Show-Me Institute analysts have written often about housing in these pages. Missouri doesn’t face the same affordability crisis as coastal markets, but that doesn’t mean policymakers are powerless to further reduce costs.

A recent executive order from President Trump aims to lower housing costs by reducing federal regulatory barriers. The order directs federal agencies to review environmental rules, permitting processes, and other regulations that can delay projects or raise costs.

This isn’t a new insight. A 2016 report from the Obama administration warned that regulatory barriers—especially zoning and land-use restrictions—have made it harder for housing markets to respond to growing demand.

The Trump order addresses part of that problem. But the most consequential barriers to new housing are found at the municipal level. Zoning determines where housing can be built—and how much. Minimum lot sizes, parking mandates, height limits, and single-family zoning can sharply restrict supply. When zoning allows only a small number of homes on large parcels of land, the cost of each unit inevitably rises.

Federal action also played a role in shaping these systems. Throughout the twentieth century, federal housing programs promoted local zoning and land-use regulation as tools for stabilizing property values and guiding development. Those policies encouraged the spread of zoning frameworks that remain common today.

The administration’s order stops short of addressing local land-use restrictions directly. Addressing federal rules may help at the margins, but without local reforms, many communities will continue to limit the amount of housing that can be built.

Supporters of strict zoning sometimes argue that land-use decisions should remain entirely local. Local authority is important, but it does not eliminate the broader consequences of housing shortages, and it should not be used in a way that violates individual property rights. When cities restrict construction, as Kansas City did with rigid energy code standards, the effects ripple across regions through higher rents, longer commutes, and constrained labor markets.

If policymakers in Kansas City, St. Louis, or anywhere else want to make housing more affordable, they should start with the rules that determine whether housing can be built at all.

The post Trump Executive Order Targets Some Housing Regulation appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In July 2010, Missouri politicians joined the state’s economic development agency to announce the awarding of $17 million in state tax incentives, along with $39 million in local tax subsidies, to the Mamtek project in Moberly. The project called for making artificial sweetener using a process that would start in China and finish at a new plant in Moberly, creating 600 local jobs here. There was just one problem—it was all a scam.

It may seem unfair of me to criticize a government agency for falling victim to a criminal conspiracy, albeit one that really wasn’t that sophisticated, but government economic development agencies are a catch-22 for taxpayers. When they do a bad job—as they did in Mamtek—they waste our tax money. As with the St. Louis Marketplace or the Olde Towne Plaza in Ballwin, we can list plenty of private business projects government had no reason to get involved in but did, to the detriment of taxpayers. But we can only wish they always did a bad job. It’s when they do their jobs right that taxpayers and average citizens really get burned.

When economic development officials do their jobs right, all they are really doing is subsidizing economic activity that likely would have happened anyway for the benefit of politically connected companies. As the old joke goes, economic development officials are great at creating jobs for other economic development officials. For everyone else, not so much. For all their skillful use of political buzzwords and claiming credit when none is deserved, it remains true that “government is a bad venture capitalist,” to quote President Obama’s economic advisor, Larry Summers. Summers was being polite. Government, in the form of local, state, and federal economic development agencies, is a terrible venture capitalist. It’s not that government officials don’t get their bets right often enough; it’s that they actively get them wrong because economic development officials are heavily influenced by the political incentives to reward supporters of the politicians who employ them. A short-term political payoff is more important than long-term success.

St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones came into office two years ago pledging to make changes to the city’s economic development process. To a small degree, her administration has reduced the subsidies it is giving out to companies, and for that she deserves credit. But they also figured out a way to somehow make a bad process even worse by imposing an “economic justice” imperative on it. So now, instead of listening to development officials fabricate how their corporate welfare led to jobs, growth, and so on, we get the additional pleasure of hearing how tax subsidies lead to more “equity.” Death can’t come fast enough.

Economist Dick Netzer mocked the exaggerated claims of success made by economic development officials when he wrote, “Who needs oil wells, when a state can be another Kuwait just by increasing the budget of a tiny agency?” Claims of subsidy successes often border on the absurd. The author once heard a Clay County economic development official claim that “All of the growth” in the town of Liberty—a fast growing, suburban community north of Kansas City, the likes of which have been growing across the nation for decades—was due to a tax-increment financing (TIF) package they passed. Chesterfield officials talk about the Valley TIF there in much the same way, as if suburbanization hadn’t existed until Missouri’s TIF law was passed in the late 1980s.

The self-aggrandizement of the economic development industry would be understandable if the system worked, but it doesn’t. The East-West Gateway Council of Governments (EWG) did a major study of TIF and other subsidies a decade ago and concluded that they created one job for every $370,000 in tax subsidies. That is a terrible return on the subsidy, as EWG stated. Economists Alan Peters and Peter Fisher studied tax incentives closely and concluded that they work about 10 percent of the time and are simply a waste of money the other 90 percent. They added that, like the Clay County officials mentioned above, economic development officials often credit all new employment and growth to tax subsidies. Yet our region continues to pass out tax subsidies like other people’s candy, evidenced by the atrocious decision of the St. Louis County TIF commission to approve $300 million in subsidies for the “blighted” part of Chesterfield just last month.

If we really wanted to help our community grow, residents of the St. Louis-area could get no better gift than the elimination of state and local economic development agencies. They are a blight on capitalism and an actively harmful influence on the civic and economic life of our state.

The post St. Louis Should Eliminate Its Economic Development Agencies appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In July 2010, Missouri politicians joined the state’s economic development agency to announce the awarding of $17 million in state tax incentives, along with $39 million in local tax subsidies, to the Mamtek project in Moberly. The project called for making artificial sweetener using a process that would start in China and finish at a new plant in Moberly, creating 600 local jobs here. There was just one problem—it was all a scam.

It may seem unfair of me to criticize a government agency for falling victim to a criminal conspiracy, albeit one that really wasn’t that sophisticated, but government economic development agencies are a Catch-22 for taxpayers. When they do a bad job—as they did in Mamtek—they waste our tax money. As with the Bass Pro Shop in Independence and the Jamestown Development near Springfield, we can list plenty of private business projects government had no reason to get involved in but did to the detriment of taxpayers. But we can only wish they always did a bad job. It’s when they do their jobs right that taxpayers and average citizens really get burned.

