As an adult, I don’t have much trouble adjusting my sleep schedule when I need to wake up early. I just go to bed earlier the night before.

Teenagers, however, don’t seem to work that way. Adolescent sleep patterns are biologically different, making it difficult for them to compensate for early wake-up times. As a result, one of the most effective policies for improving student outcomes in middle and high school is delaying school start times. A recent NBER study provides the latest evidence. The authors examine a California law requiring middle schools to start no earlier than 8:00 a.m. and high schools no earlier than 8:30 a.m. Most schools were affected. After the policy was implemented, total sleep duration increased by an average of about 40 minutes, and the share of students sleeping at least eight hours per night increased by 13 percent.

The effects on academic achievement were substantial. Math and English test scores increased by 0.08 to 0.10 standard deviations—roughly the difference between having a highly effective teacher rather than an average one. These gains are larger than what we would expect from any feasible class-size reduction in middle or high schools.

The study also examined mental health outcomes. While those estimates are less precise, the results suggest improvements in mental health, particularly for boys.

This new NBER study is not an outlier. It adds to a large body of well-identified research reaching the same conclusion: when schools start later, teenagers get more sleep and perform better.

The policy implications are straightforward, though implementation is not always easy. One concern is that parents cannot always shift their work schedules, especially when younger children need supervision before school. But for families facing this challenge, before-school programs can help fill the gap.

Another concern is transportation. Many districts stagger start times so buses can serve multiple schools, meaning some students must start early. Yet this is ultimately a scheduling problem. Districts could shift the entire school day later, allowing students to start and finish later while still leaving plenty of time for after-school activities and family dinners.

The evidence is clear that teenagers benefit greatly from delaying school start times. Missouri school districts should carefully weigh the trade-offs and consider practical adjustments to give our kids more time to sleep.

The post Teenagers Need More Time to Sleep appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Cory Koedel, director of education policy at the Show-Me Institute, about Missouri education policy following the 2026 legislative session. They discuss the governor’s A to F letter grade executive order, why literacy legislation failed to pass, leadership turmoil at DESE, Show-Me’s latest Report on the effects of open enrollment, the case for expanding charter schools in Missouri, and more.

The post Missouri’s Stalled Education Reforms with Cory Koedel appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Tim Carney, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, about why American culture may be making it harder to have and raise children. They discuss the long-term consequences of the declining U.S. birth rate, how intensive parenting culture may be driving childhood anxiety, the “travel team trap” and the arms race of youth sports, what cities and communities can do to become more family-friendly, and more.

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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00): I’m really looking forward to this conversation with Tim Carney. Thank you for joining us. You’re a senior fellow at AEI? I listened to a podcast the other day with a demographer from the University of Pennsylvania, and it was really good. I think they have a pretty strong department. He said that the United States reached peak child in 2012 or 2013, and basically

Tim Carney (00:06): That’s about right.

Susan Pendergrass (00:24): numbers have been going down on babies ever since. We definitely see that in Missouri. That was our biggest kindergarten cohort, and numbers are going down. I have five grandchildren under the age of five, and it seems to me this is going to be the policy conundrum of their generation. What do you think?

Tim Carney (00:44): It is certainly the biggest story of the next thirty years, policy, cultural, economic, everything. Another way of putting it: the number of births in the US peaked in 2007. Those kids born in 2007 either graduated last year or are graduating this week. Colleges know this very well. They’re all bracing for it. What about ten years from now when the workforce starts significantly shrinking?

Susan Pendergrass (01:03): Yeah.

Tim Carney (01:11): What about the towns that are built around a public school, elementary school, middle school, high school, and those start shrinking? Particularly in rural places, they’re seeing consolidation, two different public schools or two different Catholic schools consolidating. Can schools adjust to being small? How much is this a self-reinforcing spiral? When there are fewer kids, people aren’t used to seeing kids around. Yes, absolutely. It’s the biggest story of the next thirty years.

Susan Pendergrass (01:37): In your new book, Family Unfriendly, I think it’s interesting to juxtapose these two things. At the same time, we’re making it so much harder to raise kids in our culture, and we’ve raised the expectations for each and every one of them so high that people who are considering having kids find it daunting. It used to be, when I was young, people had six or seven kids and just hoped for the best. Everyone did okay. But now every child has these insane expectations, and I sympathize. If your child doesn’t roll over by six months old, they need occupational therapy now. That did not used to be the case. Doesn’t that work against it?

