Do You Get What You Pay For?

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Edudiva notices that there’s no clear link between district spending and low-income students’ achievement:

There is no correlation between per pupil spending in a district and the percent of free or reduced lunch students who test proficient or advanced on the math MAP test.

One conclusion we should not draw from these results is that spending doesn’t matter. Of course spending matters! But it’s not a simple question of more or less spending. Who spends the money, and how wisely they spend it, are more important than the exact dollar value. When you compare districts that face the same incentives and are run in much the same way, spending doesn’t make a big difference.

Tennessee vs. Missouri: Taxes May Tip the Odds

Posted on by Joseph Haslag

Missouri nestles against eight states, so border wars of all sorts are common. Some are fun, such as this week’s Missouri-Illinois football game. But others we can’t afford to lose. That includes economic competition between Missouri, which has an income tax, and Tennessee, which does not.

By any economic measure, Missouri dominated Tennessee at the end of World War II. Since then, Tennessee has reported faster economic growth and now has higher per-capita income than Missouri. With continued strong growth, the gap will just keep widening.

It is easy to see the switch by looking at the past decade’s worth of data. In 1997, Missouri led Tennessee: The market value of goods and services produced within its borders, divided by the state population, was $30,688. That measure is called per-capita gross state product. Tennessee’s per-capita gross state product was $29,647. Ten years later, Tennessee’s annual per-capita gross state product, after adjusting for inflation, was $34,117 while Missouri’s per-capita value was $33,326.

Tennessee’s growth rate during that period was 0.6 percentage points higher than Missouri’s growth rate. This may not seem like much, but note the effect that compounding has. Over a generation, if the growth-rate gap were to continue, the average Tennessean would realize income equal to $48,416 while the average Missourian’s income would be $40,975. In other words, the gap would expand from $791 to $7,441 in 25 years.

Productivity, employment, and population all show the same leapfrog by Tennessee when compared to Missouri. Economic growth depends on lots of different factors. Research shows that the rule of law, especially property rights enforcement, is related to growth rates across countries. Tennessee and Missouri share the same basic contract law.

Moreover, they share regional similarities that cannot account for the growth-rate discrepancy. By taxing income, the state government is collecting revenues on something that you own — your labor. Economic theory indicates that the difference in income tax rates — that is, the property rights enforced on people’s labor, and the payment for that factor of production — can help to account for the differences in growth rates.

The basic idea is elementary economics. Consider two people with identical characteristics, one in Missouri, the other in Tennessee. Suppose those two people were given identical work opportunities, so that they had access to the same machines and plant surroundings. For one hour of work, each produced the same amount, and was paid $20. Excluding federal taxes, the person in Missouri would take home $18.80 while the person in Tennessee would take home $20. (If the person worked in Saint Louis or Kansas City, take-home pay would only be $18.60. We will save that discussion for another time.) The person in Tennessee will supply more labor because he realizes a higher return for his effort.

The difference in returns applies also to those owning machines, plants, and other equipment. Other things being equal, the after-tax return to capital in Tennessee is higher than in Missouri. Consequently, when deciding where to locate plants and equipment, Tennessee has an advantage.

Together, the incentives to locate machines and people in Tennessee can account for why the Tennessee economy is performing better than the Missouri. This is not to ignore other factors that affect the two states’ economic performance. But the comparison does suggest that tax structure does matters. Perhaps it is time to ask: What tax structure is in Missouri’s best interest?

Joseph Haslag is executive vice president of the Show-Me Institute and a professor in economics at the University of Missouri-Columbia. This piece originally appeared in the St. Louis Beacon .

 

Everyone’s Favorite Alternative Teacher Certification Program

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

From the debates about the American Board for the Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE), you’d think that alternative teacher certification is a risky proposition. In fact, an alternative certification program has been in place for several years now — and it’s widely acknowledged as a success. That’s Teach for America, the organization that, through a short training camp and mentoring, trains recent grads to teach in public schools.

They train not-so-recent grads, too:

When it comes to her postretirement career, Karen Evans, 61, says her acquaintances are of two minds. […]

Grant Besser, a Teach for America recruiter, said approximately 15 percent of the 37 men and women training for the program this summer don’t fit the program’s typical path of college straight to classroom.

The article lauds Ms. Evans’ completion of the “rigorous” Teach for America application and five-week training camp. By all reports, Teach for America’s preparation is excellent — but it uses essentially the same methods as other alternative certification programs. It’s interesting that alternative training and mentoring is considered rigorous when you call it TFA, but risky when the acronym is ABCTE.

