The first zoning example is in Des Peres, where the owners of a wellness and substance-abuse treatment center want to operate on the site of a recently closed hospital. Let’s repeat that. A healthcare-related business wants to open on the site of a former hospital. In a rational world, the City of Des Peres would do nothing more than say, “Welcome to Des Peres.” But, alas, nothing is ever easy. The Des Peres Board of Adjustment has decided that a wellness and treatment center is not a hospital and denied the application and permits to operate. Furthermore, city officials have said the company seeking the approval cannot appeal the decision, as it doesn’t own the property yet. The company can appeal once it finalizes the purchase of the property, but then it will be forced to make a very large investment in the site without having any idea if it will be allowed to use it after purchase. This is, of course, all completely insane.

I am not adamantly anti-zoning. Nobody here is trying to put a chemical factory into a neighborhood (or some similar hyperbolic example anti-growth NIMBYs usually make). This is a wellness and treatment center that will be located where a hospital was. The fact that the city can deny any part of this is absurd.

The other zoning example is nearby on the border of Chesterfield and Wildwood. Here, a small, tightly knit African-American community has lived for over a century, and the land has become very valuable over recent decades as the suburbs have expanded. The family that owns most of the land wants to sell its largely undeveloped property and build a lot of new, large homes there, which is exactly what has happened in the surrounding area for the past 40 years. Not so fast . . .

Among the many impediments the family is facing is the opposition of neighbors. Here is a great quote from the public hearing by an opponent of the zoning change to allow the redevelopment:

“This would certainly be a substantial change to the character of this entire area,” resident Chrissy Jurkiewicz told the city council at its Dec. 1 meeting. “The landscape would be forever altered.”

Come again? What does the speaker think happened 20 or so years ago when her own subdivision was built? Did her own house and all of her neighbors’ homes somehow not “forever alter the landscape?” Did Osage Indians roam the area in the early 1800s and see a bunch of empty houses in her neighborhood and wonder why nobody lived in them?

A while ago, the City of Chesterfield approved rezoning to redevelop the property, but the City of Wildwood (remember, it’s on the border) rejected the rezoning precisely because the Chesterfield change was “too permissive” and would “overdevelop” the land. The entire area has changed from farmland to subdivisions over the past 50 years, but a bunch of Wildwood officials who live in those new subdivisions get to tell this family that their sale would “overdevelop” the land. This is infuriating, and it’s denying this family the right to the prosperity it has earned.

Does this mean cities should have no say at all in these zoning changes and redevelopments? No. For instance, in the Chesterfield case, I think the nearby residents have legitimate concerns about water runoff if the higher land above them were to be developed. But that’s not a reason to deny the proposal; that simply means the cities should ensure a plan to address such possible harm is included. As for the eternal concerns about things such as increased traffic, cities (and counties) can use the increased taxes generated by the development to fund the infrastructure improvements it may necessitate. We used to allow people to build, and we used the expanded tax base to fund the improvements we needed. Now we either reject it or subsidize it. (Yes, I’m exaggerating, but the point stands.)

It’s great that we have more liberal city and county zoning rules in Missouri than the rest of the country. However, these examples show that there is additional room for improvement.

The post We Still Need Zoning Reform in Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Learn more about the book here: www.cato.org/books/fighting-freedom-learn

Susan Pendergrass speaks with James Shuls, fellow at the Show-Me Institute and head of the Education Liberty Branch at Florida State University, and Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute about their new book, Fighting for the Freedom to Learn: Examining America’s Centuries-Old School Choice Movement. They discuss how the fight for educational freedom long predates modern debates over public schooling, why early advocates viewed schooling as a family and community responsibility, and how today’s school choice expansion connects to America’s founding principles. The conversation covers the history of the common school movement, the roots of residential school assignment, and why educational freedom has always been central to the American story, and more.

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction

02:33 The Genesis of ‘Fighting for the Freedom to Learn’
05:41 Historical Perspectives on School Choice
08:04 The Evolution of Common Schools and Their Impact
10:59 The Role of Religion in Early Education
14:01 The Shift Towards Standardization in Education
16:43 The Need for School Choice in Disadvantaged Areas
19:29 The Historical Context of Property Taxes and School Assignment
22:17 The Recent Surge in School Choice Movements

Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00)
Certainly looking forward to this conversation with two very, very smart people: Dr. Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute and Dr. James Shuls of Florida State University. James, can you first tell us about this new center that you are in charge of at Florida State University? I think it’s innovative and really cool, and I’d like to hear a little bit more about it before we talk about your book.

James Shuls (00:21)
Absolutely. So I’m with the Institute for Governance and Civics, and it was created by the legislature a couple years ago. And while I would like to take credit and say I’m in charge of it, as you sort of said there, Susan, I’m not in charge of the Institute, but I’m one of the branch heads. So the IGC, as we call it, has four branches. We focus on economic liberty, constitutional liberty, conscience liberty, and education liberty. I’m the head of the education liberty branch.
And so part of what we’re doing is outreach to K–12 schools, helping to focus on civics instruction, improving knowledge and preparation for teachers as it relates to civics and governance and those sorts of things. At the same time, we’re writing about issues of educational liberty from a school choice perspective, which is exactly the topic we’re talking about today.

Susan Pendergrass (01:12)
Yeah, so you guys have a book that you just co-edited, Fighting for the Freedom to Learn: Examining America’s Centuries-Old School Choice Movement. How did you come up with this idea, and why did you decide to put this book together?

Neal McCluskey (01:27)
Sure, I’ll go with that. The idea behind the book stems from just about everything I ever do, which is I got angry about something, and I was like, well, somebody ought to do something about this. If you work in school choice advocacy for more than a day or so, you’ll quickly hear that school choice started by people trying to avoid desegregation in the South. And that’s always given as the origin. And even if somebody wants to say, well, you know, Milton Friedman wrote this essay in 1955—and he really wrote it before 1955—we know that that was really just taking advantage, at the very least, of this backlash against desegregation.
And it just drives me nuts. There is a very long, rich history of the idea and practice of school choice. So I thought, you know, somebody ought to do a book on that, and we can hit, sort of semi-chronologically, all the different eras in which this happened and the ebbs and flows. The Cato Institute and the Center for Educational Freedom, which I direct, also had something called the School Choice Timeline—this interactive online timeline that I put together also because I was angry. In particular, I wrote a chapter about the gap where not much was going on in school choice, and I wanted to explain the gap.
But we have lots of chapters—one on how progressives were really into school choice for a while, and how schooling worked before the common-schooling movement, and all sorts of stuff like that. The genesis was aggravation on my part, at least, about always hearing this narrative that school choice stems from efforts to avoid desegregation. And then I said, you know, James Shuls—there’s a guy who probably is angry a lot, too. Maybe he’d like to get in on this.

James Shuls (03:17)
Yeah, that’s right. Susan, I’ve been on the podcast before talking about some of my scholarship related to Virgil Blum. He was a real strong school choice advocate starting in the ’50s, did a ton of work, and gets absolutely no credit. I was angry that Friedman gets all the credit—he wrote this paper in 1955, yada, yada, yada—and then in the 1990s we get school choice programs. It’s like, well, a lot happened in that yada, yada, yada period that we’re not covering.
I had been writing about that when Neal came along with the idea to do the book. Part of what we’re doing as we frame this is saying: looking at school choice today through the current lens we have is the wrong way to do it. We think of school choice today as opting out of the public school system—but that only works to frame it that way if there is a public school system. Before common schools were around, people were still advocating for their kids, still trying to get schools created. So there was lots of stuff that wouldn’t fit the framework we have today.
What we’re saying in this book is these impulses for educational freedom have always existed, and we’re essentially tracing them from colonial times to today.

Neal McCluskey (04:36)
James’s stuff on Blum was also a major reason I thought, here’s a guy who could really contribute to this. I just stumbled on Blum in large part because of what James wrote. I was like, why do people not know about this guy?

Susan Pendergrass (04:41)
We did a whole podcast on it. I’ll tell you what makes me mad is that in the last month or two, tops, there have been articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post talking about low-income families—both in Florida and Arizona—generally Black and brown parents, who are participating in this right-wing conservative movement to kill the public school system because they think they deserve to be able to choose where their kid goes to school.
Even locally in political groups, people say, well, that’s a MAGA person, which means they support charter schools. When those two things get put into a sentence, it really makes my blood boil because I’ve been working in this space a long time. As we’re going to find out more, school choice is not a new thing at all. The latest iteration of it is not a MAGA thing or five years old or a COVID thing. Since at least 1990—at least 35 years—parents and activists like Howard Fuller were saying, hey, this isn’t right. We’re literally assigning kids to the worst schools and not letting them out. We ought to let them out.
Somehow this has become the Republican agenda to kill teacher unions and break up the public school system. Nothing could be further from the truth. That makes me mad. That’s why I’m really glad you guys put this book together. Let’s go back—not to the very beginning of the country—but pre–industrial revolution, pre–John Dewey, before standardized schools, attendance zones, and district lines. What did it look like, say 150 years ago? Did parents decide where their kids went to school, or did you have to go to a certain school because that was the one you helped pay to create? How did it work back in the day?

