Don’t Know Much About History

Posted on by Justin Hauke

USA Today has a new poll out detailing today’s sad state of educational affairs.

Educators have proudly pointed out that while U.S. math and science scores have continued to slide, a record number of students are taking and excelling in college-level advanced placement history and literature courses. The defense is that students are at least performing well in these critical subject.

Yet according to the USA Today poll of 1,200 17-year old students:

  • 43% knew the Civil War was fought between 1850 and 1900.
  • 52% could identify the theme of 1984.
  • 51% knew that the controversy surrounding Sen. Joseph McCarthy focused on communism.

In all, students earned a C in history and an F in literature.

How can fewer than half of graduating seniors not be able to pinpoint a 50-year window in which the Civil War was fought? That is absolutely inexcusable.

Another Reason to Vote

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Here’s another situation in which economists are wrong and your vote does count. You might someday want to run for office:

Public records show Olivo, who is now running for Congress, has never voted in an election, in Missouri or elsewhere. […]

"I got caught up in the wave of apathy that has affected many of my generation," Olivo, 31, said. "I’m the first to admit that I was wrong for not voting."

The Ice Cream Market Works; Why Doesn’t the Market for Education?

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Edspresso links to an article in the Washington Post about how to choose the best school for your child. Anybody who thinks there’s no problem with the public education system needs to take a look. The first recommendation is to buy a really, really expensive house. It doesn’t get any more encouraging as you read on. Elite high schools don’t guarantee admission to the Ivy League. Middle schools are universally bad. And as for elementary school, just close your eyes and let your finger fall on a map, because it doesn’t matter anyway:

All the studies show that you are going to have much more influence over your child’s academic achievement through sixth grade than the elementary school you choose. So as long as the school is safe and you like it, it really doesn’t matter whether its test scores are not the highest.

There’s some sensible advice here — for example, talk to other parents, and don’t stress out if your kids don’t get into the top magnet school — but the article reveals the difficult situation many parents find themselves in. If you don’t have a lot of money, you don’t have much choice about where your kids go to school. Not everyone has the financial means to follow that all-important first step.

Even for those who can afford the priciest neighborhoods or the steepest tuition, a largely monopolistic education market doesn’t offer them many attractive choices. Middle schools are all bad? Elementary schools are irrelevant? No, of course not. But in the public system, they all look about the same to a newcomer. They just come in neighborhoods with different price tags. How can you tell if you’re getting the best sixth-grade teacher or the most enthusiastic principal? It’s a gamble. There are some charter schools and private schools that specialize, that have well-defined goals, and that attract parents. But they’re vastly outnumbered by the plain-vanilla public schools.

Speaking of vanilla, and because I want to prove that I have nothing against ice cream, here’s an analogy: Suppose you went to an ice cream store, and you weren’t sure which flavor of ice cream to buy. Would you throw up your hands and say, "Well, it doesn’t matter which flavor I buy, because studies show that ice cream flavor has little effect in the long run," or, "I don’t care whether I get chocolate brownie or chocolate fudge, because chocolates are all bad?" Or maybe you’d think, "Whatever flavor I get, I’m fine because this is an expensive neighborhood." I hope not. You’d probably think about which flavors you’ve personally liked in the past, and maybe you’d ask which ones most other customers prefer. In other words, you’d make a choice.

Parents who can choose consider what their kids are interested in and how they learn best. They read school publications and they ask which schools retain satisfied families. If they try a school but find it’s not the best for them, they can switch schools without hiring a U-Haul truck.

But those are the lucky few — for now. Parental choice policies could give that freedom to all parents. That would be good, because matching students with the schools where they’ll learn best is much more important than matching people with ice cream flavors.

Cut the Budget or Raise Taxes? Kansas City, Make Your Choice …

Posted on by David Stokes

Today’s Kansas City Star has a very good and detailed look at Kansas City’s projected budget problems. I believe it was Harry Truman, fittingly enough, who said something along the lines of how he never saw a budget that could not be cut. With that in mind, I will give credit to the mayor for his quote at the end of the article:

Funkhouser said the city can’t duck the budget problem or it will only get worse next year.

“You can’t wait for a better time,” he said. “The consequences of not acting will be worse than the consequences of acting.”

