The Odds

Posted on by Audrey Spalding

In April 2000, the Warren County School District asked its voters for a 54-cent property tax levy increase. More than 1,900 people showed up to vote, and the majority said no. Later that year, in November, the school district asked again. This time, about 5,800 people showed up and, once again, the vote was no.

Last week, Cynthia asked whether November elections would get more people to vote on school issues. We looked at Missouri school district tax levy elections from 2000 through 2003, and, not surprisingly, the answer is yes.

It’s a strong yes. Like Warren County, four out of the five remaining school districts that held both an April and November tax levy election during that period, saw nearly twice as many voters show up in November, if not more. If you want more voters, November is the month to put a tax increase on the ballot.

But if you want a school district’s proposed tax increase to pass, you have a better shot in April. And, whatever the reason, that’s the month most school districts put financial proposals on the ballot.

Continue reading “The Odds”

Hanushek Interview

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Eric Hanushek, who participated in the Show-Me Institute’s conference on school finance, appears this week on Econ Talk. He discusses several court cases, and compares U.S. public education with education systems in East Asia.

Hanushek makes some particularly good points during the last 10 minutes of the podcast, when he describes how current funding systems reward failure by directing resources to failing schools — in essence, giving schools an incentive to fail. He also discusses the complex relationship between choice and accountability and explains why one can’t succeed without the other.

The podcast and a list of related readings are available online.

From Frugal to Flush: The Benefit Boost

Posted on by Cynthia Juedemann

This morning, I randomly selected a stack of superintendent contracts from Audrey’s files, in addition to a sampling she had already given to me. She’s talked about some specific cases and oddities (like the $50,000 bond St. Louis requires its superintendents to post) and she’s laid out the basic format of superintendent contracts.

Some contracts are sparing with benefits, others chock full of them. But how big is the benefit boost?

Continue reading “From Frugal to Flush: The Benefit Boost”

Concrete: A Real Kick in the Asphalt

Posted on by Matt Simpson

Are rising oil prices all bad? Well, they certainly increase the price of many things. We have already seen car companies take huge hits because of the increasing scarcity of oil. But this effect isn’t uniform across all industries. For example, the concrete industry is booming. One of the executives at J.M. Marschuetz Construction Co. tells us why:

“Who would have thought in a million years that concrete would cost less than asphalt?” asked Jason Marschuetz, the company’s vice president. “The oil prices are ultimately helping us because even though we’re getting hammered once — for diesel — the asphalt companies are getting hammered twice — for diesel and asphalt.”

Concrete and asphalt are substitutes for a variety of applications, including paving roads and driveways. When oil prices rise, concrete gets a little bit more expensive while asphalt gets much more expensive. The result? People use concrete instead of asphalt whenever they can. We should see this trend across the economy — goods and services which are relatively less dependent on oil should become cheaper relative to the oil-guzzling competition.

This is just one of the many ways in which we are less dependent on oil than one might think. Oil may be the cheapest alternative for a variety of applications at $130 a barrel, but if the price increases much, there are numerous ways to achieve the same ends that use less oil. In econo-speak, the demand for oil is more elastic than it appears.

Finally, keep in mind that all the people in the concrete industry see their incomes rise during the oil-induced boom. New jobs are created in the industry as well, because new plants are coming online — such as the plant in Ste. Genevieve. Chrysler workers may be out of a job because of rising oil prices, but new opportunities are opening up because of the same cause.

How Free Are We, Part Two

Posted on by David Stokes

Continuing a series of blog posts that began in April 2007, and which was on hiatus until now, let us again consider the numerous atrocious ways government has entered our lives, from the most overreaching nanny-state activity to more complicated financial instruments. Sometime in the mid-’90s, Bill Clinton declared, “The era of big government is over.” How wrong he was.

The International Herald Tribune has a kick-to-the-gut article about how it is now the responsibility of the federal government to buy people a home and send kids to college. I am by no means an expert on these issues, but I find it offensive that the government steps in to save everyone from themselves. In this entire mortgage imbroglio, it always gets overlooked that people bear the responsibility for taking on too much debt to buy a house. Nobody forced them to buy more house than they could afford at an adjustable rate mortgage with no money down. And why is it now the federal government’s job to guarantee all the student loans for college? It just sickens me that so many people are so happy to have the government take care of them.

Now, we’ll go into the think tank world for Reason’s newest video from Drew Carey. I have had discussions with plenty of people who support these types of health mandates / control freak laws. (I, myself, can even see the benefits of a few of them, like smoking bans.) The crazy thing, to my mind, is that many supporters argue that because the public pays for the health costs of so many people, the government has a right to regulate the way we live — i.e., banning trans fats or forcing people to wear helmets when they ride a bike. The insane thing is that this argument always comes from people who support greater government involvemnt in health care (i.e., socialism), so they put themselves in the perfect circle of arguing for more socialism in health care out of some moral imperative, and then arguing for the right to control our lives out of fiscal responsibility in health care. The idea that maybe we should let people live their own lives and then let them deal with the consequences of their actions — which, in come cases, will be negative — does not seem to enter their mindset. That would, of course, be too much freedom.

