There are some great NFL press conference moments. Jim Mora’s incredulous “Playoffs? Playoffs? I hope we can just win a game.” Herman Edwards’ punctuated “You play. To win. The game.” Mike Ditka’s forlorn “If I was fired, I’d quit right now.”

But perhaps the most emotional press conference moment came from Arizona Cardinal’s coach Dennis Green, who, after losing a game to the Chicago Bears, angrily pounded the press conference podium and shouted “They are who we thought they were, and we let them off the hook!”

I was reminded of this exhortation last week when NCES released the results of the 2015–16 Private School Universe Survey, an exhaustive analysis of the landscape of private schooling across America. I spend a lot of time in Missouri and across the country talking about private school choice programs, and hearing people’s opinions about private schools and their potential as options for children. Based on people’s perceptions, I’d like to invert Dennis Green’s shouts and say that private schools aren’t what you think they are.

When they hear the words “private schools,” many people think about toney suburban campuses speckled with lacrosse fields and tennis courts. Others think about single-sex Catholic schools run by the Christian Brothers or Sisters of St. Joseph.

Neither of these images is fully representative of the diverse set of private schools in our nation today. So what do we know about private schooling in America today?

The 34,576 private elementary and secondary schools are, on average, quite small. The average enrollment was only 142 students across all schools, 100 students in elementary schools and 263 students in high school. Forty-six percent of private schools enrolled fewer than 50 students.

Single-sex schools are extremely rare. Only 4 percent of private schools in America were single-sex, evenly split between 2 percent all girls and 2 percent all boys.

Catholic schools only make up 20.3 percent of all private schools, though it should be noted that they enroll 38.8 percent of all students. A full 32.7 percent of private schools are nonreligious.

Perhaps surprisingly (though not as surprising if you read this great Brookings Institution paper on the geography of school options across the country), 30.2 percent of private schools were located in rural areas or in small towns.

As to racial demographics, private schools do differ from traditional public schools in meaningful ways. While public schools are roughly 50% white, 16% Black, 25% Hispanic, and 9% all other races, private schools are 69% white, 9% Black, 10% Hispanic, and 12% all other races.

One last data point worth mentioning; private school enrollment is on a serious decline. In just 15 years, it has dropped from 6.3 million children (in 2001–12) to just 4.9 million (in 2015–16).

I’d offer three short reflections.

1.It’s time we update our understanding of what private schools looks like. There is an incredible amount of variation within private schools. On average, they are small, more likely to be religious, and are probably located within a city or suburb. But that’s about all we can say. If you have a mental picture of what a private school looks like and assume they all look like that, you’re probably guessing wrong.

2.School choice risks being too little, too late. As I have argued for years, private schools, and particularly the urban Catholic schools that have a proud tradition of serving low-income and minority students, are closing by the hundreds. School choice is a way to stanch the bleeding—but without a greater sense of urgency, there will be no schools left for children to choose. We cannot be surprised to see private schools serving fewer and fewer minority children when all of the schools that have served them in the past are closing.

3.Private schools should do a better job of reaching out to minority communities. If private schools want to grow, reaching out to growing populations is the way to make it happen. I’m heartened by efforts like Notre Dame’s Task Force on the Participation of Latino Children and Families in Catholic Schools, but we need many more organizations working to connect minority children to educational opportunities in private schools. School choice is also an indispensable part of this effort, as it is perhaps the only tool that can help bridge the gap between what people can afford and where they can go to school.

Private schools are not a monolith. They are a part of the diverse landscape of education in America, and their decline should trouble all of us.

The post Private Schools Aren’t What You Think They Are appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

No joke. The Saint Louis media was not always as harsh on the Kroenke as they are now. Back when he was part of a task force to get an NFL team in the early 90s, many in the Saint Louis press tried their best to praise Kroenke. When he was pushing for an expansion team, Kroneke’s now-derided woodenness was described thusly:

He seems to be that rare individual who is comfortable with himself, and that makes us feel comfortable with him. After all the recent noise pollution, Kroenke's confident, understated manner is pleasing to the ears.

The very act of finding Kroenke, a Missouri native prepared to shell out tens of millions to attract a new team, was praised as a deft maneuver. Any possible faults were then overlooked . . . because football. As one Post-Dispatch writer put it:

"He wants to buy us a football team," I said to my kids. "He wants to bring the Lambs to St. Louis. I sure like him."