James Shuls (06:50)
I’ll jump in here because I’m awfully angry about this. Before common schools, there was a wide mixture of different types of schools. You had dame schools, private schools, public schools, and publicly funded private schools.
What you get in Charles Glenn’s chapter, “Emergence of the Common School Ideology,” is an understanding of the movement towards common schools. The impetus behind them was really to separate schooling from the family and the community and to use schools for social change. That’s the difference that comes in here—schooling would be used for social change.

Susan Pendergrass (07:29)
Mm-hmm.

James Shuls (07:35)
—to create and form Americans. Some people look at that and say it’s a good thing, but there are certainly negative side effects as well when you separate the impact of community and families. An interesting element that comes out in this book is that the common school ideology and the public school system that has come in its wake was created to form a certain kind of American citizen.
Then we get into Neal’s chapter, where Neal talks about the sort of gap where things aren’t happening. It’s because these systems were under attack. You see a reemergence in the 1950s—not just because of Brown and segregation—but because you start to have a return to some of these values and a return to trying to connect schooling and the family and the church.
When you look at school choice with this longer arc, rather than looking at the ’50s as your starting point, you see the various impulses that were leading pre–common schools, how common schools helped to squash some of those things, and how we’re starting to come back to a decentralized and pluralistic system.

Susan Pendergrass (08:50)
Certainly the common schools—also called public schools before 1900—were Protestant. They absolutely taught religion. They didn’t stop teaching religion until the Catholics started showing up. Then it was, yeah, maybe we get religion out of schools, right? Because we don’t want Catholicism in a public school. Public schools taught Protestantism; they just didn’t want to teach Catholicism. People think there’s always been separation—no religion in public schools—and that’s not true.

James Shuls (09:16)
That’s a key point in Matthew Lee’s chapter: Catholics turned to private schools. He would say it’s not necessarily school choice because the Catholics were saying you had to go to the Catholic schools—so no choice among Catholic schools. Nevertheless, the Catholic schools came up because the public schools were Protestant. Protestants went in—though not all in. There were some segments, which Neal could talk about, with the Lutherans.
By and large, Protestants supported the common school movement. Then there was a movement to secularize public schools. Again, that’s part of what happens in the 1950s with the return of Protestants starting to support school choice—because their capture of the public school system had been weakened and there were no longer Protestant schools.

Neal McCluskey (10:10)
Just as a pitch for the book: there’s so much good history in here that we won’t be able to talk about. You definitely want to get the book. It’s worth noting that for much of our early history—colonial period, early republican period, even into the common-schooling period—there wasn’t a separation people would recognize if you say, well, this is a public school and this is a private school. There were schools. There was education.
Government was sometimes involved in assisting private schools. Going back to British traditions, someone would provide—usually from the proceeds of owning land—funds to help maintain a school. In America, land was the one thing in superabundance, so that wasn’t as profitable. Governments would sometimes say, look, you’re running a school here; we’ll give you a little money to do it. There was often cooperation between government and schools.
The first voucher program that we’ve at least been able to catalog was in 1802 in Pennsylvania—specifically in Philadelphia. So this is not new. Go back more than two centuries and you had people like Paine and John Stuart Mill talking about helping people to consume education by funding parents so they can choose, not by funding schools.
Even as we have common schools, they were extremely localized. Think of the one-room schoolhouse—it was also the meeting house and often the church—serving pretty homogeneous communities. Even within what eventually became common schooling, there was a lot of differentiation where people could get the schooling they wanted. It’s only as progressives consolidate control that we move far away from that community-level, very small schooling.

Susan Pendergrass (12:13)
I thought it was so odd that Maine and Vermont have had town tuitioning of high schools for a couple hundred years. Where the town didn’t want to build a high school, they just paid tuition for their high school students to go to a different school the student picked. In some cases it’s a boarding school, even overseas. They were challenged in the Supreme Court within the last couple of years, even though those programs have existed for hundreds of years.
All of a sudden, people who don’t like the voucher idea went after Maine for town tuitioning, even though that program has been in place for so long.

James Shuls (12:53)
That radical right-wing bastion in Maine.

Susan Pendergrass (12:55)
—decided at a town meeting to do it. I think as you get into the earlier or middle part of the last century, you start building up this industrial education complex: we’re going to be the great equalizer; everyone’s going to have the same kind of school; 20 kids and a chalkboard and teacher; separate kids by age, not ability; common standards; and we’re going to be in charge of it.
Anyone who disagrees with what’s being taught there is seen as a radical who wants to break the system and doesn’t understand the importance of it. That’s what I feel has been happening lately, where any parent—my own experience: I homeschooled one of my kids and was considered a radical because why wouldn’t I accept that the public school to which he was assigned would be best for him? The idea that uniformity is what we need.
I still think there are a lot of people within the public education establishment who say uniformity is the key. We are clearly seeing a backlash, but the uniformity principle—maybe 75 years, maybe the 1950s—would you say?

Neal McCluskey (14:15)
It depends. In the early republican period, people like Benjamin Rush said we need schooling for everybody to make them into good citizens—into “republican machines,” his term. Horace Mann certainly wants to standardize people. Not because of Catholics at the beginning—they hadn’t come in at great numbers—but because he saw people coming in from the countryside.
New England industrialized first—relatively poor farming area, but lots of rivers to run factories. These early factories with big water wheels. Mann saw parents coming from the countryside and thought they were all idiots. He thought we needed to take their kids away from them and standardize them. So we started it even at the very beginning.
It gets even more standardized as more immigrants arrive and people get scared of them. One overarching theme of the history of school choice: it’s about people who do not fit into whatever mold the elites decide. Catholics didn’t fit the Protestant mold. In my research, Germans were most disturbing for people because they spoke German—people said, they really need to speak English. We have a thread of fear of Germans going back to colonial Pennsylvania.
The chapter on African Americans is particularly powerful: it talks about a system that never wanted to incorporate them. They needed freedom to get the education people were denying them. That’s the big theme—people who don’t want to be standardized or who are refused help need school choice to get something out of education.

Susan Pendergrass (16:13)
I’ll only say that’s true today. It’s ironic that the kids with the least options—the most disadvantaged kids in the worst schools—are the ones people openly talk about denying options to. Even in Missouri, when public school choice is considered, some of the lowest-performing districts say, okay, but not us. We can’t let kids out of our district because we’re one of the worst in the state and everyone will leave and take money.
They want to draw a line and say, whatever unfortunate child got assigned to this school, we cannot let them leave. That’s flipped on its head. That child needs choices as much as every other kid. They say, no, we have to lock those kids in and strap them to the deck of a Titanic. Why do you think that is, James?

James Shuls (17:07)
I’d say Ron Matus’s chapter on the progressive movement toward school choice is terrific for the points you’re making. There was a tremendous progressive move for school choice in the ’70s and ’80s that culminated in the early voucher programs.
They were making exactly the cases you’re making: we should not assign students to failing schools; school choice was progressive in that it allowed disadvantaged students to opt out and get the type of school that would meet their needs, and to bring competition into the marketplace. The progressives were making the case for school choice exactly because the most disadvantaged students needed it the most.
That’s why the recent idea that school choice is a MAGA movement is off. The progressives got there first, as Ron and others explain.

Susan Pendergrass (18:12)
One last thing. I have a hard time articulating to folks who believe there’s an ironclad connection between property taxes and school assignment that goes back to the beginning of time and must continue until the end of time: if you pay property taxes here, your kid goes to school here; if you don’t, your child doesn’t get to go to school there. I don’t want any kids coming into my kid’s school if their parents didn’t pay property taxes.
I think that is particularly strong in Missouri. In St. Louis County we have dozens of school districts within one county. People feel very strongly—even supporters of school choice—about this property tax/school assignment idea. They can’t get past it. What would you say to that? You lived in St. Louis, James; what do you say?

