public service training.

  2. It’s based on the premise that if you want to work in the public sector, you should go to school with people who all have the same career plans as you do. That means schools for future public leaders, schools for future civil servants, and schools for future teachers.

  3. The proposed course of study concludes with a college scholarship, conditional on the student’s agreement to teach in the local traditional district for four years.

And here are a few reasons why this could actually be a good idea:

  1. A new teaching charter would compete with existing high schools. If students choose the new charter over traditional schools, that’s a good indication that they’re better off attending the charter. And the competition could spur traditional public schools to make improvements to retain students.

  2. Some people know they want to be teachers from an early age, and they might want to start preparing before college. A teaching charter may turn out to be as popular as charters dedicated to environmental science or the arts.

  3. The scholarship program could be redesigned so that graduates choose between work in traditional public, charter, and private schools. That way it wouldn’t be biased toward any particular sector.

Legislating Common Sense

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

This week’s Well-Intentioned But Ineffectual Nanny State Award goes to California, for enacting a law requiring doctors to conduct a physical examination before performing cosmetic surgery. At the Orange County Register‘s In Your Face blog, Colin Stewart writes:

As this blog commented last year, passing a law requiring doctors to examine their patients is like mandating that surgeons wash their hands before an operation. Anyone who would ignore such a basic safety precaution isn’t likely to worry about the prospect of a technical infraction, yet violating the Donda West Law would not be a criminal offense.

Stewart recommends that patients find out whether their doctor has been the subject of complaints; patients’ research will protect them better than a law with no penalties can.

Here in Missouri, we don’t have as many cosmetic surgeons as they do in California, but we have our own version of the nanny state. Targets include kids riding bicycles, playground equipment sitting in the sun, and now haunted houses.

A Small Improvement for the Virtual Instruction Program

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

The Missouri Virtual Instruction Program (MoVIP) is offering additional courses at the high school level through the National Repository of Online Courses Network. When I first saw the news, I was thrilled because I’ve long thought that the online school covered too few subjects. Then I read through the press release and noticed that the new courses were already available to anyone for free at hippocampus.org.

MoVIP is not bringing students any content they didn’t have access to before. This move is comparable to including a free online dictionary in a virtual English course. There is a potential benefit: MoVIP will direct some students to resources that were out there on the Internet, but that they wouldn’t have looked for on their own. Still, adding these courses does not represent a substantive innovation, which is perhaps why there’s no mention of the news on the MoVIP website.

Rampant Licensing Requirements Are Tricks, Not Treats

Posted on by Christine Harbin

Today, Matt Drudge linked to two articles that illustrate the negative consequences of excessive licensing requirements. The city of Ventura, Calif., has condemned a homemade haunted house on private property as an “unsafe structure,” and prohibits visitors from entering it.

Responding to an anonymous complaint, the city said the 1,200-square-foot “amusement building” didn’t have a permit.

As a consequence, the cavorters will have to limit their fun to that which the city will allow.

There will be no maze, and it will only be open Halloween night, to coincide with a block party the neighbors are hoping to have, with the city’s permission.

This story has a lot of similarities to a story I blogged about recently in which a Michigan woman was cited for running an unlicensed daycare center. In both situations, no one had been physically hurt, all involved parties were happy with the arrangement, no money had been exchanged, and it occurred on private property.

This demonstrates how red tape can negatively affect the general welfare. For many families, visiting this haunted house is a Halloween tradition. The unintended consequence of requiring vigilante haunted houses to obtain a permit is disappointed children. Parents should have the right to determine what constitutes a safe environment for their children.

As contributors to this blog have discussed, Missouri is a milieu for rampant licensing laws, too.

Interesting Tax Data From the Tax Foundation

Posted on by David Stokes

The St. Louis Business Journal has a story about a recent study comparing sales tax rates in the 50 states. The study is from the Tax Foundation, one of my favorite think tanks. The foundation’s task is difficult, because compiling local tax data is very complicated, nowhere more so than in Missouri. We are listed as having the 15th-highest combined state and local sales tax rate. Illinois is seventh. Illinois’ average is increased by Cook County having the highest local sales tax rate in the country, so the part of Illinois along the Missouri border is going to be more closely aligned with us. Illinois also has higher property and gas taxes, but a lower state income tax.

This previous study by the Tax Foundation ranks the level of dependency that states have for various types of taxes: sales, income, property, and licenses. Missouri is not in the top 10 for any of the four categories, although it just misses the top 10 for income taxes. Illinois makes the top 10 for property taxes. Tennessee is right at the top for sales taxes, as are a number of other states without income taxes. All of this is important, because Missouri is currently debating the state income tax, and we are hopefully getting a full and accurate debate regarding that issue.