Tim Carney (02:12): Yes. A lot of economists have been praising quality over quantity parenting for years. Isabel Sawhill is an economist I’ve worked with for years, but I think she’s dead wrong when she says this is good, that people are choosing fewer kids so they can invest more in each one. That sounds right, but then you realize

Susan Pendergrass (02:33): Okay.

Tim Carney (02:53): the American Pediatrics journal says the number one cause of the epidemic of childhood anxiety we’re facing right now is lack of unsupervised play. So parents who are giving their kids the best of everything, making sure they’re not just wandering around the neighborhood, making sure they’re safe and busy with violin lessons and enrichment activities and a special private pitching coach for softball, that’s supposedly high-quality parenting. But it comes with low-quality results, which is very anxious kids, as well as stressed-out parents. People ask how my wife and I do it with six kids. I like giving answers about the special cool systems I have, but the real answer is a lot of times we just don’t.

Susan Pendergrass (03:41): Yeah. I feel like I’m probably going to say a lot of unpopular opinions on this. I never liked elite sports or travel sports, but I see travel sports going nationwide now. People from Texas are going to Florida, going to California for travel sports, which I always thought was kind of insane because it didn’t work for my family. We would normally have tournaments at Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. I also see kids being absorbed into the adult world more. Craft breweries have children trying to find something to do there, which is not a very normal environment for them. High-end restaurants have little kids in them, and I just feel like that takes away from the time when they’re supposed to just be kids.

Tim Carney (04:28): I actually think mixed-age mingling is something we need more of. Sometimes when I need to get work done, I’ll go to the local craft brewery to get away from my kids, and then somebody else has all their kids there. But those kids aren’t asking me any favors, so I’m fine with it. I think it’s good that we’re building places for parents to bring kids. The way I put it, though, and again

Susan Pendergrass (04:35): Okay. Yeah. That’s right.

Tim Carney (04:58): my local brewpub allows for this, but we need places where parents can bring kids and ignore them. I brought my kids to the brewery on a cold winter day when they couldn’t be outside because it was ten degrees and forty-mile-an-hour winds. I start the book with a story, in contrast to

Susan Pendergrass (05:05): Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Carney (05:27): high-intensity travel sports, of a program that we saw and then emulated in the Catholic parishes when we lived in Maryland, which was called Friday Night on the Field. There was T-ball and coach-pitch baseball, so this was kindergarten, first grade, second graders. Maybe 10 percent of the dads were coaching. The rest of them, if they were there, were hanging out with other dads. And the kids who were older

Susan Pendergrass (05:53): Yeah.

Tim Carney (05:56): were running around or playing wall ball. The kids who were younger were on a playground. When my wife found out what was going on there, she said, you are bringing all six of the kids to this while I stay home and rest. So I brought the kids there. I maybe had a baby in my carrier, ignoring the other four while one of them played T-ball. And that was exactly what suburban parents needed. Not this high-intensity mom and

Susan Pendergrass (06:08): Yeah, sure.

Tim Carney (06:22): child attached at the hip, but the whole family is there, it’s mixed age, and the children have freedom. This is a really important part of it in so many ways. One, that childhood is expansive and not just intensive. Two, that raising kids isn’t this hyper-intensive, constant thing. There was a commercial I cite in the book about Mother’s Day and how we need to honor mothers more. But it goes way overboard. It says they pretend they’re hiring for a job, and the requirements include you’re never allowed to sit down and you don’t get to eat meals until all of your colleagues are out for the evening. Being a mom is exhausting, and there are days where you don’t sit down, but come on. This is just not true.

Susan Pendergrass (07:00): The hardest job in the world. Yeah. I have three kids that are pretty close together. It was rocky there for a while, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. As a practical matter, how do you change culture? If the prescription is to back off on intensive parenting, it feels more like an arms race where people say, maybe I don’t even agree with it, but if every other kid is going to Kumon Math, my kid has to go to Kumon Math. What do you do?

Tim Carney (07:36): It’s a tragedy of the commons sort of thing. I discuss it particularly in sports. In chapter one I call it the travel team trap. The reason it’s a trap is you get stuck without wanting to. I know lots of people whose kid just wants to play JV baseball, but the coach says they have to play fall baseball too. But I’m a football player. If you’re saying I’ll miss some reps and the other guys might get ahead of me, well

Susan Pendergrass (07:57): Yeah.

