Internship Application Deadline

Posted on by Eric D. Dixon

If you, or someone you know, would be interested in an internship at the Show-Me Institute this fall, today is the application deadline. But, if you get your application to us by Monday, we’ll still consider you.

You can find the details and application form in this PDF file on our website. At this stage, it would be a good idea to e-mail the relevant application information and essay questions to me rather than send it by snail mail.

Tim Lee wrote about our internship program in April:

In a lot of organizations, the interns are treated like slave labor. They’re chained to a photocopier, and they get little or no contact with the real decision-makers in the organization. The Show-Me Institute is different. Our interns spend the vast majority of their time doing research and writing. Our current intern, Steve Bernstetter, had no less than three op-eds in the Saint Louis Business Journal this semester, as well as the opportunity to do an in-depth research project. Because there are fewer than a dozen people in the office, our interns get the opportunity to work closely with almost everyone on staff. That means you get an in-depth understanding of how a think tank works, including editing and publishing, event planning, and travel around the state.

No Teachers Yet for the Virtual School

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Missouri’s virtual school tries to get its act together (thanks, Combest!):

The new program, which will take children out of the traditional classroom and send them online to learn, starts in August.

Yet no teachers have been hired for the program.

“I have to admit I wish we were further ahead, but with a new program we have a crunch time,” Curt Fuchs, virtual school director, said.

I see from this article that something in my previous writing about the Virtual Instruction Program was inaccurate. I did not know that Missouri has partnered with two private virtual schools, Kaplan Virtual Education and Connections Academy, to provide course content. However, I stand by my argument that MIssouri should allow virtual schools to compete for students.

Furthermore, requiring teachers to have Missouri certification is a bad idea. The whole point of virtual education is that the teacher doesn’t have to be right there with you. What if we could hire teachers who already teach in Florida’s successful virtual education program, for instance? If Missouri gave the program more flexibility, it would probably get off to a smoother start.

Virtual Schools are the Wave of the Future!

Posted on by Maurice Harris

On KSDK’s website, an article discusses North Carolina’s dive into online education for students. So far, students and teachers are responding positively:

Students will be able to take everything from advanced placement
history to second language classes online. So far, nearly 6,000 middle
and high school students are enrolled for summer or fall courses…800 teachers across North Carolina have signed up to teach courses.

The need for online education is explained by one student:

It’s where everything is going to be (online) at pretty soon, so why not have a school online for students.

Sarah Brodsky wrote a great article on Missouri’s new Virtual Instruction Program. The benefits of online education are great. It gives students who need to make up courses due to extended absences a chance to do so. Also it gives students who do not have advanced courses at their schools to enroll into an online school that does offer courses like Advance Placement courses. States like Washington have proven that this is an application that works well and gives all students access to great education. Missouri’s Virtual Instruction Program does not offer much at this point, but the state should move to heavily invest in it in the future since the benefits heavily outweigh the costs. Giving parents, students, and teachers options in education improves the system greatly and gives students who may not do so well in a typical education setting another chance to learn.

A New Start for SLPS

Posted on by Maurice Harris

Control of the St. Louis Public School District is now in the hands of the three-member transitional school board today, after
Cole County Circuit Court Judge Richard Callahan ruled against giving the St. Louis school board a temporary restraining order against the transitional school board. Now the CEO of the transitional school board, Rick Sullivan, is looking toward the future and plans on involving the whole community in the board’s decision making:

Sullivan, who said he will not accept the salary he is entitled to under
the statute that permits the city schools to operate as a transitional
school district, promised that he and the board will not act
impulsively.

He pledged that the community will play a major role in helping to find
solutions for what he characterized as a crisis of regional proportion.

"There is no quick fix, there’s no silver bullet. It is going to take
the full engagement of the community and it is going to require the
community to understand that this is going to take time, a lot of
time," he said.

Time will tell if he lives up to his word, but his words shows the mature leadership that is needed to turn around the sorry state that the St. Louis Public school board is in. Compared to some actions of individual board members, this is a great first step.

I’ll Wave My Magic Wand

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Here’s a letter about vouchers and public schools in the Post-Dispatch:

Public schools are vital if we are to remain a democratic society. Vouchers will lead to stratification and segregation based on wealth, religion, culture, race or ability.

Which private schools will accept and keep underachieving, disadvantaged poor children who exhibit significant behavioral problems? Where will these children go to school? They will be "educated" in an under-supported public system drained of its resources by vouchers.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Private schools like Loyola Academy are doing a great job right now with disadvantaged kids that the public schools weren’t helping. And the current system, which assigns kids to schools by neighborhood, does much more to segregate kids than a voucher system would.

Graduates of public schools have benefited from getting to know and working with students of varied backgrounds, resources, abilities and cultures. They are more likely to support and be accountable to the public good.

Vouchers will leave many kids behind, lead to stratification of the haves and have-nots, lead to a system that educates some students for success and leaves others with low-level options and lead to schools that reflect only one belief system without the benefit of multiple voices or perspectives.