When economic development officials do their jobs right, all they are really doing is subsidizing economic activity that likely would have happened anyway for the benefit of politically connected companies. As the old joke goes, economic development officials are great at creating jobs for other economic development officials. For everyone else, not so much. For all their skillful use of political buzzwords and claiming credit when none is deserved, it remains true that “government is a bad venture capitalist,” to quote President Obama’s economic advisor, Larry Summers. Summers was being polite. Government, in the form of local, state, and federal economic development agencies, is a terrible venture capitalist. It’s not that government officials don’t get their bets right often enough; it’s that they actively get them wrong because economic development officials are heavily influenced by the political incentives to reward supporters of the politicians who employ them. A short-term political payoff is more important than long-term success.

Late to the subsidy game but catching up fast, Springfield—having seen how St. Louis and Kansas City have operated their own subsidies and failed by every measure—has decided to follow in their footsteps. The trucking industry has long been important in Southwest Missouri, and there are numerous companies, stations, and stores in Springfield to service the various fleets. But not enough for the City of Springfield’s Department of Economic Vitality (that’s its actual name), which decided to use over $4 million in taxpayer funds (along with other subsidies) to entice an enormous new gas station company, Buc-ee’s, to locate in town.

The head of another local convenience store company, Rapid Robert’s, rightfully took issue with the plan. He didn’t object to the competition, but rather the use of tax subsidies in a field full of local companies that had grown without them. His objections fell on deaf ears, and likely would have been meaningless to the members of the city’s “economic vitality” department. They, like economic development officials everywhere, care nothing about history, propriety, or capitalist theory. They care about getting the forms marked up, the tax money spent, and the deal done so that they can claim credit, add it to their resume, and start searching for the next job.

Economist Dick Netzer mocked the exaggerated claims of success made by economic development officials when he wrote, “Who needs oil wells, when a state can be another Kuwait just by increasing the budget of a tiny agency?” Claims of subsidy successes often border on the absurd. The author once heard a Clay County economic development official claim that “All of the growth” in the town of Liberty—a fast growing, exurban community north of Kansas City, the likes of which have been growing across the nation for decades—was due to a tax-increment financing (TIF) package they passed. As if suburbanization hadn’t existed until Missouri’s TIF law was passed in the late 1980s.

Economists Alan Peters and Peter Fisher studied tax incentives closely and concluded that they work about 10 percent of the time and are simply a waste of money the other 90 percent. They added that, like the Clay County officials mentioned above, economic development officials often credit all new employment and growth to tax subsidies.

As Christmas approaches, Springfield residents could get no better Christmas gift than the elimination of state and local economic development agencies. They are a blight on capitalism and an actively harmful influence on the civic and economic life of our state.

The post Springfield Should Eliminate Its Economic Development Agencies appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Well, buried at the end of an uneventful year for U.S. Supreme Court Rulings is a little case called West Virginia v. EPA. In 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Obama administration wanted to comprehensively regulate “greenhouse gases” at American power plants under the Clean Air Act, so it adopted what it called the “Clean Power Plan rule.” The rule put pressure on dirtier coal power plants to shutter and promoted alternative energy plants. The problem with that is the Clean Air Act had only ever been used to enable the regulation and oversight of individual power-generating facilities; Congress had not authorized the EPA to unilaterally reorganize all power-generating capacity of the United States at the grid level.

After seven years of legislative wrangling, constant litigation, and a couple of presidential administrations, the Supreme Court affirmed that the EPA had indeed exceeded its mandate under the Clean Air Act. The court found that when a “major question” like nationwide energy generation is to be decided, Congress must render its decision directly or clearly authorize an agency to act on its behalf, consistent with the law. Here, Congress had not spoken directly or made such a clear delegation to the EPA to give it such expansive powers, and because it had not, the EPA’s dramatic rulemaking was invalid.

To be clear, the court’s ruling doesn’t suggest that the federal government can’t regulate “greenhouse gases,” but it does make clear that if the federal government is going to regulate them, Congress needs to clearly authorize it. That’s a win for small and accountable government; this ruling preserves the constitutional norms of our republican form of government. Each of the three branches is constrained by the Constitution; new laws must be passed through Congress, not by bureaucratic fiat.

How do you stop out-of-control regulations like this? Ideally, by requiring some form of legislative action for them to continue. Regulatory reform is a dense and oftentimes boring policy area, but if I were to suggest one change consistent with state and federal constitutional divisions of power, I think it’d be appropriate for every regulation enacted by an agency to come with a sunset date. The sunset provision would wipe the regulation clean if not adopted and passed into law by Congress or a legislature. That way, every regulation would eventually have to get an up or down vote by the people’s representatives, or else disappear.

Regardless, the Supreme Court’s finding in West Virginia is an important one that hopefully will remind lawmakers that they alone should be making “the law”—and that they can, and should, be held accountable for both the laws they pass directly and any regulations that descend from the statutes they enact.

The post Supreme Court Reins in Federal Bureaucracy in EPA Case appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Visit MoSchoolRankings.org

About the Project

In response to DESE’s failure to perform one of its most basic functions, we launched The Missouri School Rankings Project and MoSchoolRankings.org.

The mission of The Missouri School Rankings Project is to make student performance data more transparent by providing parents, policymakers, educators, and taxpayers with access to easy-to-understand information about every Missouri school and school district in order to motivate actions that will result in dramatic reforms to Missouri’s education system.

Why School-level Data Matters

Parents Need Information to Choose

Parents need accurate information to make informed decisions about which school will best serve their children. MoSchoolRankings.org provides a detailed picture of student performance for each school.

Comparison Reveals Problems and Solutions 

The MoSchoolRankings.org comparison tool allows users to compare student performance from up to 3 schools at a time.

By comparing schools that serve similar student populations, we can identify successful schools and learn from them.

The ability to compare individual schools also allows families who are relocating to make informed decisions about which districts or school boundaries to move into. The comparison tool also highlights that many Missouri families, who are not able to move, are trapped in low-performing schools and districts.

Spending Data

The public sector should make it easy for citizens to see how their money is being spent. The powers that be shouldn’t tailor spending numbers to include some things and exclude others. So we’re providing everything, and users can decide what they consider to be relevant. The entire data set of nearly 500 variables for each district available for download. And the DESE accounting manual can be accessed on the site.

The Rankings

Each student performance metric is given a grade of A through F. The grades are combined to produce a grade point average, or GPA, which is then converted to a single letter grade. Each school and district receives a letter grade and is ranked accordingly. Information on how grades and ranks are calculated can be found on the Grading Methodology page.

The performance rankings are calculated using several performance metrics that measure student performance.