James Shuls (19:13)
We didn’t write the book through this specific lens, but if you read closely you see this: the system evolved over time. You had a radically decentralized system. Horace Mann and the common school movement advocated for state structures and more organization. Over time it evolved to the system we have today.
From the founding, the idea of residential assignment where local property taxes only follow the kids—and the high level of state and federal regulation—was not anyone’s early vision. It’s not the system most people would advocate if they could design it from scratch. We get wedded to the structures we have.
What we have to do is step back and ask, is this the way it should be? I think the answer is no. We shouldn’t have systems that restrict resources to small local communities and assign students, because we get the problems we all see: high-poverty districts with struggling schools and students assigned to terrible schools with little opportunity for the types of coursework and experiences that lead to success. The system we have isn’t inherently good just because it’s the system we have.

Neal McCluskey (20:57)
We probably needed a chapter on the history of taxation to answer this directly. My suspicion is that for a lot of our history we didn’t have a lot of income tax or other taxes, and drawing on the English tradition, we probably funded things at the community level with property taxes—very local and democratically controlled.
It’s not until the industrial era, with consolidation, that communities stopped running their own schools. My guess is that’s the history of a lot of this property-tax and local-tax funding. But things have obviously changed.
My colleague Colleen Hroncich always points out: it might have made sense to have local public schools when nobody had a car and most people walked places. You couldn’t travel 10 or 20 miles every morning to drop your kid off. That doesn’t make sense now—we have modern transportation—so we don’t have to be shackled to the school a mile or two away.

Susan Pendergrass (22:04)
See you next time. I also think that starting in the 1950s—partly because of Brown v. Board—states and then the federal government started tinkering with the distribution of tax dollars to districts to give more money to poorer districts and less to wealthier districts. That’s been going on with funding formulas. I’m not sure any of them have had an impact on poor kids or reducing achievement gaps, but they thought that moving levers at the state and federal level would get a different outcome.
In my opinion, wealthier districts with higher property tax bases and more local funding aren’t really impacted by those. Now they say, you can move kids around—but not from us—because we’re not part of that system where you move money around. We’re happy with what we’ve got. If you can afford to live here, fine; but they want to be left out of it.

James Shuls (23:10)
Sorry to interrupt you. I wanted to weigh in on that last point, because—reason to listen to the podcast and get the book—this is not in the book, but Virgil Blum had some correspondence with Milton Friedman back in the ’50s and ’60s. They weren’t closely associated; they were operating in different circles. But Blum sent Friedman something he had written and asked for feedback. Friedman responded.
One thing he said was, when it comes to the voucher idea, he thought it should start at the higher education level, not K–12. Then he said it should be at the level where the taxation or the money is supplied. So in K–12, that probably means vouchers should come from the local community, not from the state or the federal government.
So to your point: we had a system that relied more on local tax dollars, and Friedman was saying the vouchers should be local. But we’ve shifted over time to a system that provides a lot more money from the state and federal government than it used to. If you look across the country, every school choice program is a state system—very rarely do you have a district creating a voucher system. It almost always comes at the state level. Even Friedman was wrong from time to time.

Susan Pendergrass (24:44)
On that note, I know you have a chapter on this, but what about this explosion of school choice? Now it feels unstoppable. We have more than a dozen states with universal-ish programs. At least five states have truly universal school choice systems. Why now? Why has it picked up steam so fast after barely making progress through the ’90s and early 2000s?

Neal McCluskey (25:17)
Jason Bedrick has a particular take on it—which I think is probably right—but I think it has deeper roots. Generally, the idea is people are unhappy and increasingly unhappy with how they’re being served by public schools.
My theory—and I think a lot of people hold this—is that COVID made people realize that in a public school system, if a powerful minority or majority wants X and you want Y, someone loses. Many parents who wanted in-person school—generally well-heeled and used to getting what they want—suddenly couldn’t get it. They realized the system didn’t work for them even if they liked it in theory.
Anecdotally, in rich places like Montclair, New Jersey, people were at each other’s throats because many wanted mutually exclusive things. Then you had ideological battles over vaccination and mask requirements. Many say that virtual school let parents see what their kids were learning, and they didn’t like it—books like Gender Queer, how African American history is taught, etc. We haven’t shown concretely that anger was because of peeking into the classroom via Zoom, but it certainly coincided. People were angry.
Jason argues that, yes, people were unhappy, but it wasn’t really COVID; it was the strategy of reaching out to red-state parents in environments where you could get school choice, saying: public schools are teaching stuff you don’t like; you don’t want your kids trapped in that. All the big school-choice gains were in red states—the red-state strategy worked. Now the future is moving into purple and blue states. I think that’s right too, but the underlying driver is people realizing one system can’t fit everyone.

James Shuls (28:32)
I’ll weigh in here too. Friedman made the free-market case for school choice in the ’50s, and that case continued to today—choice, competition, rising tides lift boats. You also had the progressive case in the ’70s and ’80s—students shouldn’t be trapped in failing schools; create programs to help the most disadvantaged. Those arguments kept creating small, targeted programs, but not a wider audience.
A third element—cultural, right-leaning values—added a new coalition. It layered on top of the free-market and progressive cases. I wouldn’t say the movement is completely going to the right; it’s making arguments that appeal to those individuals.
If you go to a rural Missouri voter and say “choice and competition,” with one local public high school and one elementary school, that doesn’t land. If you say the most disadvantaged students in St. Louis and Kansas City need choice, the rural voter may not care. But if you weigh in on some conservative values, you reach a new audience. Maybe that’s part of what’s happened.

Susan Pendergrass (30:24)
Just a bigger tent. It’s clear we’ve only scratched the surface of your book—this is only a 30-minute podcast and there’s so much more in there. A lot of it is so intriguing—going back to the history of this country and realizing the system we have now is relatively new compared to the various systems we’ve had.
Parents don’t really care what the name is on the outside of the school. They care about how their kids come home at the end of the day—how much they appear to be learning. They want them challenged; they want them safe. That’s universal. Whatever system gets them there, they don’t care what it’s called or what it looks like. If they thought they’d get it out of a uniform system and now they don’t…
There’s so much in this book. You picked a lot of great authors—12 leading education scholars. When will folks be able to buy this book and read it themselves, and where?

Neal McCluskey (31:37)
It comes out November 11th. I think it’s available online—online bookstores everywhere—as well as the Cato website, Cato.org.

Susan Pendergrass (31:43)
And can folks reach out to you guys if they have any comments or questions?

Neal McCluskey (31:53)
As long as it’s nice stuff, they can reach out to me.

Susan Pendergrass (31:55)
I can’t promise them.

James Shuls (31:55)
The nice stuff can reach out to me; the negative comments go to Neal.

Susan Pendergrass (32:00)
Well, it’s great. Thank you so much for coming on and talking about it. It’s a fantastic book, and I highly recommend folks get it and read it themselves.

James Shuls (32:09)
Thank you.

Neal McCluskey (32:09)
Great, thanks.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post The Long Fight for Educational Freedom with Neal McCluskey and James Shuls appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass talks with Matthew Ladner, senior advisor for education policy implementation at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, about a recent Washington Post article blaming Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts for school closures in the Roosevelt Elementary School District. They unpack the real reasons behind declining enrollment, the role of open enrollment and charter schools, and why most Arizona students exercising school choice are still in public schools. The discussion covers how media narratives overlook parent-driven decisions, the political resistance to letting kids leave low-performing districts, and why open enrollment could be a game changer for states like Missouri. Ladner also shares his broader perspective on the post-COVID shift toward educational self-reliance and what it means for the future of public education.

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Susan Pendergrass (00:00)
Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast this morning, Matt Ladner of the Heritage Foundation. You are no stranger to Arizona education or school choice, right? Nor am I. I feel like I could be wrong, but we met at the Goldwater Institute around the year 2002. Does that sound right? It’s been a minute and it was so—

Matthew Ladner (00:03)
That could be, yes, indeed.

Susan Pendergrass (00:28)
It was surprising to me to see in the Washington Post a week or so ago, basically a hit piece on Arizona education. Because oftentimes Arizona’s held up like Florida as one of the states that’s really making strides in both test scores overall, but in particular in Arizona, test scores and growth scores for low-income kids. They’ve really taken bold moves and made an actual difference in outcomes.

And yet we have this piece that says because Arizona is giving parents the option of a scholarship instead of an assigned public school, that is killing this poor Roosevelt Elementary School in Phoenix. I assume you saw the article.

Matthew Ladner (01:08)
I did indeed. Well, so I moved to Arizona in 2003. Of course, I was doing work here before I moved here. So we probably met the year before at the Goldwater Institute.

Susan Pendergrass (01:10)
What’s your take? What’s your hot take?

Matthew Ladner (01:24)
The first I heard of the Roosevelt Elementary School District was in 2005, when someone I worked with had a child who was attending a Roosevelt school and was brutally assaulted. By brutally assaulted, I mean rushed to the emergency room based on what happened to this child.