So now that I see the mayor at least intends to address the issue head-on, let’s discuss the suggestions as laid out by the article (all bullet points below are direct quotes from the article, and all emphasis is added):

  • Cutting the $2 million city contribution to the Truman Sports Complex or subsidies to other regional assets such as Liberty Memorial, Starlight Theater and the zoo. Funkhouser says he’s not advocating a stadium cut in the next budget, but he does think regional assets should be funded regionally.

Why doesn’t Kansas City consider a zoo-museum taxing district, along the lines of what Saint Louis has, to fund these things regionally? That is one thing that works well here.

  • Closing the city jail, saving about $4.8 million, or privatizing the service to save part of that amount.

This deserves careful consideration. In Saint Louis County, the privatization of the jail’s pharmacy services has worked well, but the use of entirely privatized prisons for Missouri has not fared as well. I am referring here to the infamous video of Missouri convicts getting the crap beaten out of them by guards in a Texas private prison, for no reason except to torment the prisoners. And trust me, I am not one to normally side with the prisoners, but those scenes were terrible.

  • Cutting part of the $2 million that Kansas City spends on bulky-item pickup.

Bulk pickup is highly overrated. It’s easy enough to borrow a friend’s truck or just hire a hauler. This sounds like a good cut to me.

  • Reducing spending on city planning services and things like dangerous-building demolition.

Amen to the first part. Government central planning is a waste of time and money on anything beyond the basic levels of zoning, and similar areas. If anyone in Kansas City government is working feverishly at "transforming Kansas City into (insert hyperbole here)," which they are, that can be cut out. Markets and investors should be making these decisions — not government planners who can’t even be trusted to know what it is that they don’t know. The dangerous-building demolition should be kept in full, though. Those abandoned places that nobody except the curious ever go can be dangerous.

  • Reducing spending on youth initiatives or neighborhood mediation efforts, which could save about $1 million.

I have to guess there are both things that need to be maintained in full and some options for cuts in this list, but I can’t say which are which without seeing more information.

  • Reducing spending in the City Council and mayor’s offices.

I am sure there is plenty of opportunity for cuts here, but in the end it would probably add up to a small portion of the projected deficit. It should still be done, though. The mayor stated in the article that the Council needed more legislative analysts, rather than fewer. If the Council can’t trust the information from its own city manager, who is supposed to be non-partisan and unbiased, and needs more legislative analysts, that is a problem with the city manager — not a legitimate call to grow staff. (Please note, I said "If"; I am not making a judgment in the dispute between the mayor and the city manager.)

  • Laying off up to 100 people, which could save about $5 million. Some council members recoiled at that idea. Funkhouser and Ford said they want to streamline city departments and reduce the number of middle managers, but focus more on empty positions than actual people.

We finally get to the real solution. Way too many people in government think there is some sort of right to a government job. This question should really be asked before even talking about money and budgets. First of all, do the government workers you have all work solid 40-hour weeks of actual work? If they don’t — and there probably isn’t one government in the world where they do — then many of them should be let go. I am very familiar with the history and role of political machines in government, and I would be stunned if a city such as Kansas City did not have far more city employees on the payroll than are actually needed. Some councilmembers want to protect their own employees first, whether or not they are needed or can be afforded. That is not surprising, but it is exactly the type of governance that gets a city into a budget problem in the first place.

Who Should Decide on Tax Increment Financing?

Posted on by David Stokes

Anytime you can put "Municipal League" and "TIF Commissions" in the same headline, you know you have an exciting story! (To me, at least, which may say a lot about me.) Today’s Post-Dispatch has the story of a recently filed lawsuit challenging the new state law that puts more authority for the use of TIFs in the hands of a countywide commission, rather than municipal commissions. I can see you are getting more interested with each passing word. …

As they are currently established, TIF commissions are dominated by representatives of the municipality the TIF is proposed for, people who generally only care about that particular municipality. However, the tax decisions they make affect entities beyond municipal borders. I strongly feel that having a county commission make these decisions, while taking into consideration the effects the TIF will have on the county as a whole, is a much better way to debate and consider tax-increment financing.

The municipalities are screaming that this is an infringement on their rights, as though the residents of a certain city are not also residents of the county, too. They claim (emphasis added):

The suit noted the law adds the county commissions to municipal panels, opening the door to legal challenges to projects with tax increment financing. Investors would not put money into such projects because the of the risk of suits, the plaintiffs say.