Tim Carney (08:05): that’s one thing. But then the coach says you’re shirking if you’re not playing year round. We have sought out schools and programs that explicitly do not do that, but we had to seek them out. It’s harder to be a backup point guard on a varsity basketball team if you’re going to play three sports, so you might get cut from the team. To some extent the parent is just saying, I really just want them to make the team, and that’s why I’m doing this.

With the academics, there’s a similar dynamic. We put our daughter, who was struggling in math, in a remedial program, something like Kumon. When we showed up, we realized, this was in Northern Virginia, specifically McLean, which is a wealthy area. Nobody else there was remedial. Everyone else there was an A student whose parents wanted their third grader

Susan Pendergrass (08:52): I see. Okay.

Tim Carney (09:03): to be at the sixth-grade level so they could get into Thomas Jefferson, the special super-magnet high school.

Susan Pendergrass (09:08): Yeah. If kindergarten is the new second grade and preschool is the new kindergarten, where does it end? I just feel like we’re overwhelming parents. You said it’s raising anxiety in kids. It’s definitely raising anxiety in parents too. It’s making people not want to be parents. It feels very stressful right now. There are books and apps, and there’s even a book on how to be a more free-range parent, which is strange to me. Does somebody need to be told how to do this? You just let them go outside.

Tim Carney (09:46): No, it does take work. And another thing is, to quote what a wise woman once said, it takes a village to raise a child. Being free-range is easier when other people are doing it. We used to back up to a big playground, and nine times out of ten my kids were the only ones there unsupervised. I actually got an email from a neighboring parent. It wasn’t criticism. It was saying your kids are great and it’s great that you let them run free, and asking if I could talk to them about letting their own kids run free. If you’re in a neighborhood where there are kids but they don’t come out, you might have to build organized activities. We didn’t do that growing up. We just played stickball. My mom wouldn’t organize it. We did it on our own. But now parents might have to be more involved. It’s a little bit of labor, but you connect the families, connect the kids, build the trust.

Susan Pendergrass (10:19): Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Carney (10:44): The community, and we talked about policy. I’m in DC. Everybody wants it to be a federal bill, this or that. The fact is it’s a cultural thing, as I said, and the community is going to have to have these organic, or sometimes deliberate and intentional, structures to help parents raise kids. The more parents who are walking around the neighborhood, the safer the neighborhood is. The more parents making it clear that their kids are going out and should come home when the streetlights turn on, the more that’s known, the safer it is. Remember when you and I were young, other people’s parents would correct us when we were wrong? Now, I have close friends I know I can do that with, but a lot of parents say they’re terrified of correcting someone else’s kid because they’ve been screamed at by the other parents. Your kid was

Susan Pendergrass (11:25): Mad at us. Yes.

Tim Carney (11:41): about to shove gravel down the throat of her two-year-old sister at the playground. And that’s my job too, if I’m right there. That social trust and community takes work. There are people who say it takes a village, and they can’t find their village. You have to build your village. I’m one of those conservatives who really believes that.

Susan Pendergrass (11:54): Are we willing to do the work? Do you see people doing it?

Tim Carney (12:09): We’re too individualistic, and that’s part of all of this. But I’m also one who believes the burden is really on you. You can’t wait for somebody else to do it. You build the community, and then you can sit back and bear the fruits of your labor as a neighbor yells at your kid so you don’t have to.

Susan Pendergrass (12:25): You’ve also talked about building family-friendly communities. There’s a conundrum we face in Missouri: no one wants to live in downtown St. Louis. A lot of cities face that, and St. Louis is probably at the forefront. We’re in the top five for cities in decline, and St. Louis and Pittsburgh are going to serve as examples, because

Tim Carney (12:28): Yes. Mm-hmm.

Susan Pendergrass (12:53): we hit that death spiral with more deaths than births a while ago, and all of our demographic trends are going to be out ahead of everyone else. People are going to look to us. But parents don’t want to raise their kids in the city of St. Louis. And if you don’t have children, you just keep getting older. Tell me a little bit about what has happened to make cities unfriendly to families and what they could do to change it.

Tim Carney (13:19): I’m a believer that we need all of the above. I’m very pro-suburbs. That’s where I raised my kids, that’s where I went to high school. But before high school I grew up in Manhattan, and I’m very pro raising kids in cities if you can do it. The number one thing is crime, or crime and disorder. You saw this a lot during the 2020s when people would say, who cares if people are hopping over the turnstile, so what if people are smoking pot, that homeless guy sleeping on the corner isn’t going to do anything. All those little things that adults can, maybe they shouldn’t but can, turn a blind eye to are disturbing to kids and disturbing to parents. Crime and disorder needs to be put in its proper place.

