Susan Pendergrass speaks with Trish Flanagan. Trish is the executive director of Building Futures: Design and Build Workshop in St. Louis.
Founded in 2012, by Gay Lorberbaum, Paul Krautmann, and Frank Lorberbaum, Building Futures: Design and Build Workshop began as a year-round Saturday workshop focused on supplementing the education of the under-served young people in the St. Louis metropolitan area.
Produced by Show-Me Opportunity
Last week I testified before the Missouri Advisory Committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights on the topic of transparency and racial issues in education. The full text of the testimony is here. I was delighted to be invited to testify alongside a variety of peers from a variety of prominent national organizations, including the Manhattan Institute and National Association of Scholars, and a number of other state and national experts.
For those who have followed our work on critical race theory (CRT) and government transparency, my jaundiced view of the former and sanguine view of the latter will come as no surprise. If the government can take your money, it has to tell you where it went, especially if that money is being spent to tell the children of taxpayers that their parents are “oppressors.” As I concluded my remarks:
For both government and the taxpayers themselves, transparency is critical to ensuring tax dollars are being used appropriately so that the public can have confidence in its government. As we seek to form a more perfect union, state and local leaders must be far more transparent about how they handle taxpayer money in all its forms and for all of its purposes, including and especially in our K-12 institutions. I think the future of our country depends on it.
If video of the hearing goes online, I’ll be sure to append a link to this post.
Missouri’s Medicaid program is out of control, and state lawmakers don’t seem to care. Enrollment in the state’s program keeps setting new record highs every month, with more than 1.5 million Missourians now enrolled. But new estimates suggest that more than 20% of enrollees shouldn’t be on Medicaid at all, as they no longer meet the program qualifications.
Over the past two months, many states across the country—but not Missouri—have started deflating their bloated Medicaid rolls. (Reminder: enrollment got to be this high because prior to April of this year, the federal government barred states from checking eligibility or removing anyone from the program since March of 2020, as part of the response to COVID-19.)
Unfortunately, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reports that Missouri is waiting until July before removing any ineligible enrollees. If true, Missouri stands in stark contrast to states such as Florida or Arizona that started checking their Medicaid enrollees’ eligibility as soon as the federal prohibition was lifted. Recent articles suggest that Florida has already identified upwards of 250,000 ineligible enrollees, which translates to significant savings for taxpayers.
In theory, removing ineligible recipients from government-sponsored health coverage shouldn’t be a controversial topic. Prior to COVID-19, states were required by federal law to check whether their Medicaid enrollees were still eligible for the program at least once every year but could check as frequently as every six months.
Regular redeterminations (eligibility checks) are important because people’s circumstances change frequently, and they may not always go out of their way to inform the government of any changes. In Missouri, like many other states, the government pays health plans monthly to provide health coverage to Medicaid recipients, regardless of whether they receive any services. Given how expensive health coverage is, this means that there are likely billions of tax dollars being spent improperly on the program every single month.
With hundreds of thousands of eligibility checks needed, the potential for significant reductions in wasteful government spending is why states are rushing to clean their Medicaid rolls. It’s also why I suggested Missouri consider hiring outside help for processing redeterminations, given how difficult an administrative task it would be.
Though it’s just another thing to add to the list of this year’s legislative failures, it’s telling that our elected officials couldn’t even get out ahead of something as long choreographed as the resumption of Medicaid eligibility checks. If spending is all about priorities, it’s clear Missouri’s elected officials don’t consider reducing government waste to be one of them.
Aaron Hedlund, David Stokes and Elias Tsapelas join Zach Lawhorn to discuss the most recent report on inflation in the U.S., the daunting task of updating Missouri’s Medicaid enrollment data, and the intriguing idea of privatizing the water utility in the City of St. Louis following a string of over a dozen water main breaks over the weekend.
Produced by Show-Me Opportunity
Recently, a Hazelwood preschool teacher had her teacher’s license suspended due to her abrupt resignation, (on September 2nd a month into the school year) which would have left a classroom teacherless. Quitting without sufficient notice often violates the contract teachers sign with a district, and teachers in Missouri are facing increasingly severe punishments for contract violations. What was most interesting in this case was the defense of the teacher by Mark Jones of Missouri National Education Association (MNEA). Jones said:
This [policy] does not incentivize (teachers) to try and find a new school or situation that is a better fit for them when they can basically lose their livelihood because months after signing a contract, they realize maybe they need to make a different decision to work in a different setting.
That point sounds vaguely familiar.
Jones is arguing that teachers should be able to break their teaching contract in order to find a school “that is a better fit for them.” Show-Me Institute analysts have been arguing for years that students should be able to find a school “that is a better fit for them” via school choice programs.
I understand the union’s goal is to protect teachers’ rights, but this is an interesting stance to take. In Jones’s view, teachers—grown adults who have made a contractual agreement to teach students for a school year—should be allowed to break their contract and leave their school and students in a lurch. Meanwhile, the MNEA thinks that students who want better educational opportunities should be forced to stay in the schools they are assigned to for up to 12 years.