Susan Pendergrass (01:39)
My gosh.

Matthew Ladner (01:49)
Obviously, the school administration did not react well. In fact, they questioned whether the attack had been provoked—classic blame-the-victim. At that time, I put my coworker in touch with someone who did informally what we would today call navigation—helping people find schools.

Susan Pendergrass (01:59)
Thanks.

Matthew Ladner (02:13)
At that time, it was incredibly difficult to find a school for this woman’s children. The school year had already started. There were charter schools in South Phoenix, where the Roosevelt Elementary School District is located, but they had waitlists. We had scholarship tax credits, but the school year had already started, the money had already been committed, and there were waitlists.

We had open enrollment, but school districts were not interested in taking students from Roosevelt. In fact, I recall my coworker calling about an open enrollment transfer, and when she said her kids attended Roosevelt Elementary, they hung up the phone on her. It was visceral. She was almost as stuck as she would have been in 1993, the year before Arizona started any kind of school choice.

Fast-forward 20 years, no one in Arizona is stuck like that anymore. Every child has access to an ESA program. While only a minority actually use it, it’s available to everyone. That, I believe, motivates these drive-by shooting journalistic exercises, because very powerful vested interests don’t like people having the option of leaving.

If you read the Washington Post article, the unstated hypothesis is that the world would be a better place if people like my former coworker did not have the option of going somewhere else.

Susan Pendergrass (04:04)
That’s exactly right.

They chronicle the closing of an elementary school in that district. People are sad, heartbroken, and anxious. It’s a tragic story. But dwindling enrollment is less due to the ESA program and more due to the fact that in Arizona, you can pick any public school in the state.

In fact, they cite one group of low-income parents of color who started their own micro-school to avoid going to that school. Yet the counterfactual is: “If only they didn’t have the option of leaving, this school would stay open.” As if we should have kept kids trapped in a failing school. Hard to believe that’s the case in 2025.

Matthew Ladner (04:52)
Absolutely.

It’s offensive to argue the world would be better if people didn’t have the option of leaving a situation that wasn’t working for their child. The reality is, the largest form of school choice in Arizona remains district open enrollment.

Back in 2017, a study of Phoenix-area school districts found that the number of open enrollment kids—within and between districts—was about twice the number of charter school students. And Arizona has the nation’s largest charter sector.

Susan Pendergrass (05:42)
About how many kids are in charter schools?

Matthew Ladner (05:44)
Today it’s around 21% of public school enrollment. Back in 2017 it was about 16%.

Open enrollment is the King Kong of school choice. If Arizona has a school choice justice league, Superman is district open enrollment. Then come charter schools, and trailing far behind are private choice programs.

I do understand people don’t like school closures. Even schools that are underperforming and half-empty have emotional attachment. When you move to close them, people say, “My grandfather graduated from that school—how dare you close it!”

Susan Pendergrass (06:33)
No, yes.

Matthew Ladner (06:55)
State data shows Roosevelt has 6,500 kids who live in the district and attend its schools. But 5,700 kids live in Roosevelt and attend a charter. Another 2,700 attend a different district. About 800 use an ESA.

A final report showed only 129 ESA students previously attended a Roosevelt school. If you’re running a 6,500-student district, you don’t close five schools over 129 students. The Post article was misguided and misleading. Roosevelt’s enrollment has been declining since about 2006. There’s also the baby bust since 2007, which Arizona has worse than most states.

Susan Pendergrass (09:11)
Right. And in addition to bad reporting, the article says this ESA program “offers a window into the GOP vision for K–12 education.” In other words, nothing to do with what parents want. It’s supposedly a GOP political strategy to kill public schools.

That’s damaging because a lot of people don’t read past the headline. In Missouri, we don’t even have open enrollment. Some of our lowest-performing districts demand to be carved out from letting kids leave because they believe they’ll all leave and the district will collapse.

For example, in Ferguson, only 3% of 8th graders are proficient in math. Yet they don’t want kids to leave, even though they’re arguably not even fulfilling the constitutional duty to provide a free and fair public education.

Matthew Ladner (11:02)
Yeah, it’s bad all around. The Fordham Institute’s open enrollment map of Ohio shows every urban district is surrounded by districts that don’t participate. Arizona is the opposite. Almost all districts do open enrollment, including Scottsdale Unified—where about 25% of kids come from outside the district.

They do that because 9,000 kids who live in Scottsdale attend elsewhere. Financial incentives pushed even wealthy districts to open up.

Susan Pendergrass (13:10)
Right.

Matthew Ladner (13:23)
The Post piece framed this as a GOP vision, but really it’s about giving families dignity and autonomy. The underlying hypothesis was that low-income Hispanic and African American parents in Roosevelt are doing something wrong by making the best choices for their kids. That’s offensive, and bad reporting on top of it.

Susan Pendergrass (14:14)
Right. In Missouri, we rank all schools. When we launched that website, protesters said it was racist because many low-performing schools enrolled Black and brown kids. But those kids are already stuck in F schools. Shouldn’t we let them out?

Instead, the approach is: “Let’s not tell them it’s an F school, and if they find out, let’s not let them out.” That’s insulting to parents.

Meanwhile, in St. Louis, schools are losing kids but the district passed a moratorium on new charters because they know a new charter would fill up immediately.

Matthew Ladner (15:42)
Right.

Susan Pendergrass (15:43)
What’s your global view? In Missouri, we’re fighting lawsuits against our scholarship program. Do you see this as a last gasp, or what?

Matthew Ladner (16:03)
Not a last gasp. The struggle will continue past our lifetimes. But we are making progress.

The reason you see lawsuits and agenda-driven journalism is that there was an awakening during COVID. People realized the district system isn’t run for parents—it’s captured by unions and contractors. Schools are not about your kids. They’re about employees and contracts.

Now we’re seeing a self-reliance movement in education—school choice, homeschooling, co-ops. It’s growing. And frankly, Randy Weingarten’s actions during COVID made her the poster child for this failure.

Susan Pendergrass (18:18)
In terms of keeping schools closed and how she reacted?

Matthew Ladner (18:21)
Exactly. If you didn’t realize during COVID that the system wasn’t about you, someone needs to draw you a picture.

Susan Pendergrass (18:33)
The protests with coffins in the street, saying we were sending teachers to their deaths—they overplayed it a bit.

Matthew Ladner (18:37)
Yeah. And now we’re in a different environment. Young parents I talk to say there’s no way they’re sending kids to district schools.

That’s not to say everyone in districts is bad. There are good teachers trapped in a bad system. But the exciting part is teachers leaving to start their own schools. In Florida, there’s nothing stopping them, and it’s beautiful to see.

Susan Pendergrass (19:46)
Yes. In Missouri, we’ve cut off the teacher-as-entrepreneur option. It’s too bad. Every summer, parents reach out to me desperate to transfer kids to other districts, but we have nothing for them—except paying very high tuition.

It reminds me of your coworker stuck in Roosevelt. People say, “Just move.” But not everyone can move, nor should they have to.

Matthew Ladner (20:49)
Right.

Susan Pendergrass (21:09)
When I see a major outlet still saying in 2025 that ESAs are killing public education, when it’s really poor parents finding alternatives, that’s sad.

Matthew Ladner (21:28)
Exactly. It’s not up to me or lawmakers to decide where kids go. Families should decide, and that’s as it should be.

Susan Pendergrass (21:55)
Thank you so much for joining us. We have to keep this in front of people, and I appreciate you coming on.

Matthew Ladner (22:05)
Thank you, Susan.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post What the Media Gets Wrong About School Choice with Matthew Ladner appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

When the Spainhower Commission issued its final report in 1968, St. Louis County had 25 school districts (plus the Special School District). Those schools served 186,428 students. Asked to develop “a plan to provide equal access to educational opportunity for all children,” the commission recommended a consolidation of all St. Louis–area school districts into a single district. That call was taken up again in 2014 following the shooting of Michael Brown. Then, as in 1968, the solution proposed was to tear down those dividing district lines in the sake of unity. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial board endorsed this plan in their piece, “One school district. One focus. One future: Unify St. Louis schools.”

Fifty-five years after the Spainhower report, the number of students enrolled in St. Louis County school districts has decreased by more than 53,000, but almost all district lines remain. Just three school districts have closed. At the time of their mergers, all three served mostly African American schoolchildren. In the 1970s, the Kinloch and Berkeley School Districts were forced by the courts to consolidate into the Ferguson-Florissant School District. In 2010, the Missouri State Board of Education consolidated the Wellston School District into the Normandy School District.