But then also, this is something where liberals tend to be better than conservatives: walkability and public amenities. I don’t mean my ability to walk to work or to my favorite cocktail bar. What I really mean is my ability to walk my baby in a stroller somewhere nice, and my eight-year-old and ten-year-old’s ability to walk together to a cool park, and more importantly to walk together to their friend’s house. Cities can actually do that better than suburbs to some extent, because they can put in those amenities, which are playgrounds, parks, and other things. That means traffic. Cars have to slow down. This is something I’m really studying now at AEI. The federal government has a walkability index, and it’s laughably bad. It’s published by the EPA, so it doesn’t actually show you

Susan Pendergrass (14:45): It’s about car exhaust.

Tim Carney (15:10): whether your kids can walk somewhere without getting run over by a car. We’re trying to see if there’s a way to improve this. That’s part of the built environment. That’s explicitly a government duty. Are the roads too wide? Are the cars too fast? Are there crosswalks? Are there trails? Because once you can let your kids walk around without getting run over by cars and without running into meth heads, their childhood is so much better. And your family life is so much simpler.

Susan Pendergrass (15:41): What about safety? I think it was you mentioning something like setting up safety zones within which families could have some reasonable degree of comfort that police respond and that crime is being attended to.

Tim Carney (15:58): A big part of raising kids, in my view, is you want to give them a sort of walled garden and let them be free in that garden. Every year that garden gets bigger, and at some point you realize the walls are gone and they’re out in the world. For me, this was a back campus at St. Bernadette’s and St. Andrew’s, the parishes where we had these programs. The kids were running free, but unless there was a kid who was going to run into traffic, and there are those kids, and probably some of your viewers and listeners have one who they know is a flight risk, in general they were going to be safe. When I would leave my kids alone in a museum, I tell the story of my son Sean, who three times I’ve totally lost him, but it was always in a botanical garden or a museum or someplace similar,

Susan Pendergrass (16:33): Yeah.

Tim Carney (16:55): where someone would say, hey, who are you with, four-year-old? And then slowly expanding that realm of freedom. You can walk around the neighborhood but can’t cross over Route 50, and then slowly it gets bigger and bigger. Community norms are really what make that possible. That two-year-old shouldn’t be walking down the street alone. That six-year-old is fine.

Susan Pendergrass (16:57): Yeah. Who are you with? But haven’t we kind of ruined that with the twenty-four-hour news cycle where everybody believes their children are at risk of being abducted by a stranger at every moment?

Tim Carney (17:35): Yes, and this is part of the problem I run into. When I say we need to let kids be free to run around like we Gen Xers were, people say it’s so much more dangerous now. It’s not. Statistically, almost the whole country has gotten over the violent crime wave that came with the George Floyd unrest and COVID lockdowns. That caused a spike in all the cities, and every place in the country right now is much, much safer than it was in 1984 when I was six. By a long shot. Every parent’s worst nightmare is their child getting abducted by a stranger. These cases happen, they end up in the news, and so we all think they’re happening all the time and all around us. Evolutionarily, we don’t have a brain that can understand a country of 340 million people.

Susan Pendergrass (18:08): Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Carney (18:32): So if there are three major cases a year and people talk about it for a few weeks, it seems like there’s some kid who got kidnapped half the year. It happens fewer than a hundred times a year. If you see numbers saying children are abducted ten thousand or a hundred thousand times, those are bad situations, but they’re not stranger abductions. In almost every case, the boyfriend goes off with the kid without the mom’s permission, or the grandparents have custody and then the mom comes and takes the kid. These are not good situations, but they’re not a kid who was left alone at a playground and then shoved in the back of a white van.

Susan Pendergrass (19:20): To the extent that we could bring any of that back, and this is where I’m a little pessimistic, I think kids learn decision-making in a way that isn’t being taught now, so that we end up working with people who never made an independent decision in their life. I certainly was out and got hurt and had to figure out: am I hurt enough to go home? Am I hurt enough to keep going?

Tim Carney (19:37): Ask a boss who has hired somebody right out of college recently. Yes.

Susan Pendergrass (19:45): Got a flat tire or whatever, we had to make decisions on the fly. I just don’t think we’re building that type of independence and resilience into our kids, and it’s a loss at the global level.

Tim Carney (19:58): Absolutely. Employers should all really be getting behind what you and I are saying right now, because if they want to hire a kid out of high school or college who can make a decision. I always remember the time I used to mow lawns in high school. Once I showed up at a lawn across town, used his mower, and it just didn’t start.

