It appears that some brave aldermen in the St. Louis County municipality of Northwoods are resisting efforts to install red light cameras within their city. They see cameras for what they really are: a naked attempt to collect more money for municipalities. I say bravo to the aldermen for resisting this attempt, and wish them all the best in their efforts!
School Choice Goes Way Back
How old is the modern school choice movement? If you’ve visited the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation website lately, you know it’s 52. Here‘s Milton Friedman’s original voucher proposal of 1955:
The arrangement that perhaps comes closest to being justified by these considerations — at least for primary and secondary education — is a mixed one under which governments would continue to administer some schools but parents who chose to send their children to other schools would be paid a sum equal to the estimated cost of educating a child in a government school, provided that at least this sum was spent on education in an approved school.
The Friedman Foundation has a lot of great information online, including research publications, the ABCs of School Choice, and the Advocate archives. But the best part of the site is the updated newsroom, where you can compare school choice programs and proposed legislation across states.
If Friedman himself were still alive, he would have just turned 95. The Show-Me Institute celebrated his birthday in partnership with the Friedman Foundation by cosponsoring a luncheon in Columbia. Here you can read William Poole’s speech about Friedman’s legacy.
Ethanol Wins Out, Unfortunately
An letter to the editor in today’s Springfield News-Leader laments the decision by Gov. Matt Blunt to keep a $42 million subsidy for ethanol production, rather than shifting that money toward water conservation in Southwest Missouri. The worst part of this state funding of ethanol production is that it would cause more water to be used by the plant, damaging the region’s groundwater:
The proposed Rogersville ethanol plant, just a few miles east of Ozark,
if built will use 1.3 million gallons of water a day! As will each new
subsidized plant built in Missouri.Hundreds of reliable Internet sources condemn ethanol production: for
its toxic emissions and effluents; as an ineffective gasoline
alternative; for dramatically raising food prices; but most
frightening, for its contamination and horrific waste of ground water.
Some politicians seem as though they’ve been led to believe that ethanol is the cure-all solution to our energy crisis. In reality, ethanol is more costly than gasoline; it takes more fuel to make a gallon of ethanol than that gallon produces for consumers. Also, ethanol’s environmental repercussions, as pointed out in the op-ed, make ethanol production a poor strategy for solving our foreign oil dependency. Instead of wasting tax dollars on a fuel that does more harm than good, let’s use it to conserve a substance we all need in order to live … water.
Ever Get The Feeling You’ve Been Cheated?
Maurice posted yesterday on this infuriating story from the AP about the decision by state government five years ago to stop notifying businesses when they overpaid sales taxes. Befitting the fact that Maurice is a very nice young man, his post politely criticized this desision. I, on the other hand, would like someone to explain to me why this decision by the Holden administration is anything short of stealing. If somebody owes me $10, and they mistakenly give me a $20 bill, I have a moral obligation to return them the extra $10. Doesn’t the state have the same responsibility? The answer is obviously yes, and I commend the Blunt administration for changing this awful decision.
By the way, in order to get the full effect of this post’s title, you must say it with an Engllish accent and imagine looking over a crowd in San Francisco while uttering this famously appropriate summation to the end of one of the most awsome bands of all time.
No Child Left Behind, Take 2
Here‘s another article in the Post-Dispatch about No Child Left Behind. This one quotes Show-Me Institute board member Mike Podgursky:
"You’re not gonna hit 100 percent here," said Michael Podgursky, an economics professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia. The only way to make it would be to keep lowering the definition of proficient, he said.
The most important thing is that the scores show improvement, Podgursky said.
I may have been overly optimistic in my previous post on NCLB. As Tim pointed out to me, the requirement for adequate yearly progress encourages districts to focus resources on the students who score just below the desired level and to write everyone else off.
I Know Some People Can’t Fathom This, But …
There are actually some people left in America who don’t want government assistance! Per this Columbia Daily Tribune article (via Combest), Missouri has the number one participation rate in the country among those eligible for food stamps. I guess we should be proud of that. The social workers in the article sure are:
"We credit a lot of our success to our frontline workers. They’re the ones out there meeting with the public," she said. "They give 110 percent effort day in and day out, and, you know, we have an office in every county and more than one in some places."
Hey — as social programs go, the food stamp program might be the best. So don’t take this as a knock on food stamps, or social workers. It’s just the tone of the article — and I have read others like it, although I searched and failed to find them (one was from the LA Times in Kausfiles last year, If I recall).
Some types, generally of the left-leaning persuasion, just can not understand that people eligible for government aid might still prefer to make it by on their own. That just goes against their entire worldview. So instead of writing that 29 percent of Missourians take a pass on government aid, we get articles that say more needs to be done to ensure that every person eligible is in the system, ’cause it is not possible that they don’t wish to be. That’s it. Rant’s over.