These metrics are:

• Student performance in ELA and mathematics
• Low-income student performance in ELA and mathematics
• Student growth in ELA and mathematics
• A comparison of student performance in ELA and math to each school or district’s expected performance based on its enrollment of economically disadvantaged students
• 4-year graduation rate
• ACT scores

If multiple schools or districts had the lowest possible score for an item (for example, if 0 percent of their students scored Proficient or higher in math), then they would share a rank.

Key Terms

Definitions and further explanations of the terms used to determine rankings can be found in the glossary section.

Some key terms to understand while exploring the portal are:

Achievement Levels

• Below Basic—the student has only a minimal understanding of the material.
• Basic—the student has a partial understanding of the material.
• Proficient—the student has an adequate understanding and is able to apply subject matter as defined by the Missouri Learning Standards.
• Advanced—the student demonstrates a thorough understanding and ability to apply subject matter.

Academic Growth

A statistical model used to identify differences in student academic growth from one year to the next among schools or districts with similar baseline scores.

Adjusted Achievement 

For each school or district, the percentage of low-income enrollment was multiplied by the baseline rate and subtracted from the baseline. The result is the school’s (or district’s) predicted score. If a school’s (or district’s) expected score is higher than its actual score, it underperformed. If a school’s (or district’s) expected score is lower than its actual score, it overperformed.

Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI) and Targeted School Improvement (TSI)

Schools with these designations are low-performing schools. 

Additional Information About Districts and Schools Includes:

• Percent of low-income students
• Percent of students with disabilities
• Full-Time Equivalent teachers
• Average teacher salary
• Total expenditures
• Total expenditures per pupil

About the Research

The Missouri School Rankings Project is led by Show-Me Institute’s Director of Research and Education Policy Dr. Susan Pendergrass. Before joining the Show-Me Institute, Susan Pendergrass was Vice President of Research and Evaluation for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, where she oversaw data collection and analysis and carried out a rigorous research program. Susan earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Business, with a concentration in Finance, at the University of Colorado in 1983. She earned her Masters in Business Administration at George Washington University, with a concentration in Finance (1992) and a doctorate in public policy from George Mason University, with a concentration in social policy (2002). Susan began researching charter schools with her dissertation on the competitive effects of Massachusetts charter schools. Since then, she has conducted numerous studies on the fiscal impact of school choice legislation. Susan has also taught quantitative methods courses at the Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies, at Johns Hopkins University, and at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. Prior to coming to the National Alliance, Susan was a senior policy advisor at the U.S. Department of Education during the Bush administration and a senior research scientist at the National Center for Education Statistics during the Obama administration.

Contact Us about the Project 

The post The Missouri School Rankings Project appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

America’s infrastructure needs are genuine and significant. Investment in basic infrastructure (power, transportation, water supply, etc.) has failed or barely kept up with depreciation, leaving the country with an aging infrastructure stock with dwindling years of remaining service life. Moreover, although the United States spends roughly the same on infrastructure as it did in 1956 in inflation-adjusted per capita terms, it gets less bang for the buck today. In particular, the cost per mile of interstate construction has more than tripled in inflation-adjusted terms since the 1960s.

This combination of flat spending and rising costs means less actual new infrastructure. Worse yet, costs vary widely across states. From 1956 to 1993, high-cost states spent more than $8.8 million more per mile of interstate than low-cost states, and $3.3 million of this differential is due to factors under policymaker control. Thus, rather than measuring the ambition of a bill by the sticker shock of its price tag, a superior metric is to evaluate the quantity and quality of infrastructure it is likely to produce and what spillovers it will generate for economic productivity. On both counts, the Biden Administration’s plan falls far short.

First, the composition of spending in the bill appears not to have gone through any credible cost–benefit analysis to determine where best to allocate scarce (or not so scarce, given the size of the bill) dollars. For example, the American Society of Civil Engineers reports that 20 percent of the more than 4 million miles of roads in the United States are in poor condition; the same report estimates a nearly $800 billion backlog of maintenance and repair needs. Why, then, does only 5 percent of the bill (see Figure 1) go to roads and bridges, only promising to fix 20,000 miles worth of road? Moreover, why spend nearly the same amount on public transportation even though only 5 percent of people rely on it to get to work? The bill also includes Medicaid expansion of home and community-based services (HCBS) masquerading as “infrastructure.” The administration every right to make its case for a “care economy” agenda, but simply calling it infrastructure to piggyback off of the popularity of spending on roads and bridges does not make it so.

Figure 1

Secondly, and more egregiously, the American Jobs Plan’s prevailing wage, project labor agreement, and PRO Act provisions are a huge giveaway to unions that would likely raise costs, reduce growth, tilt the playing field, and overturn the will of voters in states that passed right-to-work laws to safeguard worker freedoms. The practical effect of these measures will be to reduce the number of infrastructure projects that can get completed for a given amount of spending and to needlessly harm economic performance through the elimination of worker freedom protections.

Lastly, the Biden plan partly finances the eye-popping $2.3 trillion price tag by raising the corporate income tax, thereby undermining the very competitiveness that infrastructure investment is supposed to enhance. Even the administration tacitly admits the harm such a tax hike will cause for the economy, offering only to beg other countries to raise their own taxes to prevent them from attracting companies looking for friendlier business environments in what the Biden administration misleadingly calls a “race to the bottom.” It’s hard to imagine any countries taking us up on the offer. In all fairness, the American Jobs Plan does promise workers whose jobs are displaced counseling and case management services, though many will unsurprisingly prefer to keep their job instead.

In sum, America’s infrastructure could use a jolt of investment, but the spending priorities in the bill are off target and in many cases unrelated to true infrastructure. The bill is littered with union giveaways that will raise costs and reduce the quantity of new infrastructure that could otherwise be produced, and the promised corporate tax hikes counteract the same economic growth that infrastructure spending aims to ignite. But it’s not too late. The Biden administration should learn from previous mistakes, when the Obama stimulus failed to improve the nation’s highways, and instead refocus on a pro-growth and fiscally responsible approach to solving America’s pressing infrastructure needs.

The post The Biden Infrastructure Bungle appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Ignoring the debatable merits of the bill, the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (President Obama’s stimulus package), required reporting on every project down to the subcontractor level and taxpayers were supposed to have near-real-time ability to see how funds were being spent. This act spurred many states to enact increased transparency measures. It is disappointing to learn that Missouri took a step backward at a time when much of the country was moving forward. The auditor noted, “When there’s inadequate documentation, you don’t know if there’s waste, fraud or abuse.”