Susan Pendergrass (20:05): Yes.

Tim Carney (20:21): He was not home. He had a number on the fridge. I called and said, Mr. Zellinger, your mower’s not starting. And he said, good news is I don’t come home until Monday. So you have between now and then to get the lawn mowed, and I’m confident you’ll figure out a way to do it. It wasn’t an assignment. It was a responsibility. The best way to give your kids a responsibility that’s not an assignment they can just beg out of is to let them be free. And all of a sudden they’re like, wait a second.

Susan Pendergrass (20:40): Yes. Right.

Tim Carney (20:51): I need to be there in twenty minutes. How do I make that happen? Or I’m lost, how do I get unlost? And again, the children suffer. It’s not just that they go through life happy and dumb. They end up more anxious because life will inevitably bring them these problems. There is an epidemic of childhood and adolescent anxiety, according to

Susan Pendergrass (20:56): Yeah.

Tim Carney (21:19): HHS, and it’s caused by the fact that kids don’t have enough freedom in childhood.

Susan Pendergrass (21:29): I want to circle back to actionable items. What can we do about it, realistically?

Tim Carney (21:33): On the parental freedom side, there’s not that much the government can do except build better sidewalks, crosswalks, and pathways. Housing reform is interesting here. I’m a big believer in suburbs, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be more dense. One thing that’s really freeing is when you can buy a house in the neighborhood you want to live in,

Susan Pendergrass (22:01): Yeah.

Tim Carney (22:01): because your mom lives there and you have grandma to babysit. That’s a huge predictor. So many people in Washington think everybody needs universal daycare paid for by the government. Most people want mom to work a little less and grandma and grandpa to chip in, with neighbors to fill the gaps. More housing is what enables that to happen. But for the most part, we need more robust community institutions and more robust community connections. And every parent out there has to think: maybe I’m going to be the one who does this. There’s a field across the street from your house. Start a soccer league, bring food, run a grill. This is exactly what we did with T-ball. Throw in some money to pay for it. Buy the burgers at Sam’s Club or Costco and feed everyone. Bring your six-year-old to play soccer. This is not his or her path to a college scholarship. It’s a fun thing for the families to do. But you have to start it. We started it because we saw somebody else had started it. A lot of this is going to be on an individual level. On the policy side of supporting families, there’s a lot of debate about a child tax credit, a baby bonus, universal child care, and requiring employers to give parents parental leave.

Susan Pendergrass (22:58): Yeah. A lot. Leave.

Tim Carney (23:22): I write about that a lot at AEI. AEI scholars disagree about it. In the book, what I argue is we need a child tax credit, and it needs to be a little bigger. A family of eight making a hundred thousand dollars should not be paying the same taxes as a family of two or three making a hundred thousand dollars. That should be reflected in the tax code, because this isn’t just some consumer thing. It’s not like saying, I bought a Tesla, I deserve a tax credit. It’s saying, we’re eight people, we need to eat eight people’s worth of food, and the tax code should reflect that. But on the other programs, forcing employers to offer certain benefits or creating government-run childcare, I don’t think any of that works.

Susan Pendergrass (24:02): I mean, the Nordic countries do all of it and they have population decline.

Tim Carney (24:05): They have worse population decline than we did. There was a slight uptick, and one of the arguments I make is that subsidized childcare is not really a family subsidy, it’s a work subsidy. Notice who’s lobbying for it as these things bubble up. It’s going to be the Chamber of Commerce. I’m fundamentally a family guy. I think we need work. Part of fulfilling our human dignity is doing work. But that doesn’t always have to be paid work. In the book I defend stay-at-home moms and dads. I really think our society should be oriented around families. Now that’s a little heretical these days because, well, what if you choose not to have a family? Fine. There have always been people who chose not to have families. But that doesn’t mean families can’t be the central organizing principle of our culture.

Susan Pendergrass (25:04): More people now are choosing not to have families. And a lot of cities are pursuing those people, the childless professionals with Top Golfs and loft apartments.

Tim Carney (25:10): I quote a local official in Family Unfriendly saying families are a cost and businesses are an asset. Families come in, they pay income taxes and property taxes, but then they require sewage, they require schools, they complain that the playgrounds and the sidewalks are in bad shape. Businesses are mostly revenue. Washington, DC has explicitly said they don’t just want anyone to move in. They want the college-educated 22-to-28-year-old, meaning a person who gets to spend every dime of disposable income in the restaurants and bars and shops in DC. And if you look at the housing being built in Falls Church, right near me, it’s all studio and one bedroom, because that’s what the local government wants: more singletons who go out and spend their money. Sometimes we do things that are really bad for the economy. My wife makes homemade dinner. We almost never go out. A lot of our activity doesn’t involve paying anyone. The kids are just playing wiffle ball. All of that is horrible for the economy.

