Breakfast Accountability

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that the School District of Philadelphia is going to start evaluating principals by, among other things, how many students eat breakfast at school.

I liked these comments from a principal:

Should a principal be blamed for a student who ate breakfast at home and therefore doesn’t eat in school?, asked Lerner, who was a principal for 22 years.

“Are we going to get to forced feedings?” he continued. “I think it’s wrong to assume no parent in Philadelphia is providing breakfast each day.”

I can see how providing breakfast could boost achievement if some students don’t have enough to eat at home. A breakfast program with such a goal has already succeeded if it makes food available. We can assume that students who don’t take advantage just aren’t hungry. (All students in Philadelphia are eligible for free breakfast, even students from high-income households.)

This is an example of a district focusing on minor details that have no link to classroom instruction, and missing the big picture. We’ve seen that happen in St. Louis, too.

How Does Missouri Health Care Compare?

Posted on by Stephen Feman

A recent news article compared cost and quality of health care across all the states of our country. We are in the middle of the United States, so it was good to find that our state was near the middle of Medicare spending per beneficiary, and close to the midpoint in terms of the “overall quality of health care.” Of the states that border Missouri, only Iowa was listed as having better quality, and more than half of the other bordering states were found to have both poorer quality and to be more expensive.

That is good to know, but that data was just for the Medicare population, a group that is mostly made up of people over age 65. What about the rest of us? To look at this, it is best to use information about life expectancy. In the medical community the phrase “life expectancy” describes the number of years a person would be expected to live if the current health care system remained as it is now, without any changes for the duration of that person’s life. In 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau said that life expectancy in Missouri was 76.2 years, and since that time it has improved to 76.8. Well, that is pretty good, and it is even better for you and me that it is getting longer. However, in 2009, the average life expectancy for the entire United States was reported to be 78.11. At that same time, in most of the industrialized nations of the world, life expectancy was reported to be 79.0. I guess that means that in Missouri, life expectancy is not as good as in most of the nation’s other states, and life expectancy is poorer than in of most of the industrialized nations of the world.

Why should that be? Could it be something simple, like there being not enough doctors for the number of people who are in need of medical care? That may be. (See my recent report on rural health care in Missouri.) The OECD tells us that in most of the industrialized nations of the world (that is, in the countries where people live longer than we do in Missouri), there are 2.9 practicing physicians per 1,000 people, while in the overall United States, there are only 2.34, and in Missouri there are only 2.24.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that we are spending more for health care than anybody else. Everyone knows that in the United States, we spend more than 16 percent of our Gross Domestic Product for health care, or $7,290 per person, while in Missouri it is $7,709 per person.

So, there you have it. As everyone knows, we are spending more and getting less. This needs to be changed. It may seem simplistic, but wouldn’t we be better off if there were more physicians? That would certainly reduce one complaint about there not being enough physicians to supply the current needs in this country. But, beyond that, wouldn’t an increase in physicians produce more competition among health care suppliers, and a corresponding reduction in fees?

Local Food in Springfield

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

The Springfield News-Leader has a story today about urban gardening. Here’s how a member of a task force explains the rationale for local food subsidies:

“The food consumed by the citizens of the Springfield Economic Area, an amount in excess of 1,100 tons of food per day, is shipped and trucked to us along a fragile and globalized supply line,” Chadwick wrote in a letter to the City Council.

“All depends upon the continued availability of cheap foreign oil. Should this delivery system be disrupted for any reason, supermarket shelves will empty within hours.”

I wouldn’t call the global economy fragile — certainly not when compared with local food production in a single city. In the global economy, there are multiple sources of energy and competing transportation providers, so if one is overburdened, others can step in. Food comes to the United States from all over the world; we’re not putting all our eggs in one basket. If a crop fails in one country, we get food from somewhere else. Produce that’s not in season in the United States can be imported from a warmer climate. The diversity of food sources around the globe makes a food shortage like the one postulated in the quote highly unlikely.

On the other hand, food production in one city is vulnerable and dependent on local crop conditions. Nor is it protected from what goes on in the rest of the world. If something so catastrophic happens that global transportation comes to a halt, there’s no reason to think that life in Springfield would continue as before, with everyone contentedly growing local crops. I say this not to scare people in Springfield, as I don’t expect any such thing to happen, but to make the point that a small economy is no better able to withstand disaster than a large economy. If anything, it’s more susceptible to the caprice of nature.

Although it’s poor insurance against global economic collapse, there are plenty of good reasons to grow and sell local food. Many people enjoy gardening or like to buy produce from their neighbors. It’s unfortunate that they face regulations and other barriers to entry in Springfield. You can’t sell produce from your personal or community garden in Springfield–and farmers’ markets, where sales are allowed, must take place in commercial districts and with special permits from the city.

Springfield ought to take a break from convening task forces and anticipating disasters, and instead make its local food regulations less restrictive. It won’t mean the end of the world, or of the global economy, if a few farmers sell food in the wrong zone.

Ethanol on My Mind

Posted on by David Stokes

I have been thinking about ethanol lately because the hotel with which our office building shares a parking garage seems to be hosting some type of conference that has brought down some people from Iowa. Our garage contains several cars marked as belonging to “Iowa State” or “Iowa Department of Transportation,” and they all sport large bumper stickers proclaiming that they run on ethanol fuel. Good for them. I am glad they are visiting Missouri, where they get ethanol in their gas whether they like it or not. (I am pretty sure they like it.)