Has Missouri learned from its mistakes? Some governmental bodies appear to be transparent, if not exercising fiscal restraint, with their emergency spending. The State Treasurer’s Office is publishing CARES Act state government relief fund spending down to the vendor and item purchased. St. Louis County and City both have websites publishing their emergency spending, showing when, where, and on what the money was spent. The county also publishes future committed spending. Close-fisted spending habits have led some to question their emergency priorities, but it’s the transparency portals that inform such questioning. Franklin and Jackson Counties plan to release spending details in the future. However, no other major county or city has yet published such coronavirus-specific spending.

Some state agencies have published the amount of federal money they received but did not specify how they spent or will spend it. A few identified potential categories of expenses—such as the Department of Higher Education, Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, and the Department of Transportation—but did not provide details.

Why aren’t all state agencies and political subdivisions willing to show how they are spending taxpayer funds? Shouldn’t agencies receiving relief funds, i.e., taxpayer money, want to demonstrate that the money is being put to good use? With today’s technology, they can make such data easily accessible, complete, and accurate. If a county or agency is unable to publish this information on its own, it can send the data to the state for publication.

Show-Me Institute analysts have called for government transparency since the first relief funds rolled in. While some appear to be acting transparently, not all are. Isn’t it time for the rest to catch up and show us the money?

The post Don’t Repeat Mistakes from the 2009 Stimulus appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Well, you could try the hidden ball trick. Indiana’s Trine University softball team played this old ruse to perfection in advancing to the 2019 Women’s College World Series.

In a surprise pick-off move, Trine pitcher Kate Saupe turned and fired a bullet to second base. But the ball got away from the infielder and rolled into the outfield. So it seemed. Actually, the ball never left the pitcher’s glove. When the runner tried to advance, Saupe tagged her for the game-winning out.

In promoting the idea of a cost-free expansion of Missouri’s Medicaid program, the Missouri Budget Project, the Missouri Hospital Association, and others are using a similar (and equally spectacular) misdirection play to gain public support for a policy initiative that would be neither cheap nor free.

At $10.9 billion, Medicaid already accounts for 39.6 percent of Missouri’s 2019 budget. That’s more than education, prisons, public safety, or roads. It’s the most for any service funded in part or total by Missouri taxpayers.

So how can Missouri boost the number of Medicaid participants from 850,000 to more than a million people—and save money? It can’t. If we increase Medicaid enrollment more than quarter, there has to be a similar increase in costs—something on the order of $2 billion a year.

The hidden ball here is to treat the federal contribution in this joint state-federal program as “free money” —a manna-from-the-heavens gift from Uncle Sam to the Show-Me State. But the money is not free. Like the residents of other states, Missourians are on the hook for federal Medicaid obligations, no less than state Medicaid obligations. They pay the final bill either way—through state and federal taxes.

Under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government set out to expand Medicaid to include people earning up to 138 percent of federally defined poverty level.

As originally written, this legislation would have required states to comply with the planned expansion of Medicaid or face the loss of all federal matching funds, split roughly on a $3-to-$2 basis between the federal government and the states. The Supreme Court struck down that part of the law in 2012. The Obama administration then agreed to a $9-to-$1 split in favor of the states if they opted to participate in the expansion. What had been a “gun to the head” (as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote) suddenly became a mouth-watering carrot.

Kansas recently became the 37th state to opt into Medicaid expansion. If Missouri were to follow suit, it would still need to put up 10 percent of the cost. Citing a Washington University study, Medicaid expansionists think they have found a way to make even that cost disappear. But this is just one more example of cost-shifting as opposed to cost reduction.

According to the study, Missouri could re-enroll existing recipients currently classified as permanently and total disabled (PTD) based on income, rather than disability. That would trigger the new $9-to-$1 federal match—meaning more federal funds for the same people.

But there is a problem: This maneuver appears to be against the law. So the federal Office of Inspector General said in a recent audit of New York State when it tried to do same thing.

Over the last two decades, Medicaid has been a rapidly rising cost at both the state and national levels. But it remains a deeply troubled program that is not succeeding in its basic mission of providing ready access to high-quality healthcare for low-income families and individuals.

When it comes to promoting needed change in healthcare, using feel-good, sleight-of-hand accounting to promote a false idea of something-for-nothing benefits is a step backward, not forward.

The post The Myth of “Free” Medicaid Expansion appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Missouri has spent more than $6 billion in 2019 on public education.

Do we know what we are getting for our money? How well are our schools performing? Which schools are performing better than others?

Dr. Susan Pendergrass and Abigail Burrola have created a report card that evaluates and grades how well Missouri provides school performance information based on federal requirements in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).

Join us at this St. Louis Policy Breakfast where they will present their findings.

RSVP here.

Featured Speakers:

Susan Pendergrass, Director of Research and Education Policy

Before joining the Show-Me Institute, Susan Pendergrass was Vice President of Research and Evaluation for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, where she oversaw data collection and analysis and carried out a rigorous research program. Prior to coming to the National Alliance, she was a senior policy advisor at the U.S. Department of Education during the Bush administration and a senior research scientist at the National Center for Education Statistics during the Obama administration. Susan holds a doctorate in public policy from George Mason University with a concentration in social policy.

Abigail Burrola, Analyst

Abigail Burrola graduated from Azusa Pacific University with a bachelor’s degree in political science in 2018. She is originally from the Minneapolis area, and her policy interests include special education practices and rural school choice.

The post Missouri’s Report Card and ESSA Requirements appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“Despite the fact that Missouri’s economy is growing and we’re in a stronger position than we were last year, what continues to be the greatest challenge in the budget is the explosion in federally mandated and other health care spending,” Greitens said Monday at a news conference in Jefferson City to outline his budget plan.

From there, the paper embarks on a roughly 1500-word odyssey to impress on readers that four- or six-percent rates of growth in the Medicaid program do not a cost “explosion” make. This pronouncement, delivered without providing any context, fails on several fronts, including the fact that both figures are double and triple the rate of inflation, respectively.

But I wouldn’t constrain the question of whether Medicaid costs have exploded to a single year, anyway. Consider the program’s growing impact on Missouri’s budget. According to the National Association of State Budget Officers (NASBO,) Missouri spent 18.4 percent of its FY2000 budget on the Medicaid program. By FY2016, that figure had more than doubled to over 37 percent of the state’s budget. As we’ve argued for years, Medicaid’s cost problems aren’t some artifact of Obamacare alone. The program has long been broken and, like the rest of the health care system, outpaced inflation—eating into public spending priorities just as private health care has grown in our own budgets. Over the last 17 years, Missouri even lowered eligibility thresholds for certain populations, and yet overall costs have continued to rise.