Susan Pendergrass (26:19): Yeah. Falls Church used to be such a big attraction for young families because of the schools. I’ve seen the shiny buildings going up recently, and I’m shocked by it. That’s interesting to me.

Tim Carney (26:44): I think it’s good to build more housing. But if it helps boomers sell their single-family homes to move into apartments, then it frees up family housing. This is a really complicated thing. We need more housing, but so many of the YIMBYs just want massive apartment buildings with as many apartments as possible, and that’s family unfriendly. What we really need, in my opinion, is slightly more dense suburbs,

Susan Pendergrass (26:54): Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Carney (27:14): a starter home that somebody can buy. That’s basically impossible to build, especially in a high-cost area like this, or in the nicer suburbs around St. Louis and Kansas City. You’re not going to build them because of the regulatory overhead. If I build a single-family house and sell it for two hundred thousand dollars, that’s not worth it. I’m either going to build a McMansion or an apartment building.

Susan Pendergrass (27:26): They’re not building them. No. They’re doing the six hundreds. Yeah.

Tim Carney (27:41): Getting rid of a lot of the regulations that make it impossible to build a starter home is one of the best things that states and counties can do.

Susan Pendergrass (27:49): I really appreciate you coming on to talk about it. It’s a thorny issue. Countries that have really tried their best to encourage people to have more children haven’t been successful. This is going to be one of the biggest policy conundrums of the next few decades. The earlier we start talking about it, the better. I’ve been talking about it for at least five years in Missouri. We just had our smallest high school graduating class two years ago. People ask, where did the people go? They didn’t go anywhere. The babies haven’t been born, and we need to get used to it so that we can start thinking about how to solve it. I love a lot of your ideas. We have to think about solutions to this because if it feels overwhelming to have children, then people won’t have them.

Tim Carney (28:41): That’s exactly right.

Susan Pendergrass (28:42): Family Unfriendly. And your other book was Alienated America.

Tim Carney (28:44): Family Unfriendly. And Alienated America, which is about the collapse of community, which is upstream from this problem.

Susan Pendergrass (28:53): Lack of social capital and all of that. I think these are going to be some of the most important issues we can think about going forward. I really appreciate you coming on to talk about it.

Tim Carney (29:00): Thank you, my pleasure.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Is America Family Unfriendly? with Tim Carney appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal reports, high-tax states continue to bleed residents and income. Between 2022 and 2023, California lost a net $11.9 billion in adjusted gross income (AGI), New York $9.9 billion, and Illinois $6 billion. Higher earners with income over $200,000 drove much of this exodus. In Massachusetts, they accounted for 70% of outflows, doubling the 2019 share.

Meanwhile, no-income-tax states saw the largest gains. Florida added $20.6 billion in AGI, Texas $5.5 billion, and Tennessee $2.8 billion. Even non-income tax states with more frigid climes saw significant inflows, including Wyoming and South Dakota. In short, states without income taxes dominated the top destinations for both people and wealth.

Missouri, with its current 4.7% top individual income tax rate, sits in the middle of the pack. While we are not a major loser like California or New York, we are far from the magnet status of Florida or Tennessee. Drawing upon IRS migration data, past Show-Me Institute reports have shown that Missouri has consistently lost more people and more income than it gained. This has been particularly the case among working-age and higher-earning households seeking better economic climates.

These national migration patterns emerge at a pivotal moment for Missouri. State lawmakers recently approved HJRs 173 and 174, a proposed constitutional amendment backed by Governor Mike Kehoe that would ask voters to authorize the gradual phaseout of the state’s individual income tax. If approved, the general assembly would begin reducing the tax as revenues grow and would have the authority to speed up the process while modernizing Missouri’s outdated sales tax code.

Eliminating the income tax would align Missouri with proven winners in the migration data, making our state far more attractive to high earners, businesses, and young professionals—key drivers of growth. Moreover, we sit right next door to Illinois, which, while losing top earners at a breakneck pace, is also ranked the least friendly state for middle-class earners according to one report.