Teachers should seek to find the best situation for them. Teachers who are not satisfied with their job will not be as effective. However, the Hazelwood teacher had obligations to meet, children to teach, and a contract to fulfill. Breaching your contract and leaving your students and school in the lurch is not an appropriate response to being unhappy with the school.
Teachers are adults who can apply to teach at any school they choose. The vast majority of Missouri children are forced to attend their neighborhood public school with no alternative choices at all. Groups like the MNEA that want as much flexibility as possible for teachers but oppose any flexibility at all for students ought to reflect on the incoherence of that position.
Missouri’s two flagship cities—St. Louis and Kansas City—face myriad challenges, such as declining population in St. Louis and high rates of poverty and crime in both cities. The public school system in each city has struggled to educate students who often bring many challenges with them to the classroom. One bright spot has been the dozens of charter schools that have opened in the last twenty years. More than half of the students in Kansas City have left Kansas City Public Schools (KCPS) for charters, and many of those charters have become some of the highest-performing schools in the state. Similarly, nearly 40 percent of St. Louis students have chosen charters over St. Louis Public Schools (SLPS).
It seems those families have made the right choice. The highest-quality research on the academic impact of charter schools consistently comes from the Stanford Center for Research on Education, also known as CREDO. Because charter schools are independently run, they often cater to unique populations of students, which makes them difficult to compare to traditional public schools. Further, some argue that charter schools “skim the cream”—only taking the best students— giving them an unfair advantage. CREDO overcomes this by creating a “virtual twin” for each charter school student. This twin is a student (or combination of students) with identical traits and prior year test scores who attended the same traditional public school that the charter school student would have attended. CREDO’s most recent study matched 1.9 million charter school students with 6.5 million traditional public school students.
Then, to make the studies user friendly, the complex results are translated into days of learning. Imagine a 4th grader performing at exactly the state average on the state’s math or reading test. Then imagine that same student doing that again in 5th grade. That student would then have exactly average academic growth in one year, or 180 days of growth, based on the typical school year.
CREDO’s most recent report found that Missouri charter school students gained 39 more days of growth in reading and 56 more days of growth in math than their matched twins in KCPS and SLPS. Those results are staggering. Students in charter schools gained one quarter to one third of a year of learning more than their traditional public school peers.
So, should Missouri open more charter schools? Or should districts sign moratoriums to prevent expansion? Should families in Springfield or Columbia be able to access these schools that have an incentive to perform? Or should they remain stuck in their declining public schools? Critics continue to say that charter schools are an unproven fad. The CREDO research should cause them to think twice about that claim.
A version of this commentary appeared in the Columbia Missourian.
How would your family feel if your entire neighborhood had 5G internet access and you were still using dial-up? I’m guessing the kids might complain. After all, 5G is simply better, and sticking with an obsolete system seems like a stubborn refusal to change. That’s the situation Missouri families with school-aged children face. Just about all our neighbors wrapped up their legislative sessions by finally giving up address-based school assignments and letting parents choose where to send their children to school. We’re the last one in the neighborhood sticking with the outdated system.
So, there you have it. School choice is not just happening in the far-flung states of Florida, West Virginia, and Arizona. It is literally all around us. Our neighbors have figured out what Missouri hasn’t. School assignment by address is antiquated, it isn’t what families want, and it doesn’t work.
Imagine a school district as an ice cream shop that can only stock one flavor. They’re required to do their best to satisfy every student, so if most families want vanilla, vanilla it is. If some kids show up wanting pistachio, those can be tossed in. A couple of kids want chocolate? Add a chocolate ribbon. But now some kids want bubble gum in their ice cream. Does it really make sense to insist on offering a single flavor that turns out to be vanilla-pistachio-chocolate-bubble gum? No one wants that. There is no single, secret flavor that’s everyone’s favorite.
What our neighbors seem to understand is that it is better for the kids who need pistachio ice cream to get the very best pistachio out there. Parents are in the best position to know. And they may have a pistachio kid and a bubble gum kid in the same family. Try to please everyone at once, and you end up satisfying no one.
Over half of the 50 states now have mandatory open enrollment programs that allow families to choose any public school in the state. The number of states that include private schools among the options offered is growing fast. Missouri has neither. We allow charters only as interventions in our worst performing districts, rather than opportunities for districts to expand their portfolios. We have a scholarship program that addresses the needs of children in larger communities, but not rural children. Our legislature did not have the courage or determination to overcome their differences this year to bring even voluntary open enrollment to Missouri families.
Change can’t have been easy for policymakers in neighboring states, either. But they did it. Maybe it was out of a sense of fairness to children stuck in poor-performing schools, or maybe it was because they wanted their states to be attractive to growing companies and young families. It sure would be nice if such considerations would motivate lawmakers here.
A version of this commentary appeared in the Springfield News-Leader.
If I offered you $100,000 a year for the rest of your life to retire from your current job, would you take me up on the offer? What if I said you could have the money and also get a different job if you wanted? If you would answer yes to these questions, you have gone a long way toward understanding why turnover is high among public school superintendents. We financially incentivize them to “retire.”