So investors might not finance projects that get to kick people out of their homes and are guaranteed to succeed by the government because they don’t have to pay the taxes other businesses pay?  That would really be terrible. …

Almost all abuses of TIFs and eminent domain (which are related, but not the same thing) have occurred at the municipal level — particularly in St. Louis County. The record of municipalities making responsible decisions about the use of TIFs does not generate confidence. I believe that the lawsuit has at heart the interests of municipal government and developers — not the interests of residents of St. Louis County. As such, I hope it is thrown out of court and County Executive Dooley gets to appoint a countywide TIF commission that has final say on ALL TIF proposals within the county.

It’s good to be back blogging after some time focusing on other things here at Show-Me!

I Drink Your Milkshake

Posted on by Nicholas Loyal

After last night’s Academy Awards, it feels appropriate to reiterate a story closely related to the eventual Best Picture Winner With an Incomprehensible Ending That I Understood But Obviously Didn’t Appreciate.

According to an article printed earlier this month in the Riverfront Times, the Missouri Department of Conservation unanimously approved a proposal that would allow hunters to use high-caliber air-powered rifles (not unlike the weapon used by a certain antagonist) at the start of regular-weapon deer season on November 15.

These weapons (which must be powered by compressed air or a hand pump with a minimum of a .40 caliber) came at the request of a small group of enthusiastic hunters whose logic led one member of the regulatory committee to comment on the nature of the weapons:

"These firearms are not Daisy air rifles. They are high-powered,
large-caliber, generally very expensive firearms that carry the
foot-pounds of energy necessary to take down large game."

Although I realize that any extension of firearm legalization is likely to lead to an outcry from someone, I feel that anyone who wants to use an expensive (retail prices for the rifles start at around $500), short-range (about a quarter of that of a traditional rifle) and slow-loading weapon to make their hunting experience more difficult can go right ahead. After all, who are we to stop the Missouri Outdoorsman from making his hunt as difficult as that faced by Lewis & Clark?

Just as long as we keep them away from certain people.

Standards vs. Market Reform

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Over at Cato-at-Liberty, Andrew J. Coulson tells it like it is:

Trying to “fix” the education being provided by a monopoly school system is like trying to “fix” a command economy. While occasional improvements will certainly be possible, ultimately, the effort is doomed. Even when excellent, proven methods or curricula are adopted in state schools, the incentive structure of the system provides no support for retaining  them.

Coulson mentions old vs. new math debates and tells the story of Jaime Escalante, who developed a highly effective math curriculum and was kicked out of his school. There are good curricula out there, but public schools have little incentive to find and use the best ones.

Read the whole thing!

Margaret Spellings on the Teacher Shortage

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Margaret Spellings spoke about alternative teacher certification in Jefferson City yesterday:

She pointed to federal programs such as Teach for America to recruit more college students and alternative certifications for people with other careers who want become teachers.

"We’re going to have to figure out how to recruit mid-career professionals into our classrooms," Spellings said.

Both Teach for America and alternative certification are good ideas, but I think alternative certification has the potential to be more effective. Teach for America is popular, but graduates generally teach for just a year or two and then go on to something else. Whereas, if you help people switch careers — say, from working as a scientist in a lab to teaching high school science — they may stay in their new career for 15 or 20 years. This could be a particularly attractive option for older people who want to cut down on their work hours but don’t want to retire completely.

However, alternative teacher certification is much more controversial than Teach for America. I’m not sure why; neither program requires extensive education coursework. But many people seem to think that older people need more theoretical training than recent graduates. The NEA criticized Spellings’ alternative teacher certification idea, not her mention of Teach for America:

Chris Guinther, Missouri president for the National Education Association, said the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence checks whether people know a subject, not whether they can teach it.

"As we hold our students to higher standards, it seems incongruous that we’re willing to lower teacher standards," said Guinther.

New Charters Threatened

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Here’s a video clip about a plan to prevent new charter schools from opening in St. Louis. The proposal would allow only charter schools sponsored by the city or state boards of education. That would mean no KIPP schools and no new versions of Lift for Life. The clip includes a quote from Eric Hanushek, who recently spoke at a seminar cosponsored by the Show-Me Institute. Hanushek suggests that the district stop worrying about charters and focus on spending its money more efficiently.

SLPS’s response to Hanushek’s criticism is that they’re working on making the traditional public schools "more attractive." That’s a positive step — and one that I’m sure was prompted by the large numbers of students leaving the district every year. Limiting new charter schools would remove this incentive for SLPS to try to appeal to parents.

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