How does all this connect to Missouri? Well, we are the nation’s leader in saggy pants ordinances, so we have struck a blow for decency and telling kids we don’t want to see their boxer shorts. It’s also a nice excuse to stop them and check them for drugs, while we’re at it. It’s all very depressing, and my mood is not helped by the fact that the Cardinals will now be playing in Stella Artois Stadium.

Control

Posted on by Audrey Spalding

A little while ago, a Cole County judge ruled that Missouri gives enough money to public school districts. A main argument was that more money spent in a school district doesn’t itself increase student achievement, and that Missouri’s education spending was growing too fast.

The goal has always been to spend money to help students. The court ruled that Missouri was spending enough. Based on the ruling, what we would expect to see over the course of the next few years is a leveling of total spending on public education in Missouri. If the state was the only one handing out money for education, we would see just that.

But schools don’t receive state funds alone. Though state spending is not growing as fast as before, school districts can always ask their communities for more money.

As I’ve been looking over election results for school financial issues, occasionally I’ll stumble across a recent news article about a district’s election. When I do, superintendents are often quoted as saying that a property tax increase is needed because the state just isn’t providing as much money as the school district had counted on. In the lawsuit, more than 240 Missouri school districts had joined together to charge that they weren’t getting enough from the state.

And, while the court ruled otherwise, school districts have proven that they can get money in other ways. It’s not just the state that controls the public education finance spigot.

Continue reading “Control”

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie …

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

… He’ll ask for a bakery license from the state.

The trend toward occupational licensure seems to be hard to resist, even for mavericks like mice … or midwives. Midwives in North Carolina, where practicing tocology is currently a misdemeanor, are asking the state to license them:

“If there was licensure in place, there would be more midwives trained here, and there would be a selection. No one’s going to move to a state that’s not friendly to midwives,” said Kreutzer, a member of the North Carolina Friends of Midwives.

It looks like North Carolina could be the next state to legalize midwifery, which would be great for the midwives who want to work there and patients who’d like to choose this option. But “friendly” and “legal” doesn’t have to mean “licensed by the state.” I hope North Carolina will follow MIssouri’s lead and allow a private organization to certify the midwives. In fact, the ideal scenario would be several licensing organizations competing with each other.

If the North Carolina midwives want to increase their numbers, they should avoid state licensing. That tends to keep people out of the profession by creating lots of bureaucratic hurdles to jump over. It won’t bring new people in. (You don’t see geologists flocking to Missouri to be licensed here, do you?)

It Makes No Sense to Take Back Taxes From Stimulus Checks

Posted on by David Stokes

There have been a few articles recently about state and local governments intercepting federal stimulus payments in order to take out taxes owed. Missourinet has one of those stories about our own state. I hate to sound like a defender of tax scofflaws, but it makes no sense to intercept the money. If the point of the stimulus plan was to stimulate our economy (we’ll leave aside for now what a stupid idea it is) then how does it do any good to have that money go from one government to another? There is no stimulus effect or consumer spending in that transfer (assuming those things exist in the first place).

The stimulus plan is deficit spending, nothing more. If the feds send $600 to a Missourian, and the state takes half of it, federal taxpayers (all of us) are still out the $600 the feds sent, but now there is $300 less to be used to stimulate the economy. So, basically, it’s a shell game in which the feds increase deficit spending while the states add it to their collections. It might make more sense for the federal government to withhold their own back taxes, but in this case you would be essentially giving a gift to a tax scofflaw without any stimulus effect at all.

I want to be clear that taking out money for back child support — which makes up a lot of what Missouri is doing — is a different matter, and should clearly be continued. Money collected in this way will be transferred to other people, not just to the government, and those people will be able to spend the money in ways that might stimulate the economy. (Again, this whole post is based on an assumption that the feds should “stimulate” the economy, which I don’t necessarily agree with.) Although just taking out back taxes alone from the stimulus money might make a state’s bottom line look better, it misses the supposed point of the entire program in the first place.

Remarriage?

Posted on by Cynthia Juedemann

Partisanship has long been divorced from most school elections in the United States.

In fact, all school board elections in Missouri are nonpartisan, according to Kelli Hopkins, a director of education policy for the Missouri School Boards Association. Board candidates don’t run as Republicans or Democrats.

Theoretical papers argue that nonpartisan school board members are beholden to all citizens, not just those of a particular party, and that without partisanship there’s a wide variety of candidate choice — not just Republicans and Democrats.

To even further divorce all school elections from partisanship, districts rarely hold elections in November. Many elections run in February, April, June, or August, but most often in April — a month least linked with partisan elections.

“The separation of school board elections from general elections was a deliberate attempt by Progressive-era reformers to reduce partisan influence in the school election process,” write Ann Allen and David Plank in a 2005 paper for the Politics of Education Association.

Still, there is controversy surrounding both the timing of school elections and school board candidate partisanship. Some have argued that partisan school board elections would bring up lagging turnout. Others, that holding school elections in November would do the same. The question is, is it worth it?

These arguments have some serious implications for school district governance. But would partisanship or November school elections do what advocates say? Would turnout increase dramatically?

Continue reading “Remarriage?”

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