Since when do graduates need to be accountable to the public good? Also, that description of a voucher system sounds a lot like our current public school system to me. Students in Ladue are "educated for success" while students in the city are shortchanged. And the public schools rarely allow multiple voices. For example, you can read a heated debate about how to teach sex ed in the public schools (link found via John Combest). Presumably sex ed is not the most important part of the school day, but it still generates this high-profile debate because public schools impose one perspective on everyone. With vouchers, parents can choose schools that will present the information they want their kids to hear. My personal experience is that private schools are much better at allowing diverse viewpoints than public schools are. So the sex ed I was taught in a religious private school talked about both abstinence and protection, even though 99.9 percent of the kids there were going to be practicing abstinence anyway. None of the parents wrote angry letters to the Post-Dispatch about it.

The remedy to poor quality schools is not vouchers. The remedy is equitable education for all. It takes people of moral character to stand up and say that more resources need to go to disadvantaged students.

Will even more resources lead to "equitable education"? Maybe if we people of moral character stand up, click our ruby slippers together, and say, "There’s no place like the public schools."

How to Cut the Local Budget…

Posted on by David Stokes

My friend, Geoff Segal with the Reason Foundation, has written an op-ed on the experiences of Sandy Springs, GA, in dealing with its municipal services and budget. In short, Sandy Springs basically contracts just about everything out except police and fire. And in my in-laws’ home town of Farragut, TN (yes, that’s a town named after a Union admiral in a Confederate state), they even contract out the fire department to a private company. 

This is important and topical here for many reasons. As I often write about, St. Louis County has an absurd number of municipalities (91) for its population of just over a million people. Right now, my hometown of University City is struggling to deal with a budget deficit. I think that U. City has done a good job so far in dealing with this situation — they are actually cutting programs and eliminating jobs, as opposed to raising taxes (except for a few fees). I hope that they are at least considering contracting out some of their services to St. Louis County. As big is U. City is, they need to contract with the county much less than most other municipalities, but it is still something I hope they are thinking about. 

Sandy Springs, GA, and Farragut, TN, are different from University City in many ways. They are both fairly new cities, to start with. But their examples of contracting with private companies to provide many of the services people just automatically assume are for the government are a great example to cities everywhere — especially St. Louis County.

Finally, a Centene Post …

Posted on by David Stokes

We haven’t posted yet on Centene for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s all over the local news so it’s not like anyone needed to hear about it from us. Second, our expert on this issue, Tim Lee, is out of the office this week. But this does not mean that we have not been following it closely (and excitedly). The Post-Dispatch has an article on it today in the business section that features some truly amazing quotes from developers who must live in a universe different from my own. Take your pick of absurd statements from among:

"If a property owner knows you want a property, they can raise the price," Donovan said.

Donovan means this as a bad thing. As if property owner in America should not have the right to determine what they are willing to sell their own property for. Or how about:

"The decision will have a chilling effect on any community government thinking about invoking eminent domain," Case said.

Again, Case means this as a bad thing. He obviously could not care less about the "chilling effect" property and homeowners can feel about being forced to sell their property so that someone else can put it to a use determined by government to be preferable. In his defense, Case is developing several projects in our area and none use eminent domain, so let’s give credit where it’s deserved.

Developers have long had too much power in the St. Louis area. Wildwood was incorporated in the 1990s solely because developers were getting permission for everything they wanted to build in the area, even over the objections of Greg Quinn, the West County councilman. This is a good ruling by the Supreme Court, and now I hope Centene and the property owners can sit down and work out a deal based on negotiations, not threats.

Incentives at Work (in School)

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

There’s an article in the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Digest about the relationship between merit pay for teachers and student achievement:

Figlio and Kenny find that teacher salary incentives are associated with higher levels of student performance. They cannot be certain whether the test score improvement is driven by teacher incentives or whether the incentives are proxy variables for unobserved school quality. In general, they find, teacher salary incentives are associated with a 1.3 to 2.1 point rise in test scores, about the same increase associated with increasing maternal education by three years. The correlation exists in schools with predominantly low- and middle-income students.

Figlio and Kenny note that one case in which merit pay systems don’t work is when most of the teachers get merit pay. If everybody’s a winner, there’s no incentive to improve.

In Missouri, the Ladue School District has used merit pay for over 50 years. However, Ladue does suffer from the merit-pay-for-everyone problem. A report by Ladue’s Compensation Systems Task Force notes that 70 percent of the district’s staff received 12 or 13 out of 13 possible merit points for the 2004-2005 school year. Ladue should reconsider the way it awards points if it wants to encourage excellence in teaching.

Immigration Law and Its Costs for Businesses

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Link via Combest, Claire McCaskill writes about illegal immigration in the Kansas City Star. She mentions the raid of a chicken processing plant in Missouri and complains that employers such as this one go unpunished:

Is that fair? No, it is not fair. It’s not fair to American workers. It’s unfair to the businesses that are playing by the rules. It is fundamentally unfair that many businesses are requiring the kind of documentation that assures them they are following the law while other employers are paying cash under the table to pad the bottom line.

This argument doesn’t make sense to me. We have a bad law that is extremely burdensom for businesses and workers to comply with. A few actually manage to comply with it. Therefore, to be fair, we should enforce the bad law more broadly.

It would be fairer not to have the burdensom immigration law in the first place. The current system forces every business to act in place of the U.S. government, investigating employees and enforcing immigration regulations. The time it takes to comply is a huge cost for employers.

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