I would like to see a Missouri system in which local government is funded primarily by property, especially land taxes, with a more fair and reasonable system of assessments equalizing and lowering the property taxes that most people pay. State government should be funded primarily through sales taxes, without increased reliance on user fees (like toll roads). At both levels, privatization opportunities should be pursued whenever appropriate. At the local level, more shared provision of services between cities and counties is also needed, and can be a very good alternative to privatization. This is, in my opinion, a recipe for economic growth and fair taxation.

Thanks to Mr. Combest for the original link to the StLBJ.

Jailhouse Barack

Posted on by Josh Smith

According to an article over at the Springfield News-Leader, the Missouri prison population has inexplicably reached an all-time high. On a related note, I’d like to take this opportunity to commend President Barack Obama for scaling back the police state milieu slightly with his recent announcement that federal authorities will no longer pursue users and suppliers of medical marijuana, provided that the individuals and businesses in question conform to state laws.

How are these related? Well, during 2005, 20 percent of the state prison population in the United States were nonviolent drug offenders. The policy issue here is: “How should our limited tax dollars be spent? In particular, how much should go to incarcerating nonviolent drug offenders?” Obama has recognized that deprioritizing the pursuit of certain nonviolent drug offenders will alleviate some of the fiscal burden caused by funding for enforcement and incarceration. Similarly, and especially given the sea change in federal policy, there is an opportunity here to relax some of the tax burden for Missouri citizens involved with putting nonviolent drug users away for a decade or two. Let me spell it out: Legalized medical marijuana in the state of Missouri would simultaneously help many people who are ailing and reduce the tax burden that comes from incarcerating users.

For what it’s worth, I also commend Obama’s move insofar as it is a nod to increased state sovereignty. A government by and for the people is easier to manage when fewer people need to agree on how to proceed, so sovereignty at lower levels is highly encouraged. For more on that, see my post about Charles Tiebout and the blessing of prioritizing local governance.

Do Charters Make the Grade?

Posted on by Abhi Sivasailam

Over the weekend, the Columbia Missourian ran an interesting article that questioned the effectiveness of Missouri’s charter schools. Using MAP scores as a benchmark, the article suggests that the lower average MAP scores of charter school students as opposed to traditional public school students show that charter schools are doing worse in educating children. Problems abound in this analysis.

The article makes an oft-repeated mistake in education: viewing education as static, as happening in a vacuum. The static view leads one to analyze student scores as isolated events — as snapshots — and ignore the underlying trend. Only in taking a longer view of the data can we begin to see the degree of value added at each stage. Yes, the average test scores of students in St. Louis charter schools are lower than the statewide average of students in traditional public schools. But, no, it does not follow that those charter schools are worse. For starters, that claim is based on an apples-to-oranges comparison between St. Louis city charter schools and statewide public schools. Instead, it should be based on the relative performance of St. Louis charter schools as opposed to St. Louis traditional public schools — a gap which, it should be noted, has also been established and will be outlined in more detail in a forthcoming Show-Me Institute study. But charter critics still have to contend with the value-added component, something the article does not do.

So, the article fails to reject the claim that charter schools are effective. Can we actively prove the claim? As Show-Me Institute policy analyst Dave Roland writes, in the comments section of the article:

A simple comparison of MAP scores doesn’t even come close to telling the real story. None of these comparisons take account of “selection bias” in making charter and non-charter comparisons. A recent study by the Center for Research on Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University examined the effectiveness of charter schools in 16 states, including Missouri. The Stanford study took careful account of the prior test scores of charter school students, and every charter school student was paired with one or more similar students (aligned by race, sex, grade, poverty status, English language learner status, special education, and prior test score by subject) in schools that acted as feeders for the charter school. The study revealed that Missouri’s charter schools attracted students who were underperforming in their traditional public schools, and that this state’s charter school students were realizing larger academic gains than their counterparts in traditional public schools. The difference was small, but statistically significant.

If You Run Out of Things to Say, Just Praise the Communist Party

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

The above advice was given to students in China before a national exam, according to this radio program featured on the Two Million Minutes Blog.

The program reports that China is trying to incorporate more critical thinking into its school system. I don’t expect it to make progress in this area unless it mitigates the propaganda and censorship its citizens are subjected to. You can’t command students to think critically the way you can insist that they memorize the periodic table of elements. And they’re unlikely to volunteer a challenging opinion if they fear recrimination.

China’s top-down education system is good at producing high test scores, bad at inviting criticism. We should keep this in mind the next time someone calls for national standards “because the highest-performing countries have them.”

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