From then to now we have known that arbitrary boundaries drawn around school districts create haves and have-nots. We have known that assigning students to attend schools based on where they live has perpetuated inequities among students and limited access to quality educational options. And yet, the problem has been almost intractable. Why? According to James Spainhower, as reported by the Post-Dispatch’s Tony Messenger, “The only place where the report was weak, was in the thought that people could get over their biases.” I think this analysis is correct, but not in the way that Messenger implied.

According to Messenger, parents in predominantly white school districts did not want to merge with predominantly African American school districts. As we saw when students from the predominantly African American Normandy school district attempted to transfer to predominantly white school districts a few years ago, race can still be an issue. But race wasn’t the only obstacle for those Normandy students—remember, their own school district didn’t want them to leave, either—nor am I convinced that race is the primary motivating factor for those who oppose school district consolidation. People take pride in their local schools, and they do not want to see them changed. Moreover, people instinctively react when anyone attempts to force their school district to be consolidated. It is a loss of identity.

This is the problem. If we leave school districts to make this change themselves, nothing will get done. If we attempt to force consolidation on them, they will resist. This is why attempts at consolidation, except in those rare cases mentioned above, have failed in the St. Louis region. People are loathe to voluntarily consolidate their own school district unless they see a significant benefit, and they strongly resist top-down directives from the state to consolidate their schools.

It is time to change the strategy. Rather than rely on district leaders to take action or attempt to obliterate school district lines, we need to make those boundaries porous. We need to allow students to begin moving across those lines to attend schools in other school districts. We need school choice. We need open enrollment. The Post-Dispatch editorial board once championed this idea. In their call for unifying St. Louis schools they wrote, “The fastest way to move toward such unity would be for the school districts in the St. Louis region to adopt an open enrollment policy.”

Now there is an open enrollment proposal before the Missouri legislature. Yet, as Blythe Bernhard and Jack Suntrup have reported, “Missouri educators vow to fight as open enrollment plan gains steam.” This opposition was to be expected. What was not expected was the complete silence from those who previously advocated for unity among St. Louis schools.

If we continue to look for top-down solutions to this problem, in another 55 years we’ll likely be exactly where we are today—where a student’s educational opportunities are dictated by his or her zip code.

The post Open Enrollment in St. Louis Schools: 55 Years in the Making appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

When critics of school choice levy this claim of exclusion against private schools, they forget a few important details. First, it is not historically true that public schools served all people. Black Americans, Native Americans, students with special needs, and nearly every other marginalized group can point to a time in our nation’s history when they were excluded from our public school system.

Second, this claim of “serving all” is not presently true. No school can serve all students, so our public school system rations admission. Several public schools have attendance zones that draw boundaries between affluent and impoverished communities. These lines can and do exclude poor students from receiving a quality education. In fact, schools have employees whose jobs are to vet the addresses of students to remove those that do not belong.

The truth is that no school serves every child. It is impossible. That is why this attack fails; the true goal is not for a single school to serve every child but for every child to be served well by our educational systems. Serving all students well can only happen when we recognize the point of an education system is to meet the unique and varied needs of students and their families.

The late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan understood this. In a 1977 address to the graduating class of LeMoyne College in Syracuse, NY, he said:

Diversity. Pluralism. Variety. These are values, too, and perhaps nowhere more valuable than in the experiences that our children have in their early years, when their values and attitudes are formed, their minds awakened, and their friendships formed.

I cherish these values, and I do not believe it excessive to ask that they be embodied in our national policies for the betterment of American education.

Our public education system should serve every student well. Yet we simply cannot do that by assigning students to schools via mandatory attendance boundaries. The only way to truly serve all students well is to elevate these other values of diversity, pluralism, and variety. The only way to truly serve all students well is to provide them with educational options.

The post How Can We Serve All Students Well? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Supporters for the value of pre-K point to a single preschool program, the HighScope Perry program in Ypsilanti, Michigan that ran from 1958 to 1962. The participants had been tracked over 40 years and the resulting data provide much of the basis for what supporters claim is the benefit of pre-K.

The Mid America Regional Council (MARC), which will administer the Kansas City pre-K program if approved by voters, claims in its 2018 “Status of Children and Families” report that (page 45):

Research shows that every dollar invested in early childhood education saves up to $13 in future social costs, leading to lower crime rates, fewer adults on public assistance, fewer teen pregnancies, and a stronger, more prepared workforce.

Mayor Sly James’s pre-K Implementation Plan for pre-K similarly claims (page 44):

. . . the public benefits accrued over time from children who attended HighScope Perry Preschool program in Ypsilanti, Michigan, at a rate of 13 to one.

These returns seem too good to be true. And they are. The 13-to-one return comes from a single study of the HighScope Perry plan published in 2005, which claimed:

For the general public, higher tax revenues, lower criminal justice system expenditures, and lower welfare payments easily outweigh program costs; they repay $12.90 for every $1 invested. However, program gains come mainly from reduced crime by males.

The HighScope Perry study was of 123 “low-income African-American children who were assessed to be at high risk of school failure.” Only 58 were randomly assigned “to a program group that received a high-quality preschool program at ages 3 and 4.” The high-quality program included:

• Two school years of preschool running October through May;
• A center-based program for 2.5 hours per day with “4 teachers for 20 to 25 children”;
• Home visiting for 1.5 hours per week; and
• Group meetings of parents.

Only 39 of the participants in this study were male (see footnote 3 here). In other words, Mayor James and MARC want voters to believe that a small-scale, intensive two-year education program conducted with 39 high-risk boys can be extrapolated to the more than 6,000 children in Kansas City.

Even other proponents of pre-K are more restrained in calculating possible returns. Economist and Nobel laureate James Heckman wrote in a 2017 research summary of that same HighScope Perry program (emphasis added):

Every dollar spent on high quality, birth-to-five programs for disadvantaged children delivers a 13% per annum return on investment. These economically significant returns account for the welfare costs of taxation to finance the program and survive a battery of sensitivity analyses.

As I pointed out in a recent American Public Square panel discussion about pre-K in Kansas City, the program Kansas City voters are being asked to support is nothing like the HighScope Perry program Heckman analyzed. The plan being put before voters does not have anywhere near the 5 or 6 to 1 ratio of child to teacher, will not include home visits, will not be two years, and will not spend as much per child as HighScope Perry did.

A recent blog post discussed the unimpressive findings on pre-K programs such as Head Start that more closely resemble what Kansas Citians are being offered. But using HighScope Perry’s results to pitch pre-K for all in Kansas City is nothing short of a bait and switch.

The post Kansas City’s Pre-K Bait and Switch appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Fortunately Missouri’s Legislature isn’t letting the licenscing fights just play out in the courts; rather, it’s taking a proactive stance to these issues and is already considering legislation to resolve the hair braiding question once and for all.

The post Hairbraiding Bill Advances in the House appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In Missouri, Charter Schools overwhelmingly serve African-American students. According to DESE, the 72 charter schools in Kansas City and Saint Louis enrolled over 21,000 students in 2016, two-thirds of whom were African-American.

How well did these schools perform? Take a look below at the 2015 Annual Performance Report scores for charter schools compared to traditional public schools (for context, 70 percent is required for full accreditation):

Sources: DESE St. Louis Academic Performance Data, DESE Kansas City Academic Performance Data

On average, charter schools in Kansas City tend to be higher-performing options than the traditional public school district. In Saint Louis, the results are more varied, but there are several charter options that perform as well as any school in the state.

The following tables show demographic characteristics of students in the top 5 schools in Saint Louis and Kansas City.

As you can see, several of the top-performing charter schools in the state (Northside Community School, Saint Louis Language Immersion, and Grand Center Arts Academy in Saint Louis and University Academy and the Ewing Marion Kauffman School in Kansas City) serve student populations that are more than 50% African-American. Does the NAACP really want to deny students the opportunity to attend schools like these?

Of course, charter schools should be monitored closely for their performance and closed if they are failing. Such was the case of Better Learning Community Academy, which had an APR score of 28%; it is now closed.

If new and better charter schools are not allowed to take its place, however, then parents are left with fewer quality alternatives to their neighborhood public schools. Instead of taking away future opportunities, isn’t it better to enhance the education of students, regardless of race, to give parents more choices and more control over their children’s education? The evidence would say so.

The post The NAACP’s Misguided Opposition to Charter Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

What is that issue, you ask? Is it that puppies are cute? That apple pie is delicious? That Ken Bone is the hero we desperately need?

Nope, its Charter schools. Specifically that charter schools help low income and minority children.