When Saint Louis finally bought the Rams, Kroenke was hailed as a victorious warrior. When the NFL voted (21 to 3) to block the Rams’ move to Saint Louis, the newspapers eagerly (and now very ironically) lapped up Kroenke’s promise to get the team here anyway, with litigation if necessary. After enough side deals were cut and the lease, now universally derided, was inked, the Post-Dispatch praised Kroenke as a “quiet source of steady strength.” The praise was so lavish that when the Cardinals faced an ownership crisis in 1995, Post-Dispatch columnist Bernie Miklasz wrote:

The good news is that maybe Cardinals fans will get what they deserve, when all of the brokering is completed: a caring, interactive owner. That person is out there. (HELLO, STAN KROENKE?)

If Saint Louis’s media had spent less time heaping praise on any attempt to get an NFL team, and more time looking critically at of the final deal’s merits, maybe we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now. 

The post On Rams Relocation, Saint Louis Media Is as Fickle as Stan Kroenke appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The Edward Jones Dome in downtown Saint Louis is another story. Praised as state-of-the-art when it opened in 1995, the 100 percent publicly financed dome is on the verge of abandonment several months shy of its 21st birthday.

The future of the St. Louis Rams – the dome’s current occupants – will be decided in the next couple of days as the NFL owners club considers two competing plans for new stadiums in the Los Angeles area – one of them put forward by Stan Kroenke, the owner of the Rams, who wants out of Saint Louis.

Whatever happens, the Saint Louis dome’s playing days as a football stadium are probably over. It stands as a monument to wishful thinking – a telling example of the fallacy that public officials can accelerate a city’s growth or reverse its decline by “investing” large sums of money in a giant sports complex.

When the dome was first proposed and developed, its backers – including two Saint Louis mayors, business and civic leaders from the city and county, Missouri legislators, and the editorial board of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch – described the project as a much-needed shot in the arm for downtown Saint Louis. They claimed it would create thousands of jobs, generate hundreds of millions of dollars in new business activity, and more than pay for itself through the additional tax revenues it would create for St. Louis City and County and the state of Missouri.

In a 1993 editorial, the Post predicted a “downtown resurgence” and only worried that the riverfront might become “a gridlock of automobiles overlooked by a garish strip replete with pulsating electric signs and the amplified voices of barkers luring people aboard (casino) boats.”

Today the St. Louis riverfront is emptier than ever.  Over the last two decades, the city has continued to lose both population and jobs, while St. Louis County and the state as a whole have also experienced subpar economic growth. There is no sign of any dome-centered economic growth.

The Edward Jones Dome was desperation’s child.  In 1988, after the St. Louis Football Cardinals took flight for Phoenix, Arizona, leading figures in the city became serious about building the new stadium that the departing owner Bill Bidwill (not wanting to share space with the baseball Cardinals) had craved.  Enlisting the help of Saint Louis County and the state of Missouri as partners, they gambled on building a stadium entirely on spec – not knowing when, or even if, they would be able to attract another NFL franchise to replace the Cardinals.

Surely, the thinking went, a metro area of our size (two and half million people) and with our willingness to open the public purse strings, should have no trouble attracting one of two NFL expansion franchises then coming up for grabs.

That was a big mistake. In late 1993, the NFL awarded the new franchises to Charlotte, North Carolina (with the now #1 seeded Panthers in this year’s NFL playoff), and to Jacksonville, Florida.

Thus, there was great joy in Mudville when Georgia Frontiere, the widow of longtime L.A. Rams owner Carroll Rosenbloom, elected to move the Rams franchise from an aging stadium in Anaheim to a new one in her old hometown of St. Louis.  As the dome was nearing completion, she saved political and civic leaders from the embarrassment of having a football stadium but no team.

Corralling the Rams was hailed as a great victory for the city and state – but was it a good deal for taxpayers?

Plainly it was not.  The Rams shared no part of the cost of building the dome, yet they have paid an annual rent of $250,000, or just 1 percent of the $24 million that the city, county, and state have paid to service the debt on its construction . . . and will continue to pay ($12 million from the state and $6 million each from the city and county) for another five years. That means taxpayers are still on the hook for another $120 million – money that would otherwise be available for public services ranging from fire and police protection to education, roads, and infrastructure.

In addition, the lease agreement allowed the freeloading tenant to demand major improvements at public expense, and gave the team the right to opt out of the lease ten years early – in 2015 – if the city and state failed in their contractual duty to keep the dome in the top tier of NFL stadiums.

That is the option that Mr. Kroenke deployed at the beginning of last year when he announced his intention of moving to Los Angeles.  For a while, the response from city and state officials was déjà vu all over again.  St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay and Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon joined forces in trying to raise some $400 million in public assistance to go toward the building of a new $1 billion-plus riverfront stadium to keep the Rams in St. Louis.

But now it seems the air has gone out of that spheroid. There seems to be a growing realization (even in St. Louis) that if a team thinks it can make a whole lot more money in one city – with no subsidies – than it can in another – even with copious subsidies – it probably makes sense for all concerned to let the team go where it wants.