Missouri Kept Extra Sales Tax Revenues
According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for the past five years the state of Missouri has quietly kept extra funds that it netted from overpaid sales taxes. During that time, many consumers — and the businesses they patronized — did not know they were paying more than required:
[A]fter the AP’s inquiry, the Revenue Department also acknowledged
that it had stopped notifying businesses in 2002 that they had overpaid
state sales and use taxes."Those funds were simply kept by the state, and a taxpayer may not have known that he or she had overpaid," Browning said.
This ostensible oversight probably stemmed from the fact that Missouri was in the midst of a fiscal crisis, using every revenue stream it could find to balance the budget.
But "with the downturn in revenue, and how desperately the Holden
administration was trying to hold things together, I can see how that
could have happened and probably did," said [former state Senator Wayne] Goode, who now is on the
board of directors for the Consumer Council of Missouri.
Even though the state was facing a tough financial situation, which it could have prevented if the previous administration had spent wisely, officials should have reported overcharging and refunded overpayments immediately. Now, consumers have no way to get their money back, because state law does not require businesses to refund money for sales tax overcharging. Hopefully, legislators will learn from this and change state law to protect taxpayers from future instances in which Missouri government officials decide they don’t want to follow the rules.
Trash Talkin’ 2: Think Tank-Style
I must admit, this is one issue I am really torn on — the St. Louis County plan to divide the unincorporated parts of the county into trash districts and award one hauler the rights to do the job for that area. There is a great deal of opposition to this in South County. People like having the freedom to contract with whomever they choose to pick up their trash. Who can blame them for that? On the other hand, there would be undeniable cost and efficiency benefits to the trash districts.
I wrote about this a few months ago. The Mayor of Affton has also chimed in with his always enjoyable opinions. The argument for freedom in choosing your hauler carries great weight with me, although — let’s be honest — we are just talking about trash removal here. In the end, it’s just garbage, not freedom of speech, or religion, or beer. Most citizens in the county are probably having trouble understanding what the fuss is about, considering that most people live in municipalities that have long done with trash service exactly what the county is planning to do — bid the contract out to a hauler that comes into your neighborhood once a week to pick up the trash.
So, what should trump here? The right of the people to keep the system as it is, in which they contract with their own hauler and pay all the costs? If they want to have trash trucks come onto their street multiple days each week, that is up to them. On the other hand, having multiple trucks come on multiple days is obviously bad for the street itself, which everone in the county pays for with our tax dollars. (You may not be aware of this, but if you live in a municipality you pay the same county tax dollars as you do if you live in the unincorporated parts.) So, lower costs versus economic freedom of choice? Usually, these two things go hand in hand. This is a rare case where they seem to be opposed. I say, always err on the side of more freedom. Scrap the trash plan for areas that clearly do not want it, and keep it for areas that do.
Parental Choice Within Schools
When I was a little kid in a public elementary school, my parents would ask around about which teachers were the best. They got to request that I be assigned to a classroom — but more often than not, the school didn’t pay any attention to those requests. When I was in first grade, I didn’t like my teacher and my parents asked that I be allowed to switch. The school would only do that on the condition that I, the six-year-old, present my grievances to the teacher in person at a formal meeting. (Needless to say, I stayed in that classroom and learned to deal with it.)
I’m happy to see that there’s more choice than that at Carmen Trails Elementary School. A Post-Dispatch article about single-sex education reports that parents can choose between single-sex and coed classes for their first-grade kids. The school might expand the program to other grades, as well.
I’m guessing the impetus for this program was competition from the Catholic schools in the area, many of which are single-sex. If public schools want to retain students whose parents prefer single-sex classrooms, they need to offer it as an option.
If there were more parental choice in education, I predict we would see more examples of public schools giving parents different options. For example, instead of forcing a phonics (or more likely, whole language) curriculum down everyone’s throats, a school might allow parents to choose which method will be used to teach their child reading. Disputes about "new math" could be resolved in a peaceful way too.
I do have a concern about one thing in the article:
Boys engaged in a math contest meandered around the room Tuesday, scampered on the floor and fidgeted at tables.
Gleeful taunts shot up each time a high card trumped a low one. It was boys being boys.
And where were the girls?
They were next door, in Alicia Wall’s class, sitting quietly as Wall asked them to talk about colors clipped from magazines.
Olivia Rosewell raised her hand and politely observed of a classmate’s project, "You sure found a lot of pink."
It’s not often that I agree with anyone from the National Organization for Women, but if I ever have daughters I would not want them to be finding colors in magazines while their male peers learn math. However, that’s a decision parents should make for themselves.