Years of cost increases—even if only of the four- or six-percent variety—add up to an ongoing cost explosion. That is precisely why former President Barack Obama said this back when he was selling Obamacare. (Emphasis mine)

And, finally, the explosion in health care costs has put our federal budget on a disastrous path. This is largely due to what we’re spending on Medicare and Medicaid—entitlement programs whose costs are expected to continue climbing in the years ahead as baby boomers grow older and come to rely more and more on our health care system. That’s why I’ve said repeatedly that getting health care costs under control is essential to reducing budget deficits, restoring fiscal discipline, and putting our economy on a path towards sustainable growth and shared prosperity.

So yes, Medicaid’s costs are exploding. And the sooner we can get to reforming the program, the better.

The post Yes, the Cost of Medicaid Has Exploded appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This is your conscience calling. I speak to all of you who call yourselves conservatives – the champions of limited government and economic freedom. Another year has come and gone and what do you have to show for it? “Too damned little,” I say, given super-majorities in both houses of the Legislature and control of the executive branch as well.

Look at what has just happened in the U.S. Congress. With far narrower majorities than you have in the Missouri Legislature, your counterparts on the national stage passed the most important pro-growth tax policy in many years – cutting the corporate income tax to 21 from 35 percent while also allowing businesses to write off the full costs of new equipment to improve operations and enhance productivity. In addition, under the new legislation, middle-income taxpayers will pay about $900 less in their 2018 tax bill than they would under the current law, according to the Tax Policy Center.

Though I may sound critical, I really do want you to succeed – for nothing is gained if you continue to ignore the chastisements of your often-troubled but ever-hopeful conscience. Here are my New Year’s Resolutions for you going into the 2018 session of the Missouri Legislature –

One, don’t be afraid to think big and act boldly. For almost three decades, Missouri has been one of the slowest-growing states in the nation. That alone should tell you that a major course correction is in order – and long overdue.

Two, say “No” to corporate welfare. Slaughter the fatted calves of tax credits for economic development (eliminating as much as $400 million in annual state expenditures).

Three, use those savings to lower taxes for all Missourians – both individuals and businesses.

Four, deregulate, deregulate, deregulate. Nationally, the undoing of many of the regulatory excesses from the Obama administration helped to power 3-percent-plus GDP growth in the second and third quarters. Further deregulation at the state and local government levels in Missouri can have a similarly beneficial effect. The governor’s No MO Red Tape initiative looks like a big step in the right direction.

Five, and this is a plea that is meant not just for lawmakers, but for who believe in the power of free markets: Do not shirk debate and, still more, do not shrink from the important task of ridding young people of the pernicious idea (widely accepted at colleges and universities in Missouri and across the country) that free-market capitalism is an evil system that promotes social injustice.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Free-market capitalism under limited (as opposed to wide-ranging) government is the only economic system that spreads opportunity far and wide and that reliably delivers both growth and prosperity to the many and not just the few.

To you lawmakers, I say, in closing: Good luck on ringing in the New Year with the strength and conviction that come from knowing that you are capable of achieving great things.

This op-ed also appeared in th Joplin Globe.

The post Arise and Shine, Missouri lawmakers: You Have Nothing to Lose but a Long History of Bad Performance. appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The Obama administration’s guidelines had come under criticism as more and more individuals accused of sexual assault came forward to argue that their due process rights were being violated.

The “Dear Colleague” letter (and subsequent communications by the Department of Education) offered several bits of problematic guidance. First, the letter directed universities to follow what is called a “single investigator” model when pursuing these claims, meaning that a university employee would, as Emily Yoffe of the Atlantic wrote, act as “detective, prosecutor, judge, and jury” for the case. There is a reason why we separate those responsibilities in our court system.

Standard rules of evidence that we would expect any court of law to follow did not have to be followed. Because of the opaque nature of these investigations, those accused did not have a right to submit evidence on their own behalf or cross-examine witnesses or experts. In fact, those accused of these crimes did not even have to be notified of the specific complaint against them. It was a recipe for disaster.

At the core of all investigations is the balance between the rights of the accused and the rights of the accusers. As both Yoffe and Robby Soave of Reason.com have documented in heartbreaking detail, current processes have failed both of these groups. Due process helps to ensure that the guilty are punished and that the innocent are not. With an issue as serious as sexual assault, it is that much more important that fair and transparent procedures are followed. Let’s hope that this period of public comment brings them back into balance.

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How did they do this? By invoking a heretofore little-used law called the Congressional Review Act, originally passed as part of the Contract with America in 1996. It allows Congress, through a joint resolution, to strike down recently issued regulations wholesale if they believe that those regulations differ substantially from the intent of the original legislation. The Department of Education’s rules surrounding the Every Student Succeeds Act were ripe for the picking, and for good reason.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was passed in late 2015 and signed into law by President Obama.  After nearly a half century during which the federal government accumulating increasing amounts of power over K-12 education, ESSA was a bipartisan attempt to return a substantial amount of authority back to the states. The Department of Education, however, in writing the rules that states would have to follow to be in compliance with the law, seems to have tried to hang onto everything it could.

The National Governors Association published a list of some of the regulations it had problems with, and just a quick perusal reveals that Department had mandated things like a single summative grade for schools, had narrowed the kinds of indicators that can be used to measure school success,  and had tried to set timelines for things like school improvement plans when the underlying legislation was purposely vague in order to give states more flexibility. These examples and many others show the degree to which bureaucrats acted like mini-legislators in their own right.

It is the job of the executive branch of our government to faithfully execute the laws written by Congress. Members of administrative agencies might not like a law, but it is their duty to see it through regardless.

Practically speaking, Congress just put the ball firmly in Missouri’s court. We can no longer point to the federal government as some bogey-man preventing us from doing what is best for kids. We are in charge of our education system, and we need to work diligently so it delivers for all of our children.

According to this PowerPoint presentation by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, it looks like the state plans to submit its plan to comply with the new law on April 3. When the plan is released, we will make sure to have analysis available for you, detailing what it means for districts, schools, teachers, and children.

The post Repealing a Mountain of Regulation with This One Simple Trick appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The executive order calls for agencies to pinpoint “at least two” current regulations to be repealed for each new proposed regulation. And it says the net incremental cost for fiscal 2017 should “be no greater than zero,” meaning the cost of new regulations should be offset by existing rules that will be rescinded.

House Speaker Paul Ryan applauded the order in a statement Monday afternoon, noting that it builds on House Republicans’ “Better Way” agenda and comes as the lower chamber is set to repeal a number of Obama era regulations this week.