Take a look at the recent article from Springfield News-Leader’s Claudette Riley, in which she discussed the problem of superintendent turnover. Nearly every person cited in the report was a superintendent who has retired and is working another job. Doug Hayter retired as superintendent of Branson Public Schools; he now draws his retirement benefit and serves as the executive director of the Missouri Association of School Administrators (MASA). Kelly Hinshaw and John Jungman, also quoted in the report, are retired administrators who now work for MASA.
Given the rules of our current state pension system, it makes financial sense to do just as these folks have done. Consider some of the other retiring superintendents listed in Riley’s report. Shawn Randles is retiring from the Logan-Rogersville School District. After a 31-year career, he’s eligible to draw 75 percent of his final average salary of $152,002 for the rest of his life. Depending on the payout he chooses, this could be as much as $114,000 a year. According to Riley, Randles “plans to start a second career in an education-related field.”
Chris Ford, Fordland’s “retiring” superintendent is in a similar position. He’s eligible to draw $108,000 a year for the rest of his life while continuing to work. He has taken a position at Evangel University.
We are told turnover among superintendents is high because the job is stressful. It is curious then that many retire and take up similar positions in other states. Take Crane’s retiring superintendent, Chris Johnson, who has accepted the superintendent post in Prairie View, Kansas.
Stress may be a factor, but the truth is that superintendent turnover is high because our state’s pension system makes it financially beneficial for our veteran administrators to leave. They can earn more by retiring than they could if they kept working.
As Riley’s piece explained, superintendents are eligible to retire after 30 years of service in the profession or after their years of service plus their age equal 80. This means that someone who starts teaching right out of college could be eligible for retirement by their mid-50s. These individuals can then draw their pension and take on new roles, as long as those roles are not covered by Missouri’s Public School Retirement System.
We should applaud efforts to mentor and train superintendents, but if we truly want to reduce turnover the solution is clear—we must change our retirement system. This does not have to mean abandoning the current defined-benefit pension system, though offering a defined-contribution option is something that should be considered. The solution could be as simple as allowing superintendents to draw early disbursements from their pension fund while retaining their current jobs. This would diminish the financial pull to retire and take up a new job in another state or outside of PSRS.
As long as we continue to make it financially lucrative to retire, we will continue to see our best educational administrators retire shortly after they hit year 30.
A version of this commentary appeared in the Examiner of Jackson County.
Independence is one of the few cities in Jackson County that continues to provide extensive municipal utilities to its residents. It recently announced that is it considering the privatization of its municipal electric utility. If privatization is done in a transparent manner designed to encourage multiple bids for the electric assets and customers, it will greatly benefit the residents of Independence. In fact, the city should go even further and consider privatizing its water utility, too.
There is no standard method for providing utility services in Missouri cities. Springfield, for instance, has a city-owned public utility that provides every utility service. In Kansas City gas and electric are provided by private companies, while water service is handled by a city department. Almost all of the one million residents of Saint Louis County are customers of private companies for utility services.
Municipal utilities often charge lower rates than private utilities, but that is not the case with Independence. The city admits its municipal electric utility charges more than the private companies serving the area (mainly Evergy), despite the structural cost advantages in taxation, regulation, and financing that government-owned utilities have.
Studies have demonstrated that private utilities are generally more efficient than municipal utilities. In 2000, economist B. Delworth Gardner of Brigham Young University determined that private water utilities in Utah charged lower rates for water than comparable public utilities despite the large advantages in taxation and regulation that government utilities have. Economists Daniel Hollas and Stanley Stansell found in a 1994 study that private gas utilities were more economically efficient than public gas utilities. A recent comparison of public and private electric utilities in Florida concluded that private utilities outperformed public utilities in nine of 14 categories (with one category being equal).
It is a reasonable supposition that private utilities would be more efficient in their costs and operations than Independence’s current municipal utilities. Privatizing the utilities could benefit the city in a number of ways. Most importantly, the city would experience an immediate cash infusion from the sale. Eureka, in Saint Louis County, sold its municipal water and sewer systems to Missouri-American Water for $28 million in 2022. Independence is much larger than Eureka, and its electrical and water utilities could likely be auctioned off for a much higher price. The substantial sale proceeds could be used to continue funding vital city services, be deposited into a reserve fund, or be put to a variety of other uses that would benefit city residents.
Independence would also see other fiscal benefits from privatizing the city utilities. The assets of the newly private utilities would become taxable, expanding the Independence and Jackson County tax bases. Finally, reducing the number of municipal employees would scale back the long-run taxpayer costs associated with government pensions and health care. It is imperative, though, that the entire process be an open one to serve the interests of taxpayers and consumers.
Private utilities are just as capable of providing quality services at a low price to the residents of Independence, and likely would be more efficient than city departments. Privatization of the Independence water and electric utilities would bring a needed cash infusion to the city, add substantial assets to the tax rolls, and reduce long-term public employee costs. Cities throughout Missouri have seen positive results from such privatization efforts, and there is good reason to believe that Independence taxpayers and residents would, too.