Censorship

Posted on by Dave Roland

My colleague, Ms. Brodsky, has hit on one of my hot-button issues. The first contribution I ever made to a brief in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court was a section arguing that the First Amendment “properly functions to prevent the government from influencing the marketplace of ideas by invidiously supporting or disfavoring particular viewpoints.”

Censorship occurs whenever any authority acts to suppress or inhibit free access or exchange of ideas disfavored by that authority. Not all censorship, however, is a problem. As Sarah pointed out, if parents want to prevent their children from encountering certain ideas, I fully support their right to do so. The problem, as with so many things, is when the government assumes the role of the parent. In a free society, it should never be the place of a government actor to decide what ideas are too unworthy or too “dangerous” for citizens to encounter. As the Supreme Court put it in Griswold v. Connecticut:

[T]he State may not, consistently with the spirit of the First Amendment, contract the spectrum of available knowledge. The right of freedom of speech and the press includes not only the right to utter or to print, but the right to distribute, the right to receive, the right to read […] and freedom of inquiry, freedom of thought, and freedom to teach […]

The U.S. Supreme Court has been called upon several times over the past few decades to address the question of to what extent government officials (or persistent community activists) can lawfully compel libraries to limit or terminate access to various materials. In 2003’s U.S. v. American Library Association, a divided court upheld legislation (sponsored by Senator John McCain), that required libraries receiving federal funds to install Internet filters on computers available to the public. The Court reasoned that because the law allowed librarians to temporarily disable the filters at a patron’s request, thereby giving the patron free access to whatever websites they hoped to view, the First Amendment’s prohibition on censorship was not violated. A good paper discussing the events leading to this case, and its implications, can be found here.

I disagreed with the court’s conclusion, of course, because the imposition of Internet filtering was an example of the government putting itself in place of the parent, saying, “We think these sites are naughty.” The appropriate solution would be for parents to take responsibility for keeping an eye on what their kids are reading or viewing. I’d be perfectly fine with libraries allowing parents to monitor their children’s check-out history. I’d even be fine with libraries allowing parents to bar their children from checking out books by certain authors. And I’m definitely fine with libraries making judgment calls about the best classification and shelving location for any given title — or whether to purchase a book in the first place. But a constitutional problem arises when librarian (or vocal special-interest groups) block someone’s access to an otherwise available book simply because they don’t like the book’s content.

Teacher Pay

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Will pay raises for math and science teachers lead to school disunity? That’s an objection raised by people quoted in this Post-Dispatch article:

Lobbyists for two of the state’s leading teachers’ groups — the Missouri National Education Association and Missouri State Teachers Association — both said Thursday that there could be dissension within schools if teachers of certain subjects get more money than others.

No school pays the same amount of money to everyone who works there. Even if all teachers earn the same pay, custodial staff generally earn less, and principals earn more.

Teachers understand that principals should be paid more than them. If a school could offer principals no more than it offered teachers, prospective principals would easily find more lucrative jobs somewhere else, and the school would be left without a principal. It’s the same for math and science teachers. People with advanced training in math and science have excellent employment options outside of the teaching profession, so schools have to offer comparable salaries to hold on to them.

The County Library “Censors” Books Right and Left

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

An article in the Post-Dispatch describes a campaign by a group of citizens who object to some children’s materials in the St. Louis County Library. Obviously, this is not the right blog for a discussion of proper reading choices for children. What I’d like to deal with here is the response of the library and of the campaign’s critics, and their accusation that making any of the requested changes would be “censorship.” Putting aside the issue of whether the changes would be a good idea, would they restrict anyone’s rights?

The suggestions include limiting what children can check out without a parent’s permission, creating a rating system that alerts people to sexual content in books, or moving the books in question to the adult section of the library.

If any of those proposals are unconstitutional, the library is already in trouble. Currently, children can’t check out interlibrary loan books themselves — that has to be done by a parent. (There are even some reference books that nobody can check out, and I haven’t heard accusations that the library is censoring the dictionary.) The library sorts books, deciding whether they are appropriate for adults or children. It even divides books by fiction and nonfiction, and there are separate sections for biography, mysteries, and other categories. The library decides whether any given book should be shelved with the biographies or in general nonfiction, or whatever.