“The explosion of federal regulations has hamstrung small business growth and crippled our economy,” he said. “President Trump’s executive order helps bring the nation’s regulatory regime into the 21st century by putting regulators on a budget, and addressing the costs agencies can impose each year.”

After the President’s announcement, my colleague Mike McShane reminded me that, in fact, he has talked about precisely the same kind of regulatory reforms in the past. In his case, the context was education. From his US News and World Report piece from last year:

Our Tory compatriots across the pond offer a way forward. In 2010, the Conservative government of the United Kingdom implemented what they called “one in, one out” (later revised to “one in, two out“) that required government to remove a regulation of equivalent compliance cost for every new regulation that they proposed. Want to require a new form to be submitted to the Department of Business, Innovation, and Skills tracking how businesses recruit new employees? Lovely, not a bother at all. You simply must find another form that takes the same amount of effort or another requirement that takes the same amount of time and eliminate it.

But the regulatory push doesn’t end there, of course. Newly inaugurated governor Eric Greitens has established his own regulatory beach head to fight from, and while it may not be “one in, two out” quite yet, it’s reasonable to believe something similar is on the horizon. That regulatory freeze is important because it halts business as usual in the state bureaucracy and offers an opportunity for a clear-eyed reassessment of what the state is doing well, and doing wrong, in its rulemaking and regulatory processes.

Expect more about good-government regulatory reforms as this year’s session proceeds, but it is refreshing to see that our state and federal governments may soon be getting smaller, one rule at a time.

The post Regulatory Reform Emerges as Major Issue, Nationally and in Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

the investments she favors may more quietly reflect conservative tenets like heavy highway spending, disregard for energy efficiency, and the denial of funds to transit and pedestrian projects in densely populated areas.

This should not be surprising, especially for streetcar proponents. But it should be alarming for them. As my former colleague Joe Miller wrote in 2014,

What streetcar advocates really have to fear is not the defunding of urban transit, but the defunding of streetcars in favor of other forms of transit. Past administrations favored transit projects that reduced congestion or improved mobility, so streetcars received few federal dollars. The Obama administration’s desire to use transit projects to create “livable communities” has made federal streetcar funding possible.

Mind you, overall Federal transit funding may not change much. But as Slate pointed out, the Obama Administration was an outlier on how the funding was spent:

Obama’s first transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, for example, was a major proponent of diverting DOT spending away from highways (many of which are boondoggles, the least of which costs many times as much as the hated streetcars) to other transportation and infrastructure projects. He supervised the creation of the TIGER grant program, which injected billions in federal money into local, multimodal projects, and was reauthorized repeatedly by Congress.

Recall that in 2013, TIGER funding provided $20 million toward the streetcar project in Kansas City. And according to the Kansas City Regional Transit Alliance (KCRTA), the proposed $227 million Main Street extension of the streetcar assumes up to $114 million in federal funding. Fourteen million of that is from designated regional funds (STP/CMAQ), which means other regional transportation projects would have to wait if streetcar expansion moves ahead. The remaining $100 million now may be pie-in-the-sky.

In July 2014, Mayor James campaigned for the first ill-fated streetcar extension line by saying, “We really have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity here.” Considering the President-Elect’s Secretary choice, he may have been right. It remains to be seen if he and other streetcar supporters believed that rhetoric.

The post Will Streetcar Funding Dry Up? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

GDP Growth during the Expansions of the Post-WWII Period

Source: CRS calculations based on data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).

Note: Economic expansions as identified by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

This result is not just bad—it is catastrophic. The average American should not be wondering if his income is a bit above or below 2007 levels. Just by historical averages, the average American should be 20% better off than in 2007. And this slow growth is settling in as a permanent new-abnormal.

I believe the root cause of abysmal growth is the huge tax increases imposed by President Obama and Congress since 2008. The most harmful were the increase in the capital gains tax from 15 to 20 percent, the increase in top bracket income from 35 to 39.6 percent, and the new tax of 3.8 percent on investment income in the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The massive increase in regulatory burden through the ACA and Dodd-Frank bills are also crushing, but unfortunately are harder to measure.

The three tax increases mentioned above (plus higher state and local taxes) directly lower expected returns on all investments. Our government grabs the fruits of investment and then is puzzled when businesses do not invest. This causes billions of dollars of investment projects to come off the table.

Weak investment is the signature feature and cause of the abysmal "recovery" under President Obama. The aggregate of all investments in the United States is Net Private Domestic Investment (NPDI), computed by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Relative to GDP, NPDI averaged 7% per year from1960 to 2008. The average was 7 to 8 percent from 1960 to 1990, and 6.5 percent in the Clinton and George W. Bush years. However, for the Obama years NPDI was an astoundingly low 2% of GDP!

In every year of Obama’s presidency but 2015, NPDI was worse than in any year from 1960 to his inauguration. This isn't bad luck. If nothing changed in the economy, the likelihood of having a period as bad as Obama’s just by chance would be 1 in 1000.

The numbers for GDP and NPDI are interesting, but they’re still just lifeless statistics. The human toll is terrible, taking the form of millions of Americans who can’t find jobs or can’t make ends meet in the jobs they do have.

Dismal investment levels are the predictable result of taxing investment and income at high rates. This terrible economic performance will continue until income and investment taxes are slashed. The government can still raise needed revenue with a broad-base approach, eliminating all the special deductions and credits and allowing very low rates.

On the other hand, maintaining the current high rates will entrench lackluster investment and stagnant incomes and trap far too many Americans in a bleak economic future.

The post The Dismal Recovery appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

On Thursday the President more or less confirmed this, albeit unintentionally. Many of our readers are aware that tech giant Samsung has recalled its Galaxy Note 7 cellular phone because it's, well, exploding. In response, the company has told Note 7 owners to stop using the device immediately. Even the FAA has banned taking such phones aboard airplanes because of the risk associated with the phone catching fire. Rather than try to upgrade the product to avert their catastrophic failures, Samsung is now… replacing all of the devices.

I had not previously thought to compare Obamacare to a device with an unadvertised tendency to explode, but luckily President Obama just painted that picture for us.

Obama compared problems in the law to a bug in new technology. He said, for example, that a company will fix a problem with a smartphone.

"They upgrade it, unless it catches fire and then they just pull it off the market," Obama joked, in a reference to the recalled Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphone. "But you don't go back to using a rotary phone. You don't say, we're repealing smartphones."

Along with the joke being a tad tone deaf given the pain the law has put families through, President Obama's analogy is imperfect because by repealing the PPACA we wouldn't be repealing "health care"—just an indisputably broken part of it. As Samsung is swapping one failed product for another that won't set your hair on fire, so should policymakers fundamentally reassess and replace what was and is an ill-conceived health care law that doubled-down on the status quo rather than reforming it.