The pattern is clear. People and capital continue to flow to states with lower tax burdens and pro-growth policies. Missouri has the chance to join those states. By modernizing our tax code now, we can shut off the outflow of the past and build a more prosperous future.

The post Missouri’s Opportunity to Attract Talent: Latest IRS Data on “Voting with Their Feet” appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Missouri’s property tax system works best when the assessments are accurate, the tax base is wide, and the rates are low. That combination will help grow Missouri’s economy for everyone while properly funding the necessary functions of local government. However, a radical change in the system is being put before voters in Webster, Christian, Lawrence, and Dade counties in April. These four counties will vote on whether to prohibit any property tax increases due to reassessments. Current law requires local governments to roll back tax rates as assessments increase, but we all know that taxes still go up, sometimes substantially.

At the Show-Me Institute, we support low taxes, and I am well-aware of how tempting this will be to voters. But using market valuations in reassessment to set tax levels is a good system. While our property tax system needs reforms, eliminating any and all tax increases from reassessments will make Missouri more dependent on other taxes that hurt our economy far more than property taxes do. Hate them as much as you wish, but property taxes indisputably harm economic growth less than other taxes do.

These property tax limitations would reduce the ability of school districts to fund themselves and would make them more dependent on state aid. Consider the following: school districts in St. Louis County regularly receive at least 80% of their funding from local sources, primarily property taxes, and some are over 90%. It is nowhere near that level in Southwest Missouri. Nixa school district in Christian County is only 54% locally funded, while Marshfield school district in Webster is only 46% locally funded. Even Springfield school district, the largest school district in Greene County, where no property taxes changes are proposed, is only 58% locally funded. These changes would make school districts in these counties more dependent on state aid, not less. Again, I’m aware that many voters may view that as a benefit, but it is anything but.

Numerous other harmful effects would come from diluting the market forces (in the form of assessments based on market values) that form the basis of property taxation. California provides us with an example of the harms of these types of property tax caps with its famous Proposition 13, passed in 1978, which dramatically limited increases in property assessments and taxes. Proposition 13 certainly had its intended effect of lowering property taxes for California homeowners. However, it also reduced mobility, significantly increased alternative taxes, limited homeownership opportunities, and caused substantial tax disparities for similar properties receiving similar services. These negative consequences are exactly what these four counties would experience over the long run.

There are also significant constitutional concerns with this legislation. Missouri Constitution Chapter X, Section 3 states that “taxes . . . shall be uniform upon the same class or subclass of subjects within the territorial limits of the authority levying the tax.” So, consider the issue of the Logan-Rogersville R-VIII school district. This school district serves families in three counties. If voters approve these tax changes, the property tax system in one of those three counties would remain unchanged (Greene), while in the other two (Webster and Christian) it would be illegal to have a tax increase from reassessment. It would certainly seem unconstitutional for property owners within the same taxing district who own the same type of property (single-family homes) to face different tax and assessment systems for the same services.

We need property tax reform in Missouri, but this total limitation is too severe. If enacted, the property tax proposals before the voters in these four fast-growing counties would make the region’s overall tax system worse, not better. I hope voters will look past the easy appeal of a tax limit to think about the long-term harms.

The post The Wrong Way to Fix Property Taxes appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A version of this commentary appeared in the St. Louis Business Journal.

Missouri’s property tax system works best when the assessments are accurate, the tax base is wide, and the rates are low. That combination will help grow Missouri’s economy for everyone while properly funding the necessary functions of local government. However, a radical change in the system is being put before voters in St. Charles, Jefferson, and Franklin counties in April. These three counties will vote on whether to prohibit any property tax increases due to reassessments. Current law requires local governments to roll back tax rates as assessments increase, but we all know that taxes still go up, sometimes substantially.

This change would also reduce the ability of school districts to fund themselves and would make them more dependent on state aid. Consider the following: Parkway school district in St. Louis County is 89% funded by local taxes. However, Fox school district in Jefferson County is only 51% locally funded, while Wentzville school district in St. Charles is only 64% locally funded, and St. Clair school district in Franklin is just 45% locally funded. These changes would make school districts in these three counties more dependent on state aid, not less. Again, I’m aware that many voters may view that as a benefit, but it is anything but.

At the Show-Me Institute, we support low taxes, and I am well-aware of how tempting this will be to voters. But using market valuations in reassessment to set tax levels is a good system. While our property tax system needs reforms, eliminating any and all tax increases from reassessments will make Missouri more dependent on other taxes that hurt our economy far more than property taxes do. Hate them as much as you wish, but property taxes indisputably harm economic growth less than other taxes do.