Children’s books are labeled by grade level, a process that involves a lot of judgment calls. The library designates Alice in Rapture, Sort Of as a book for fourth- through sixth-graders. (This novel contains lots of discussions of “French kissing,” as well as mentions of boys groping girls’ breasts, etc.) Meanwhile, the library classifies These Happy Golden Years, in which about the most graphic thing that happens is that the protagonists hold hands, as appropriate for seventh- through ninth-graders. I’m not talking about some kind of proposed, unconstitutional rating system; this is the labeling system that the library uses right now. Regardless of the system’s merits, it’s incorrect to say that the library doesn’t make decisions — sometimes controversial decisions — when sorting books by audience.

Furthermore, the video and DVD section of the library contains all the usual warnings displayed on that kind of material, such as “PG-13 for Sexual Content.” Nobody calls that censorship.

Going beyond ratings and labeling, what if the library doesn’t purchase materials at all? Is that censorship? I’ve requested that the library purchase books, and my request was turned down because the small publisher that prints the books I wanted was not on the library’s list of publishers. The publisher is still free to publish, and I’m still free to buy the books at a store. I don’t think I or anybody else was censored by that incident.

This is a bigger issue than deciding which books are appropriate for children, a problem no library policy will be able to solve to everyone’s satisfaction. If we get used to hearing the cry of “censorship” over every library shelving decision, we’ll be less alert to real cases of censorship and less vigilant about protecting the right to free speech. We should focus on defending Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s right to publish novels about teen sexuality, not her “right” to have them placed in the elementary school section of the library.

Safety Obsessiveness in Sprawlville

Posted on by David Stokes

I get some of my best feedback when I write and post about our society’s obsession with safety. So today’s Post-Dispatch article, about a new subdivision in Wentzville that is designed to a level of safety that Jodie Foster would have appreciated, is a gift to me — and to you, my gentle readers.

Several years ago, Slate suggested that instead of hanging the lawyers, we should hang the Realtors. Reading this article makes you feel the same urge — not that I haven’t always felt that way (with apologies to my friends who are Realtors). This new subdivision is so far beyond ludicrous as to make me think it’s a joke, but it ain’t. The agent in the story is just awful, with her constant fear mongering about kidnapping, when all they really have to worry about in Wentzville is mailbox baseball. (I would be highlighting some of the worst quotes, but we are having computer troubles here at the office. I am operating in safety mode and can’t cut and paste from other sources. It is very frustrating.)

The article gives a good description of why none of this is remotely necessary, but our nanny-state-lovin’ home purchasers don’t seem to mind paying more in order to worry less. Constant surveillance of your family, neighbors, strangers, workmen … sounds like heaven in modern suburbia. It is more than sad, though, because so many Americans think like this. It does not affect only them. When they vote for fear and surveillance, we get red-light cameras, ID cards to enter buildings, and children who can’t leave their parents’ view at 14. The eagerness of so many Americans to give up basic freedoms for safety both astounds and appalls me, and this new subdivision may be the most loathsome example yet.

November Ballot Issues

Posted on by Calvin Harris II

Today, Missouri’s Secretary of State announced that two of the four groups that submitted ballot measures received enough valid signatures on their petitions to be placed on the November 4 ballot.

Gambling loss limits and home health care unions — you made it!

Renewable energy proposals and eminent domain constitutional amendments — better luck next time.

The gambling loss limits proposal would repeal Missouri’s law that limits gambling losses to no more than $500 in a two-hour period. The Post-Dispatch paraphrased a spokesman for the group that sponsored the petition as saying that eliminating loss limits would “help Missouri casinos compete against those in neighboring states” and secure an estimated $100 million toward public schools. Show-Me Daily has covered this issue before. As for the home health care union proposal, annual costs are estimated to exceed $510,560.

Under the Color of State Authority

Posted on by Dave Roland

Today, the Eighth Circuit held that St. Louis’ Land Clearance Redevelopment Authority must face the music for attempting to shut down Jim Roos’ very public protest of eminent domain abuse. As you may recall from an earlier post, LCRA officials first told Roos that he had to get their approval before he put up his anti–eminent domain sign, then tried to argue that Roos couldn’t sue them because the agency never really possessed the authority it had claimed when it tried to squelch Roos’ right to political expression. Fortunately, good sense prevailed and the judges have sent this matter back to the trial court to determine whether Roos’ protest is, in fact, entitled to constitutional protection.

Support Us

The work of the Show-Me Institute would not be possible without the generous support of people who are inspired by the vision of liberty and free enterprise. We hope you will join our efforts and become a Show-Me Institute sponsor.

Donate
Man on Horse Charging