The post Deflate-gate in Saint Louis: Air goes out of a plan for a new subsidized football stadium appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

TDDs are small taxing districts that collect property or sales taxes and spend that money on transportation-related projects. We’ve been largely critical of TDDs in the past, because:

. . . TDDs are ad-hoc specially created taxing districts with idiosyncratic boundaries. They are created through what is not a normal democratic procedure (see “qualified voters” and flexible district boundaries), with boards that are not elected in the normal sense.

Most TDDs opt to collect sales tax dollars instead of property taxes, allowing the micro-districts to export taxation. However, as TDDs proliferate, it becomes increasingly difficult for a resident to know how much they are getting taxed and where that money is going, even in their own city.

There are situations where using TDDs or other small taxing districts may be appropriate. For instance, we wrote favorably about the use of a Community Improvement District (very similar to a TDD) to build a causeway in the Lake of the Ozarks. In that instance, the district had: 1. A clearly defined and much needed improvement (a causeway); and 2. Virtual unanimity among those who would be taxed.

As things stand, the downtown TDD fails to meet these criteria. What critical transportation improvement requires the TDD? According the chief executive of Downtown STL, “We don’t have a definite proposal but we know what the needs are. . . .” Reportedly, projects could include pedestrian improvements, security cameras, and/or supporting a “development spine” to Midtown. In addition, Downtown STL has long pushed for a streetcar; setting up a TDD is a common first step toward that goal.

Because the TDD will charge sales taxes, unanimity among taxpayers is already out of the question. City/county residents from outside the TDD who come downtown for a Cardinals game or Ball Park Village (both of which city and state taxpayers subsidize) will have no vote on the matter. But even within the district, business owners are not all on board. Cardinals ownership is opposed, and hotel representatives point out that they already have a very high tax rate—17 percent—and visitors’ complaints are mostly about safety, not transportation.

When it comes to downtown Saint Louis, there are plenty of taxes in place to pay for necessary street improvements. There are also elected representatives who are empowered to manage those resources. Residents should think twice about giving an unelected group what amounts to a $4.5 million taxpayer budget without that group articulating a clear, non-controversial plan. 

The post Group Pushes for Higher Downtown Taxes appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

That’s right, this story is not about the Rams; it’s about the St. Louis Football Cardinals circa 1988. Then, as now, NFL teams still would prefer that the public subsidize new stadiums, with the possibility of leaving town as the not-so-veiled threat. Saint Louis and Missouri officials hope to oblige, presenting a plan to spend more than $400 million on a new stadium for the Rams.

Saint Louis is a great sports city with enthusiastic support for professional teams (especially the baseball Cardinals), and many local leaders and residents take pride in being an NFL city. However, government officials here and around the country argue that pro sports franchises boost regional economies and spur urban regeneration.

Unfortunately, it just isn’t so. Cities have been funding stadiums for decades. The vast majority of economic research shows little evidence that these subsidies have yielded any economic benefits or growth in tax revenue. Speaking about the plan to subsidize a new stadium for the Rams, one University of Chicago economist said, “. . . building a football stadium is probably one of the worst expenditures of taxpayer dollars there is.” As for urban regeneration, while stadiums can ride a revitalization trend, there is no evidence that they create them. The issue with stadiums is that they tend to divert entertainment dollars that were already being spent in the metro area. Unless the teams draw in many tourists, which is not the case with most teams (including the Rams), NFL stadiums do not have a significant impact on the regional economy.

In the case of Saint Louis, officials do not even need to read up on the economic literature, they can simply look at the results of the Edward Jones Dome, Saint Louis’ current stadium. Originally conceived as an effort to keep the Football Cardinals (now playing in Arizona), the Edward Jones Dome was entirely publicly financed. When it opened in 1995, it was considered state-of-the-art.

Only 20 years later, the Edward Jones Dome, on which the city still owes money, is maligned as outmoded. The arrival of the Rams had no noticeable effect on tax revenue, aside from a small increase in income tax receipts. As for urban regeneration, the area immediately north of the stadium, known as the Bottle District, is an empty lot. There has been no dome-centered growth.

Nevertheless, public officials and representatives still talk as if a new riverfront stadium will cause urban regeneration and generate hundreds of millions of dollars of new state tax revenue. If regeneration means parking lots (which will surround the stadium), then they may have a point.

Even assuming the best case—that Saint Louis is blessed with a football team that holds home-field advantage through two playoff games leading up to the Super Bowl—does anyone really believe that having 10 great tailgate parties a year outside a new riverfront stadium is the key to Saint Louis’, or any other city’s, economic revitalization?