As the President suggests, sometimes trying to "upgrade" an inferior product can be downright dangerous. After 6 years of poor Obamacare results, it's time for policymakers to move on to something better.

The post Like an Exploding Cell Phone, Obamacare Should Be Replaced appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“The basic assumption of your draft regulations appears to be that top down, Washington driven standardization is best…. You are funding teaching interventions or changes to the learning environment that promise to make public education better, i.e. greater mastery of what it takes to become an effective citizen and a productive member of society. In the draft you have circulated, I sense a pervasive technocratic bias and an uncritical faith in the power of social science.”

Was it:

(A)   Then Kansas Senator (now Governor) Sam Brownback

(B)   Then Texas Governor Rick Perry

(C)   Then California Attorney General  (now Governor ) Jerry Brown

(D)   Missouri Governor Jay Nixon

If you guessed Sam Brownback, you would be wrong. It was actually Democrat Jerry Brown.  Yes, that Jerry Brown.

This quote resurfaced in an interesting piece by Matt Barnum of education website The 74 about California’s long-running opposition to federal education policy. Brown’s riposte was a harbinger of the showdown that California ultimately had with the Department of Education in 2013, when California suspended its standardized testing and school rating system. The feds said they couldn’t do it and threatened to withhold funding. Brown responded more like a Texan than a Californian and dared them to come and take it.  The feds backed down.

I think there are two interesting lessons to take away from this story (which is worth reading in full).

First, states can stand up to the federal government. It obviously helped California that it is the most populous state in the union and is one that will reliably deliver Democratic votes, but even with that said, it is clear that the federal government is loathe to pull funding that overwhelmingly benefits poor students and students with special needs. That is not to say that they wouldn’t, but states are probably in a stronger bargaining position than they realize.

Second, the issue itself matters. California picked a smart issue on which to go toe to toe with the Department of Education. Had the feds been opposing standardized tests and the states supporting them, the calculus would probably be much different. A hardline stance might not work with an issue with more divided opinion or one where the federal government has the majority opinion on its side.

I don’t know if what California is doing is right or wrong. I’m by no means a technocrat, but I think they probably swung too far in the opposite direction on testing and school accountability. That said, part of respecting local control of education is realizing that not everyone is going to make the decisions that you would have made had you been part of the process. Agree or not, we can learn from California about what states can do when they feel they have been pushed too far, and we can recognize the need for states to have a game plan in place in case they are asked (or ordered) to do things expressly against the will of their citizens.

The post They Fought the Feds, and the Feds Lost! appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The U.S. Labor Department has extended mandatory overtime pay to more than four million white-collar workers, including some 100,000 workers in Missouri. A new ruling from the department more than doubles the weekly threshold for salaried workers exempt from overtime pay to $913 a week (or $47,476 a year), and it requires employers to pay time and a half to employees at or below the threshold for any week in which they work more than 40 hours.

With five hours of overtime pay, a salaried worker at the threshold level will go from making $913 in a week to $1,172.

That may sound good, but it reflects a fundamental lack of understanding of what leads to wage and job growth and upward mobility for workers. It sets a new high-water mark in government meddling in other people’s business—or businesses.

As the CEO of one restaurant chain points out, the new ruling will demote thousands of mid-level managers into “glorified crew members” whose overriding incentive is to log more time rather than get results and be rewarded with bonuses and promotions.

In calling for cumbersome timekeeping systems that will rein in those who see showing initiative and always doing more than the required minimum as a ticket to success, the new ruling restricts the freedom and flexibility of employers and a large portion of their front-line managers to come to mutually beneficial agreements on compensation and working hours.

Other unfortunate side-effects will also follow. According to a National Retail Federation study, the rule will cause employers to move about a third of salaried retail and restaurant workers to hourly status. Further, it will lead to reduced hours for many of those workers and a shift to hiring more temps.

The idea that government can force businesses to take money out of profits in order to pay more to different classes of workers is itself delusional. To force any business to pay more to a worker than his or her value to the enterprise is to ensure that the business will do its best to keep employment of such workers at an absolute minimum. Unlike governments, companies that can’t make money are unable to expand, and are subject to extinction. That is especially true for low-margin, hypercompetitive businesses such as hotels, restaurants, and retailing that have been especially critical of the ruling.

The White House is saying that millions of salaried workers will get a raise under the new overtime rule. However, according to the Federation of Independent Businesses, that is contradicted by the Labor Department’s forecasts of a decline in average pay rates of newly covered salaried workers of about 5.3% in 2017.

To paraphrase Churchill, the Obama administration’s plan to order up a raise for middle-class Americans through an administrative edict is as foolish as the man who stands in a bucket and expects to lift himself up by pulling on the handle.

In fact, the administration’s plan is worse than that. At least the man who pulls on the bucket handle does not descend to a lower level. But that is exactly what will happen through the ministrations of our know-it-all government.

The post Know-it-all Government Undermines Growth and Jobs appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In my remarks today, I hope to convince you of three things. First, the idea of the Common Core was noble, but misguided. Second, the Common Core State Standards will not significantly improve student achievement. And finally, the federal government created the controversy we have seen surrounding the Common Core over the past few years.

A Noble but Misguided Goal

The idea behind the Common Core is quite simple. Schools need standards because standards allow teachers to align the curriculum and allow teachers to see what they are to cover in each grade. I have been told many times that prior to schools adopting learning standards, it was not uncommon for students in the same grade in the same school to have radically different experiences depending on the teachers they had. Standards help alleviate that problem.

Following the infamous “A Nation at Risk Report” report of 1983, the standards movement was launched. This Reagan-administration report used alarming language to describe the nation’s education system. The authors of the report wrote:

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. . . . We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.

The report fueled a desire to improve the quality of our education system. State officials wanted to keep a watchful eye on how schools were performing. To do that they needed tests, and to have tests, they needed standards on which to base them.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, states began creating their own standards-based accountability systems. By 2000, 39 states had accountability systems in place. After the No Child Left Behind Act was passed in 2001, the remaining states were forced to follow suit. As a result, by the mid-2000s we had 50 different state standards and 50 different accountability systems.

These individual state standards created a problem. Students from families that moved from one state to another could miss entire topics if they were covered in one grade in one state and in a different grade in another. And, very importantly, the different tests did not allow us to compare one state to another because the accountability systems were different. In a state with very low standards a student might score “proficient,” but if he were in a state with very high standards he might score “basic.”