The research literature is unambiguous. While suburban and rural charter schools are often statistically indistinguishable from their neighboring traditional public schools, urban charter schools consistently demonstrate significant positive results for their students. Yes, there is a distribution, with some performing far better than others. No, they cannot single-handedly solve every social ill of inner-city communities. But on average and in aggregate, they provide a better education for students than those children would have without charter schools in the mix.

This is why lawsuits trying to stop charter schools are bad for poor kids. This is why limiting charter schools to within the boundaries of the Kansas City and St. Louis school districts is short sighted. This is why major advocacy organizations for African-Americans taking stances against them is potentially harmful.

In a time of deep division, charter schools are an issue where we can come together. Let’s get to it.

The post Come Together, Right Now, on Charter Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

kicked off debate Thursday with a speech listing off a “litany of issues with unions,” including several run-ins that … involved racist comments by union members.

The senator promised to continue supporting “rank and file” union members, but added that “labor unions can’t expect carte blanche support anymore.”

The senator has a point here. The interests of the African American community and union leaders are not always aligned, and the rights of minorities are sometimes sacrificed for the good of the politically stronger labor movement.

Ironically, labor reforms such as paycheck protection are about protecting the rights of a minority from the will of a majority. Paycheck protection allows a worker to opt out of the campaign contributions and expenditures of a government labor union. Paycheck protection recognizes the fact that not everyone has the same political views as their union and that this difference of opinion should be respected.

The other labor reforms we’ve discussed, transparency and union elections, are also aimed at protecting a minority from the majority. Financial transparency would allow workers and taxpayers to see how government unions spend taxpayer-funded union dues. Union elections would give workers the chance to de-unionize their workplace every few years. All of these reforms make unions more responsive to all of their constituents, not just the majority. And all of these reforms lead to greater worker freedom.

The next time our elected officials want to take a stand on protecting minority rights, they might consider endorsing public policies that actually protect minority rights.

The post Did the Missouri Senate Sacrifice the Rights of Minorities for Union Executives? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Some history is important here.  The District was first sued for maintaining an illegally segregated school district in 1972. An initial settlement to that case was reached in 1983 and created a voluntary inter-district transfer program that allowed African-American students in the district to transfer to districts in the county and white students from the county to transfer into the city if they so chose. Desegregation efforts in the district were largely supported by state aid. This changed in 1999, when a desegregation sales tax was passed to replace state funding.  SLPS is suing over these tax dollars.

I am not a lawyer, so I cannot evaluate the claims made by SLPS officials.  I can, however, examine what has happened in terms of integration. Have charter schools helped or hurt efforts to desegregate public schools St. Louis?

In 1991, 20.9 percent of all students in Saint Louis public schools were non-minority. That percentage has decreased steadily. In 1999, when the sales tax was passed, the first charter schools opened in Saint Louis. Charter schools are public schools and are financed by public dollars, but they are not operated by the district. In 2008, charter schools became their own local education agencies (LEAs). In essence, they became something like their own school districts at this point, though they are all located within the boundaries of the St. Louis Public School District and are open and free to all students in St. Louis.

Below, I highlight the percentage of non-minority students in Saint Louis public schools. The green line shows the percentage in all Saint Louis public schools, including public charter schools. The percentage was in decline for about 20 years, but has recently taken an upturn.   This upturn was caused by an increase in non-minority students in public charter schools.

Some might suggest that public charter schools are pulling white students away from the district because the district has continued to lose white students. The available data tracks district or school enrollment as a whole; without data on the individual student level, I cannot answer that question conclusively. We can see, however, that the large increase of non-minority students in charter schools far outpaces the decline of white students in the district post 2008. In other words, charter schools seem to be attracting white students who were not previously enrolled in the district.

The data here may not be able to answer the legal question regarding the desegregation sales tax, but they do suggest charter schools are actually helping, not hurting efforts to integrate public schools in the city of Saint Louis.

The post Are Charter Schools Improving Integration in Saint Louis? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

It should be noted that this shortfall is not a result of legislators in Jefferson City cutting funding. This is prospective students freely deciding that they don’t want to spend their college years as Missouri Tigers and taking their money somewhere else. That should terrify administrators in Columbia. Will Mizzou go the way of other brands scorned by the marketplace, like Kodak, Pontiac, or Ask Jeeves?

Mizzou desperately needs to get its house in order. Most importantly, it needs an administration that realizes that protests on university campuses have been happening for decades.  In most cases, there is some element of truth to the protestors’ grievances, but it soon gets wrapped up in the narcissism and self-righteousness of 18-22 year olds.  The job of administrators is to separate the wheat from the chaff. They must address the real issues that are affecting students without losing sight of the fact that it is college kids making the demands.

Mizzou’s administration completely failed in this regard. The kernel of truth in the protestors’ anger is that far too few students of color are meeting with success on Mizzou’s campus.  This is undeniably true.  While African-Americans make up around 12% of Missouri’s population, they make up only 7% of Mizzou’s.  They are disproportionally enrolled in remedial classes, and drop out at higher rates than other students.  This is cause for concern, and something that the administration needs to address.

That entirely appropriate issue got wrapped into a series of out-there “demands,” including requiring that the former University of Missouri system president pen a handwritten note admitting his white privilege, and calling for the hiring of legions of staff across a variety of departments to provide services for minority students, but providing absolutely zero advice on how to pay for all of it. That is the chaff.

If the university does not have leadership that knows the difference between the two, or is incapable of dealing with substantive issues without being derailed by ridiculous ones, a loss of 25% of enrollment is just the start. And they shouldn’t expect the state to bail them out.

It appears that nearly everyone involved in this imbroglio has lost sight of the fundamental fact that the University of Missouri is paid for in large part by the citizens of Missouri.  Many of these people did not attend, will never attend, nor will ever have any of their children or grandchildren attend the university. University students, faculty, and administrators are asking the single mom in Cape Girardeau who is struggling to get by working two jobs to pay for their wants and desires. Just because they go to, or work at, Mizzou does not mean that they have a claim to that woman’s money.

We support Mizzou (and all of our other state universities) because they provide a service to our state; they educate our citizens and do research that improves our world.  If they’re not doing either of those things, they aren’t entitled to a dime.

Hopefully this enrollment nosedive serves as a wakeup call to the Mizzou community.  A strong flagship university can be an asset to its state and citizens.  Mizzou has a long way to go in proving that it is ready to resume that role.

The post Reaping the Whirlwind in Columbia appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In the 1970s, St. Louis Public Schools and the State of Missouri were sued for maintaining a segregated education system in the city. The U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the ruling and school districts in the area began working on a plan to fix the problem of segregated schools. The solution, from a 1983 settlement agreement, was to allow black students in the city to attend predominantly white schools in the county and to allow white students in county schools to attend predominantly black city magnet schools. This “voluntary” program was to improve integration in the city and county.

Although well-intentioned, this policy has become a roadblock for black students wanting to attend a high-quality school in the city. Take Edmund Lee, for example. As Fox 2 reports, Edmund is a bright African-American 3rd-grader at Gateway Science Academy in St. Louis. Gateway is one of many high-quality charter schools in the city. Edmund’s family will be moving soon to the county, but would like to utilize the transfer program to allow him to continue at the school he loves. There is just one problem—he’s black. Black county students cannot transfer into the city, because that wouldn't help integration efforts.

Of course, this problem is not new, and it goes both ways. White students in the city cannot transfer to Clayton, Kirkwood, or any of the high-performing county schools because they are white.

The case of Edmund Lee may not just be sad; it may also be illegal. In 2012, the United States District Court for the Western District of Arkansas found a similar policy to be in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Arkansas allowed students to transfer to another public school, provided they improved the racial balance of the schools.  As in the transfer program in St. Louis, black students in predominantly black schools could transfer to predominantly white schools and white students in predominantly white schools could transfer to black schools.

The court wrote, “The legislation was no doubt properly motivated in its desire to end segregation, but the question that must be addressed is whether the legislation infringes on federally protected rights.” In the end, the court decided the law did violate the rights of individual under the 14th amendment.

A similar fate could be in store for the St. Louis transfer program. For those who believe that the goal of the program is a noble one, wouldn’t it make sense to expand the program so that all students, regardless of race, could choose to attend the schools that fit them best? Doing so would not only avert the danger of violating the 14th amendment, but it would also allow students like Edmund Lee to continue attending the schools they love.

The post Race-Based School Choice Policies May Be in Violation of the Equal Protection Clause appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Bright Flight works with—not against—need-based aid. It is good that Missouri universities promote diversity in their student body, whether that’s diversity of race and gender or diversity of income. Think of Bright Flight as promoting diversity of academic achievement. Having high-flying students, regardless of their background, makes universities more well-rounded and interesting places. That’s why Missouri has a basket of scholarship programs (of which Bright Flight is a small part) to try and recruit diverse students into our universities.