Common sense tells us “no.” So too does past experience, along with an abundance of economic literature.

The post The Fallacy of Tailgate Economics appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

That’s right, this story is not about the Rams; it’s about the St. Louis Football Cardinals circa 1988. But the stories are so similar that, if the Post-Dispatch were to change the date, a few proper nouns, and replace “dome” with “open-air stadium,” they could easily republish articles written decades ago.

If Saint Louis’ position is analogous to the one it experienced in 1988, there is much reason for caution. Back then the conventional wisdom was that domed stadiums were the future and open-air venues were a thing of the past. As one Post-Dispatch writer put it, “A domed multi-purpose building, involving an enlarged convention center, would not be the white elephant of an isolated, open-air athletic stadium.”* Despite the last-ditch stadium proposal, the Cardinals moved anyway.

But that did not stop plans for a dome. Then, as today, regional leaders claimed that having an NFL team was a boon for the local economy and city pride. Thus, building a new stadium was the “progressive” action, and it was needed to “compete for sports, convention and political bucks.”* In the area of urban development, the Post-Dispatch published articles about how the RCA Dome transformed downtown Indianapolis, hinting at similar results for Saint Louis. In a demonstration of an uncritical, keeping up with the Joneses mindset that too often guides municipal governance, one prominent stadium plan supporter commented, “You know, the other cities that have built domes are not totally stupid.”* When state and local residents voted to go forward with a publically financed dome, one Post-Dispatch columnist claimed that it “all sounds like a dream.”*

Now the dream is over. While Saint Louis eventually lured the Rams in 1995, it did so with a sweetheart deal that has been described as the “worst lease ever,” part of which frees the Rams to leave the city after only 20 years. The dome, which was described as “cutting-edge” and even “intimate”* in 1995, is regularly maligned. In fact, talk of the dome being out of date began as early as 2007, just 12 years after it was completed. As for urban regeneration, other than the heavily subsidized developments on Washington Avenue, progress has been limited and certainly not centered on the dome.

The history of the Edward Jones Dome demonstrates the pitfalls of using public dollars to chase the NFL. Perhaps that will cause Missourians and public officials to be more skeptical of the new stadium proposal. But then again, you know, the other cities that have built open-air stadiums are not totally stupid.

The post It’s Groundhog Day for Saint Louis and NFL Stadiums appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Every year there are arguments about the budget. Every department wants everything on its wish list and there is only a finite amount of money. Some (like yours truly) argue that certain programs shouldn’t even exist. However, things have started to degenerate. Now it seems that the governor and the legislature cannot agree about how much money there even is to dole out. Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon is much more bullish about the future of the state’s revenue collection. He expects revenues to grow by 5.2 percent this year. Conversely, the legislature believes the state’s revenues will grow by only 4.2 percent. That seems like small potatoes but the difference in terms of actual dollars is in the hundreds of millions.

The fact that the legislature and the governor haven’t settled on a consensus revenue estimate is newsworthy because these types of disagreements are rare. However, this disagreement isn’t a cause to panic. The House will mark up its own appropriations bills and the budgeting process will continue. It’s just disappointing to see that governor and legislature can’t seem to agree on a revenue estimate, which is probably one of the more straightforward, less partisan issues. Hopefully, next year, both sides can agree on a number. Then the real fighting can begin.

The post Budget Battle Breakdown appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Last weekend, I traveled to Chicago to see some college friends and visit Wrigley for the first time. I thought about driving, but that would have set me back about $100 in gas. I thought about flying, but airfare to Chicago was running above $250. I thought about Amtrak, but that would have set me back about $60 roundtrip.

Instead, I took Megabus to and from Chicago for a total of $21 roundtrip. That cost you, the taxpayer, next to nothing because private commercial buses receive an average federal subsidy of $0.10 per passenger per trip. Amtrak, on the other hand, receives an average federal subsidy of $57.04 per passenger per trip.

I personally don’t think subsidies are necessary and would willingly pay an extra 10 cents for my bus fare if federal subsidies were discontinued. Compared to Amtrak subsidies, however, the cost to taxpayers is negligible.

Through federal subsidies, intercity buses are partly exempt from the federal diesel fuel tax, paying 7.4 cents per gallon instead of 24.3 cents. Assuming that the bus got 4 miles to the gallon on the 300 mile trip to Chicago, Megabus would have paid $18.23 in tax to the federal government, but because of the subsidy, the company only paid $5.55. The company still paid the full state tax on fuel.

Commercial buses are a great example of the private sector stepping in to satisfy a demand that benefits consumers with a negligible burden on taxpayers.

I had an excellent trip because of Megabus. But next time I go to Wrigley, I better not see that silly white flag.

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