In reality, these were not problems created by having 50 state standards. They were problems that have always existed, and in many regards still exist. To be honest, these problems are relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. I mean, would you go through all of the effort that the Common Core designers went through just to improve transparency across states? I wouldn’t, especially when we have the National Assessment of Educational progress, known as the nation’s report card, which already allows us to compare one state to another. The most valid reason to support the Common Core comes from the thought that these standards could improve student achievement for all students. This is where the supporters for Common Core were misguided. This is where the logic for Common Core falters, and this is what brings me to my second point: that Common Core will not improve educational outcomes for students.

Common Core Will Not Improve Educational Outcomes

Let me ask: How might a system of new standards improve educational outcomes for all students? As far as I can tell, there are three options:

• The standards could better align the curriculum.
• The standards could be more rigorous.
• Or, the standards could create a broader platform for collaboration.

Let’s examine each of these.

The standards could better align the curriculum

Remember, states have already developed standards and aligned curricula. We’d have to believe that the Common Core has somehow come up with a better way to do these things—that they have discovered the special sauce or that the designers have figured out the right progression of learning. Something tells me that is not the case. While the quality of education research is improving, there is simply not enough evidence to know if we should teach fractions in third grade or fourth, or whether we should introduce money in kindergarten or first grade. I recently sat on a committee to rewrite Missouri’s state standards. I can tell you, while the process is informed by research, it often comes down to educated guessing. The individuals making these guesses are indeed educated, but in the end, many of these decisions are completely subjective.

So what is the second option?

The standards could be simply be more rigorous

They could raise the level of expectations for students. After all, students rise to the level of expectation, don’t they? If this were true, we would expect students in states that previously had rigorous standards to perform better than students in states with weaker standards. In a study for the Brookings Institution, Tom Loveless examined this very issue. He found no relationship between the rigor of state standards and student performance on the NAEP. None. Another thing to consider is that ratings of the Common Core Standards by the Fordham Foundation, a group that has been very supportive of the effort, do not place Common Core at the top of the standards list. They are among the best according to Fordham, but in Math and Language arts, other standards were rated higher. If we believe that rigor or the quality of standards matter, then it puzzles me why supporters of national standards would be so willing to go to bat for Common Core. Why not simply adopt the superior Massachusetts standards?

The Common Core will not improve student achievement by better aligning curriculum, nor can we improve student learning simply by being more rigorous. What’s left?

A system of national standards could create a broader platform for collaboration

Before Common Core, textbook companies often designed curricula for more populous states like California and Texas. As a result, states found it difficult to get textbooks that aligned with their individual standards. Common Core helps alleviate this problem. Moreover, it allows teachers throughout the country to collaborate on lessons related to the standards. While this sounds great, planning on a substantial benefit from collaboration is misguided. If it were true that more opportunities for collaboration led to success, then we would expect to see more populous states—those that drive textbook production—to have an advantage. Not only would they have textbooks tailored to their curricula, but with a larger number of teachers, they would have greater opportunities for collaboration. Yet, we don’t see a California or Texas advantage.

In the face of the evidence, there is simply no logical model that can explain how a set of standards that simply tells teachers what to teach will improve student learning. At least not today.

To be clear: Standards are important, and evidence does show that the standards-based accountability movement has led to modest learning gains for students. It seems, however, that the low-hanging fruit has been picked. Schools have already aligned curricula, and we have already begun focusing on student outcomes. New standards may have some impact on the margins, but by themselves they cannot substantially improve student achievement.

This is not intended to be a comprehensive indictment of Common Core. I don’t believe Common Core will ruin our education system. I don’t believe it is some grand conspiracy to dumb down America. I simply believe it is bad policy.

But if Common Core is innocuous, then why are we devoting so much time to it? We are having this conversation today because promoters of Common Core oversold, and because the federal government overstepped. As is often the case, the actions of the federal government came with unintended consequences.

The Federal Government Created the Common Core Controversy

Common Core did not begin as a federal initiative. I hesitate to call this a “state-led” initiative, and it certainly wasn’t a grass roots initiative. It was instigated by the National Governors’ Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. These two trade organizations began the process late in George W. Bush’s administration, but the idea of national standards goes back even further, to his father’s administration. Early on in the development of the Common Core standards, some thought that the standards would be adopted by a handful of states; it was hoped that other states would adopt them voluntarily over time. That changed with federal involvement.

In 2009, President Obama launched his Race to the Top initiative, a competitive grant program that was part of the stimulus plan. States could compete for $4.35 billion dollars in prize money by proposing a series of reforms. This came at a time when states were feeling the pressure of the recession and could ill afford to pass up an opportunity for additional federal funding. One of the reforms supported in Race to the Top was the adoption of learning standards that were common to a majority of states—what would become Common Core.

As part of the first round of the Race to the Top process, states had to submit their applications (including a commitment to the Common Core standards) by January 19, 2010. The second round was June 1. But the final draft of the standards was not even released until June of 2010. In other words, the federal government encouraged states to commit to common standards before those standards were even finalized. Still, states jumped at the opportunity. By 2013, 45 states had adopted the standards. President Obama took credit for this in his State of the Union address.

At the same time, the Obama administration doubled down on support of Common Core by offering to waive certain No Child Left Behind (NCLB) requirements to states that adopted Common Core. Schools and states were finding it increasingly difficult to comply with various aspects of NCLB; that is, they had failed to meet the mandated 100 percent proficiency marks. States could avoid penalties by promoting education reform policies championed by the administration, one of which was common standards.

Whether you support federal involvement or not, it is difficult to deny that the actions of the U.S. Department of Education caused or at least contributed to the controversy surrounding Common Core. What might have been a coalition of states that grew and developed over time was catapulted into the national stage as a new and radical reform that many states adopted, if not against their will, then at least under duress.

Conclusion

While the motivation behind the Common Core standards was good, the outcomes—at least in terms of liberty—are not. Common Core moves control of one of the most important aspects of education—what students learn—further from students and parents, and it concentrates power at the federal level. As Nobel-winning economist Milton Friedman once said, “Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.” The Common Core standards reduce individual liberty and academic freedom for states, teachers, and students. They nullify the great advantage of individual states—the ability to act as laboratories that allow us to evaluate different systems to see what works best—in favor of a monolithic approach that stifles innovation. Ultimately, the Common Core movement is an expression of the flawed mindset that we can mandate and orchestrate improved student achievement through centralized control. 

The post A Well Intentioned Disaster: A Presentation on the Merits of Common Core State Standards appeared first on Show-Me Institute.