Not just “wealthy” kids get Bright Flight Scholarships. In the advocates’ literature, they use not qualifying for free and reduced-price lunch or attendance at a private school as a proxy for wealth. That is not necessarily the case. In Missouri, you qualify for reduced-price lunch if your annual household income (for a family of 4) is $44,863. You could fail to qualify and still be far from wealthy. There are also lots of middle- and low-income kids who attend private schools in Missouri through large financial aid awards from those schools. (I was one of those kids, who also received a Bright Flight Scholarship, for what it’s worth). Their families will struggle to afford college, and might not get as much need-based aid as those who are less well off, so a Bright Flight scholarship could mean a lot to them. Why take that away?

Merit is something we should encourage. One would think that in America this would go without saying, but I guess not. We should be pushing our students—poor, middle-income, or wealthy—to try and do as well in school as possible. Those high-achieving students are our future innovators and leaders, who can help make the state better for all of us. I don’t care if the person who can make the next great breakthrough in medicine or forge a new era of good government was born rich or poor. I just want them doing it here!

Bright Flight isn’t the reason that low income and minority students are not succeeding in Missouri Universities. Let’s look at the Missouri statistics on college readiness for African-American students (from this report): Only 6 percent scored college-ready in all four tested subjects on the ACT, only 2.7 percent graduated high school having passed at least one AP exam, and a whopping 68% enrolled in remedial coursework when they got to college The real scandal, and where we should focus our reform efforts, should not be scholarships for Missouri universities, the K-12 education system in our state that fails to prepare our low-income and minority students for success in college.

Ultimately, I think the campaign against Bright Flight is misguided. We do need to do a lot more to help our low-income and minority students succeed in college, but getting rid of Bright Flight isn’t going to accomplish that. I’d rather focus my energies on the levers that can actually help more students do better rather than punishing kids for doing well on the ACT exam. 

The post Save Bright Flight Scholarships appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

African-style hair braiding, or natural hair care, is a traditional hair care practice where hair is twisted, braided, and weaved without the use of chemicals or heating. It’s often practiced by Africans, African-Americans, and immigrants. In Missouri, anyone who handles hair is required to get a cosmetology license from the government. This license requires thousands of dollars and at least 1,500 hours of cosmetology training—and teaches you nothing about African hair braiding.  

The Institute for Justice has helped Joba and Tameka file a lawsuit to allow them to continue practicing their trade without government interference. “The U.S. Constitution protects every individual’s right to earn an honest living in their chosen occupation free from pointless government interference,” says Greg Reed, an Institute for Justice attorney.

African-style hair braiding is just one example of government overreach through occupational licensing and regulation. I’ve written before about the state’s interference with yoga teacher training. We’ve also commented on proposals to license street performers, landlords, and of course the regulation of taxicabs to keep competitors like Lyft and Uber out of the market.

For further information, the Institute for Justice’s video on the licensing of African hair braiders is available here.

The post Hair Braiders’ Hands Tied by Missouri’s Twisted Regulations appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

There’s no other way to put it: Missouri schools simply aren’t giving African-American students a chance.

This was made particularly clear to me last month, when the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation released The Path Forward: Improving Educational Opportunities for African-American Students. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to help collect and analyze the data for the report, and I attended the launch event co-sponsored by the Chamber and the NAACP in Washington, DC.

The Path Forward broke down African-American student performance state by state. The results for Missouri were beyond disheartening:

·         On the 2015 National Assessment for Educational Progress, only 15 percent of Missouri’s African-American 4th graders were deemed proficient in reading and only 15 percent were proficient in math.

·         By the time they got to 8th grade it was even worse, with only 14 percent of African-American students proficient in reading and only 11 percent proficient in math.

·         While the graduation rate stood at 72 percent, only 6 percent of African-American students scored college-ready in all four tested subjects on the ACT.

·         Only 2.7 percent of African-American students graduated having passed at least one AP test during their time in high school. That was the third-worst rate in the nation.

There are over 151,000 African-American students in the state’s K-12 schools—16.5 percent of the overall student population. Our state will never reach its potential if that many students are failed by our education system.

So what can we do?

First, we have to break down the barriers between African-American students and quality schools. Right now, tens of thousands of students are trapped in low-quality schools because of where they live. Several of the small, almost entirely African-American districts of St. Louis County have only one high school. If students are not being served there, they have nowhere else to go. Elsewhere in the state, the geographic assignment of schooling often requires African-American students to attend schools that do not meet their needs. By allowing students to enroll across district lines—or even better, by allowing independent charter schools to open and draw students from across district boundaries—the link between where a child lives and where he or she goes to school can be severed.

Second, we have to engage the whole community in creating quality educational environments for African-American students. Statistics like those above remind us that this is an all-hands-on-deck crisis. Granting funding flexibility for students to attend the school that best serves them, regardless of whether it is a public or private school, would encourage churches, nonprofits, and other social organizations to get involved in schooling and reach out to children in need.

Third, we have to push for higher, not lower, expectations for African-American students. In the No Child Left Behind era, schools have been judged based on how well they meet basic targets of proficiency or how well they do at getting students to graduate from high school. Clearly, these are important stepping stones on the way to a well-rounded education, but they are far from sufficient. Passing AP tests, scoring well on college entrance exams and thus not needing remediation, and other more advanced indicators need to be part of the suite of metrics we use to judge student, school, and district success.

The Missouri Constitution calls for the state to fund and support a system of schools because knowledge and intelligence are “essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people.” An education system that fails to educate a large swath of our students is a threat to our rights and liberties, and fixing it should be a priority of our leaders.

The post Missouri Is Leaving Its African-American Students Behind appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

More than three-quarters of Missouri’s class of 2015 took the ACT, an admissions test that is also designed to tell whether students have a strong likelihood (a 75 percent chance) of earning a “C” or higher in introductory college courses in four subject areas. For English, the minimum required score to be deemed “college-ready” is 18, for math it is 22, for reading 22, and for science 23 (all out of 36).

Only 30 percent of students scored college-ready in all four tests. In other words, seven out of ten were judged to be unprepared for college in one or more of the four areas. While a high of 71 percent of students scored college-ready in English, the scores dropped sharply in the other subjects: 51 percent in reading, 44 percent in math, and 42 percent in science.

Even more troubling is the performance of African-American students. Only 6 percent of African-American students scored college-ready in all four tests. On the individual tests, 37 percent of African-American students scored college-ready in English, 19 percent in reading, 13 percent in math, and 12 percent in science.

On advanced placement (AP) exams—which indicate how many students are likely not only to pass, but to excel in different subject areas—the state did even worse. Here the gold standard is a score of 3 or better on a 1-to-5 scale, enabling high-scoring students to obtain advance credit for courses such as calculus and physics prior to their arrival at college.

Though class-wide numbers are still emerging, it is already clear that Missouri, once again, has under-performed all but a handful of other states in AP tests. This is the same story as last year, when only 9.5 percent of Missouri graduates passed at least one AP exam. In Massachusetts—the highest performing state—28 percent of graduating students, or three times as many as in Missouri, passed one or more of the tests of college-level proficiency in challenging subjects.

Out of approximately 20,000 African-American high school juniors and seniors in public schools in Missouri last year, only 55 black students met the standard in AP English literature, 44 did so in U.S. history, 24 in calculus, 8 in chemistry, 7 in physics, and 6 in computer science. In total, that is just seven of every thousand students who are already working at a college level in one or more of these subjects while still in high school.

The numbers tell an alarming story. First, our schools are underperforming across the state. Preparing only 30% of students for college-level work isn’t going to work. Second, our schools’ poor performance is particularly egregious for black students.

We need to upgrade our education system almost everywhere, but a good start would be providing choice for African-American students trapped in the worst public schools. A school system that empowered parents rather than bureaucrats to make the most important decisions in children’s lives would maximize the likelihood of reversing these troubling statistics.

The post All Too Many Missouri Students Are College Bound, but Primed for Failure appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Tiny schools start in a library or classroom with a small group of volunteer students and no more than one or two teachers, usually for a couple of hours on a weekend. For up to a year, the teachers try new methods and get instant feedback, refine what they’re doing, and improve. The students attend voluntarily; they know they’re part of the experiment. If all goes well, after a year, the educators are in a much better place to start a full-fledged school than if they had tried to build a whole school from scratch. What’s more, if the plan doesn’t work, no students are harmed, and very little money is lost.