This is topical because just the other day the Government Accountability Office released a report recommending that we do away with the ethanol tax credit. The Post-Dispatch‘s “Political Fix” has the story here. Now, the bad part is that the tax credit is no longer needed because another government mandate is forcing ethanol on us:

But the GAO said the tax break is no longer needed now that the industry has prospered under a government mandate for ethanol use, called the Renewable Fuel Standard.

So, the ethanol industry “prospers” because of a federal mandate, a federal subsidy, and an additional state mandate. But I guess getting rid of one of them amounts to some progress, at least.

Here is some of the work we have done at the Show-Me Institute about ethanol.

Starting a Charter School in Wyoming

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Lest anyone think I’m trying to pick on Oregon when I write about its nonsensical charter school application process, let me point out that Oregon is not the only state whose charter school regulations should be updated. An article linked to by Edspresso explains the drawbacks of Wyoming’s policy.

The current system in Wyoming is a headache for any district superintendent, who must first help charter sponsors create an application, then turn around and make a recommendation about the charter to the school board. These are the superintendent and board of the same district that’s going to be competing with whatever new charters are approved.

The Wyoming Department of Education is considering changes to the process. The new rules would direct sponsors to work more closely with the Department when writing proposals; superintendents would continue to report on the application to the school boards.

These changes could be a step toward simplifying things, but I hope Wyoming will institute broader reforms in the future. Traditional districts and charters compete for a limited number of students. The state shouldn’t ask them to work together or depend on each other for approval, because their interests are at odds with one another.

High Time for a Change in Higher Education

Posted on by Josh Smith

Aristotle said that “Education is the best provision for old age,” and I believe that this insight applies to both of the common purposes for pursuing a college degree: investment in human capital and personal enrichment.

This piece in the Post-Dispatch discusses the gap in higher education completion between St. Louis and other metropolitan areas, as well as what is to be done about it. The St. Louis area is well below average, apparently, and this is unquestioningly seen in the article as a problem not of individual motivation, but of institutional provision for the disadvantaged. I will propose a third option not discussed by the author or likely considered by most readers of the piece: too many people are going to college with the intention of getting a bachelor’s degree.

This unpopular sounding idea consists of three insights, all of which are championed by Charles Murray, so I’ve embedded a video of him explaining his stance at the end of this post. The first insight is that you don’t need four years of coursework for any occupation — even doctors spend much of medical school in an internship. The second is that the one-size-fits-all approach of the four-year B.A. is remarkably inefficient in terms of adding value to individuals who are looking to invest in their employability by adding skills/knowledge that will signal to future employers their capabilities. The third is that the two common purposes for pursuing a B.A. should be, but typically are not, treated separately. Personal enrichment is a luxury that many — if not most — high school graduates cannot afford. On the other hand, investing in their own future productivity is great for virtually every high school graduate — so an option other than the four-year degree is called for.

Again, Charles Murray is the main proponent, in terms of visibility, of the idea I am putting forth here. However, I have not read or heard him discuss one major problem with the present scenario: It will be difficult to implement change, given that the B.A. at present is an established signal from applicants to employers, and a systematic change would be required to eliminate this well-socialized practice as the standard signaling mechanism and instead move toward a more efficient alternative. The best news on this front comes from the high-tech sector: For many years, there has existed a plurality of independent certifications — in networking, programming, and other tech-related fields — that are recognized by employers as acceptable signals, in lieu of a degree. If something like this could catch on in other fields, it would be a boon to anyone trying to get into those fields who is not well-suited — financially or otherwise — to pursue a B.A.

I agree with the Post-Dispatch piece that a change is needed. I strongly disagree that the change needs to entail sending more kids into B.A. programs that many or most of them simply can’t reasonably complete.

For a cogent summary of the problems with the pervasiveness of the B.A., here’s author and public policy advocate Charles Murray:

People We Can’t Do Without in an Emergency

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Midwives, breastfeeding mothers, and now school nurses: They are all claimed to be indispensable when disaster strikes. Nurses are in the news because the St. Louis Public Schools laid off a fraction of its nursing staff. The Grade has the story. A warning of dire consequences can be found in the commentary quoted in the body of the post, and it’s repeated with no less alarm in the comments. Look at this comment from someone who writes under the name “a school nurse”:

The Individuals with Disabilities Act, No Child Left Behind, and the mainstreaming of students with severe physical, emotional and medical problems has drastically changed the face of school nursing. We are not the school nurses of your childhood anymore. We are highly specialized professional health care practitioners who make independent decisions that can mean life or death for some students.

Of course, there are ominous references to swine flu in some of the other comments, but I don’t want to spread the panic even further by reprinting them all.

I see a few problems with this argument. First, No Child Left Behind does not affect school nursing one way or the other. NCLB is a law that requires standardized tests. It doesn’t put sick kids in classrooms. If school nurses have more work to do because of NCLB, it’s because kids who don’t like taking tests have psychosomatic complaints — and the tests happen only once a year. Yes, I realize that wasn’t the main point of the comment, but I’m answering it because it’s wildly erroneous.

Second, if students are so ill that their lives hang in the balance, they need to be in hospitals under the care of physicians. That’s not just my personal opinion — there are regulations about which tasks that different types of nurses may perform, and how much supervision they must have. (The Missouri Board of Nursing publishes a handy guide, in case you can’t figure out whether a license permits some particular action.) School nurses do routine things like dispensing medicine. If a situation is more serious, they call for help. That was their role when you were a kid, and it’s still their role today.

Third, although schools should be prepared to respond to emergencies, the person who responds doesn’t have to be a nurse. Teachers and staff can get CPR and first aid training — and they should.

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