Spearheaded by 4.0 Schools in New Orleans, tiny schools are a promising response to a stubborn problem—starting a new school is incredibly risky.

Think about it: if you are an aspiring charter- or private school leader and you want to start a school via conventional means, you’re talking about an organization with a million-plus dollar budget, contracts with 10, 20, or more staff and teachers, the rental or purchase of a large building, and the lives of hundreds of children—and that is just the start. This risk explains why even the supposedly agile and entrepreneurial charter school sector has created applications to open schools that stretch into the hundreds of pages. When we’re talking about that much money and that many people, authorizers want as much assurance as possible that the school is going to work. I don’t blame them.

The most common criticism I hear, though, when I get excited talking about small entrepreneurial ventures like tiny schools is that they are simply “boutique” options. They cannot scale. “There are 50 million school children, for crying out loud, and you’re talking about teaching 20!”

Much of this ire has been directed toward AltSchool, a new private school model out of Silicon Valley. AltSchool runs a series of very small schools that personalize education to every (generally wealthy) child who attends them. They made news recently with a $100 million investment from some of the biggest names in technology and venture capital. Their model is intensive and expensive, and most have dismissed it as a viable option for students across the country. They may be right.

AltSchool critics remind me of a blog post written almost 10 years ago by Elon Musk, founder of PayPal, Tesla, and Space X (and promoter of nuking Mars). He too received criticism, particularly from environmentalists, when his first Tesla cars were priced north of $100,000 apiece. “The planet is warming, and you’re building cars only a small number of people can afford!”

Musk’s response to his critics is a good lesson for entrepreneurship in education. In a blog post titled The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (just between you and me), he wrote:

Almost any new technology initially has high unit cost before it can be optimized and this is no less true for electric cars. The strategy of Tesla is to enter at the high end of the market, where customers are prepared to pay a premium, and then drive down market as fast as possible to higher unit volume and lower prices with each successive model.

Replace “electric cars” with schools, and you’ll see where I’m going.

So many schools today—traditional public, charter, and even private—suffer from a kind of institutional isomorphism: Each one looks like the next. At the same time, we continue to see statistics indicating that students across the board are not prepared for college-level work. When we narrow our focus to low-income or minority students, the picture gets even worse. In Missouri (where I live), for example, only six percent of African-American students scored college-ready in all four subjects tested by the ACT. Six percent. Innovation is sorely needed.

But trying to create large-scale schools with an envelope-pushing model is expensive and risky. As a result, most people tend to stay in the same safe lane and, at best, try and tinker around the edges. This explains why most charter and even “lab” schools look so similar to the average public school and generally perform about as well.

One solution to this is the high-end model of AltSchools, where wealthy families pay for the innovations that might eventually make their way down market. Another is the small, focused model of tiny schools that rapidly iterate and see themselves as a work in progress rather than a finished product. But in both cases, it is the limited scope and tight focus of the effort that enable the innovation to take place.

We should not be so quick to dismiss “tiny” efforts to rethink schooling. A “tiny” effort in automobiles just made a car that broke Consumer Reports’ rating system. These schools may end up being bigger than we think.

The post The Case for “Boutique” Efforts appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The Roman philosopher Cicero once said, “Advice is judged by results, not by intentions.” It is hard not to think of these words when reading the final report of the Ferguson Commission.

The signature priorities, “justice for all,” “youth at the center,” and providing individuals the “opportunity to thrive,” could not be more noble. Unfortunately, we cannot judge the Ferguson Commission’s report on good intentions alone. We must examine the probable results. It is certainly too early to understand all of the long-term implications of the policies that the report advocates; however, based on the evidence, the prospects are bleak.

For example, the commissioners call for an end to poverty. Who can argue with that? But to eliminate poverty, they urge the adoption of a $15 an hour minimum wage. The commissioners admit that “debate exists over the short- and long-term economic implications of raising the minimum wage.” Yet they ignore this debate and selectively cite a report in support of the higher wage. This may be to the detriment of the people the commission is attempting to help. As Nobel-winning economist Milton Friedman once said, “The minimum wage law is most properly described as a law saying that employers must discriminate against people who have low skills.” The people most in need of entry-level jobs will suffer the most.

The commissioners outlined a plan to “enhance college access and affordability,” but gave short shrift to the greatest impediment standing in the way of a college education for disadvantaged students—subpar academics. The average ACT score for the Normandy school district was a paltry 16; not even high enough to gain admittance to most four-year state institutions. Less than seven percent of students scored above the national average. It isn't funding that is keeping these kids from going to college; it is their abysmal K-12 preparation.

The report, which is ostensibly about improving the outcomes for low-income African-American students (who make up more than 80 percent of the Ferguson-Florissant School District and more than 96 percent of students in Normandy), includes a plank granting access to state scholarships to undocumented students brought to the United States as young children. We can debate the wisdom of that policy another day, but what on earth does it have to do with improving outcomes in North Saint Louis County?

The commission did offer some helpful suggestions for making the inter-district transfer program sustainable, but they stopped short of calling for greater freedom of choice for the parents of children trapped in underperforming schools. Rather than confronting the issue, the commissioners punted and simply called for the creation of an “education design and financing task force.”

In the end, the K-12 education proposals amount to a call for more of the same. The state needs to “invest” in a universal pre-K program and move the compulsory education age down to 5 from 7. Note, not, “create a pre-K system that doesn’t suffer from the same problems of the current one,” but simply append another grade onto K-12 schools that are not meeting the needs of low-income and African-American students.

This is not to say that the commission report was altogether wrong. Indeed, the commissioners offered many suggestions that were on point and, if enacted, could lead to improvements in the Saint Louis community. But unfortunately, when the commission veered away from policies focused on the issues at hand toward tired planks of political opportunists—like increasing the minimum wage, expanding Medicaid, creating a universal pre-K program, and getting scholarships for undocumented kids—it lost sight of the problems it was set up to solve.

The post The Ferguson Commission: A Bridge to Nowhere appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I taught at an urban, historically African-American Catholic school, St. Jude Educational Institute on the west side of Montgomery, Alabama. After 76 years of operation it closed its doors 2014, following the path of many other inner-city Catholic schools. 

You should be worried about urban Catholic schools closing, as they have for decades succeeded where other schools have failed.  Surveying the research, economist Derek Neal wrote, “Although many questions remain unanswered, one result seems clear. Black and Hispanic students in large cities often have the most to gain from private schooling, in particular, Catholic schooling.”

But the story of Catholic schools in America today is not all doom and gloom. Echoing what my good friend Andy Smarick wrote in National Review earlier this week, there are in fact, several promising trends in contemporary Catholic education. I’d like to highlight three:

1. Innovative management strategies. Many dioceses have not kept up with the changing times. Some still rely on parish-based schools tied to neighborhoods whose demographics of both children and parishioners are changing. Others have decided to keep open a large number of under-enrolled schools rather than consolidate resources into a smaller number of more viable schools. Our Lady Queen of Angels is a great example of a school under creative leadership. It is part of the Partnership for Inner City Education, a management consortium of 6 urban Catholic schools in New York. The partnership has a laser-like focus on providing a great education for low-income students, and supplements the Archdiocese, which already has its hands full managing its diverse portfolio of schools. Organizations like this (which already exist in Washington DC, Philadelphia, and elsewhere) can help bring a much more coherent strategy to urban Catholic education and stretch limited dollars the furthest.
2. Blended Learning. Multiple Catholic-school organizations have been working on blended learning models, which can help schools control personnel costs, a huge driver in the increase in the cost of Catholic schooling as the teacher workforce has shifted from priests and religious sisters to lay men and women. Seton Education Partners has implemented a blended learning model at six Catholic schools in San Francisco, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia. The University of Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education has piloted a blended learning school in Seattle. Even the much-vaunted Cristo Rey network has started a blended learning school in San Jose, California. These could change the delivery model of Catholic education, lower its cost, and make it available for more and more students.
3. School Choice. Probably the single most promising development in Catholic education over the past two decades has been the emergence and growth of private school choice programs. Catholic schools in Indiana, Florida, and Wisconsin have swelled with students attending with state support in the form of a school voucher, tuition tax credit scholarship, or education savings account. Nationwide, enrollment in school choice programs has grown from less than 30,000 students in 2000 to over 300,000 today. That said, if more low- and middle-income students are going to be able to take advantage of a Catholic school education, more states will need to create or expand these programs.

It was the prophet Jeremiah who said “in this place of which you say it is a waste, there will be heard again the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness. The voices of those who sing.” For years now, many observers have written off Catholic schools as dying institutions that had failed to keep up with the changing times. But across America, voices are singing.

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