Numerous other harmful effects would come from diluting the market forces (in the form of assessments based on market values) that form the basis of property taxation. California provides us with an example of the harms of these types of property tax caps with its famous Proposition 13, passed in 1978, which dramatically limited increases in property assessments and taxes. Proposition 13 certainly had its intended effect of lowering property taxes for California homeowners. However, it also reduced mobility, significantly increased alternative taxes, limited homeownership opportunities, and caused substantial tax disparities for similar properties receiving similar services. These negative consequences are exactly what St. Charles, Jefferson, and Franklin counties would experience over the long run.

There are also significant constitutional concerns with this legislation. Missouri Constitution Chapter X, Section 3 states that “taxes . . . shall be uniform upon the same class or subclass of subjects within the territorial limits of the authority levying the tax.” So, consider the issue of the Meramec Valley R-III school district. This school district serves families in three counties. If voters approve these tax changes, the property tax system in one of those three counties would remain unchanged (St. Louis), while in the other two (Jefferson and Franklin) it would be illegal to have a tax increase from reassessment. It would certainly seem unconstitutional for property owners within the same taxing district who own the same type of property (single-family homes) to face different tax and assessment systems for the same services.

We need property tax reform in Missouri, but this total limitation is too severe. If enacted, the property tax proposals before the voters in these three fast-growing counties would make the region’s overall tax system worse, not better. I hope voters will look past the easy appeal of a tax limit to think about the long-term harms.

The post The Wrong Way to Fix Property Taxes appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I was reading a recent post by Chad Aldeman at Aldeman on Education that touched on something I’ve been thinking about a lot: the rise of disorder in our schools.

I’ve heard anecdotes for a while, but I first saw it clearly in data while working on a project about teacher working conditions. Since the pandemic, teachers report substantial declines in their working conditions along many dimensions. Most notably, they report a sharp increase in classroom disruptions. We are losing control of the learning environment, and that’s a serious mistake.

Aldeman was thinking about the same thing in his recent post, where he opines on a different post by Noah Smith about the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system in California. Bear with me for just a moment while I make the connection from Smith’s post on BART to education.

Smith describes how BART installed fare gates, after which crime and maintenance costs dropped sharply. As it turns out, a small number of riders were responsible for most of the disorder and they weren’t paying fares. Once the gates went up, order was restored. Smith’s conclusion is simple and persuasive: “You only have to restrain a very small number of people in order to maintain public order.”

He continues:

Progressives often argue against measures like fare gates, labeling them “carceral” and “racist”. This demonstrates a principle that I call anarchyfare — the idea that eliminating society’s rules serves as a kind of welfare benefit for marginalized people. But in fact, most poor and marginalized people are just peace-loving people . . . [and] they are the chief victims of the tiny number of chaotic individuals who destroy the commons and make public spaces and public services unusable.

I fear this is what is happening in our schools.

I worry most about students who attend disadvantaged and low-performing schools, where data show that behavioral problems are more prevalent. Some educators—maybe mostly administrators—seem to believe that tolerating disruptive behavior is compassionate. But I think they’re wrong. It does not prepare the misbehaving student to be a functional adult in a civil society, and more importantly, it disrupts learning for the majority of students who are not disruptive, robbing them of the opportunities afforded by a strong education.

If we care about equity and opportunity, we must restore order through stronger, consistently enforced disciplinary policies in our public schools.

The post Anarchyfare in Our Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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Susan Pendergrass (00:00)
Great. Mike McShane, EdChoice, always great to have you on the podcast. I read your Substack, Informed Choice. I know you do not write them all, but you write a lot of them, and I think they are super interesting. A month or so ago, there was a lot of “what’s out, what’s in,” closing down 2025 and starting 2026. I really liked your post about six words for 2026, but…

Mike McShane (00:03)
Always great to be with you. Thanks for having me. I tried to.

Susan Pendergrass (00:28)
I want to talk about that, but generally speaking, I have been having this feeling, and I think we have even talked about this on the podcast, that something has changed in K–12 education in the United States. Something seems different than it did. You track the number of kids in private school choice programs, which took forever to get to a million, and now it is like a million and a half, right? It just seems to have been growing so fast.

Mike McShane (00:52)
Yeah. I think there has definitely been a shift. I have noticed that, with the start of the year and legislative sessions starting across the country, I am talking to journalists and other folks, and it seems like the normal conversation I would have had in the past was, “Are we going to have these programs, is there going to be choice, or what?” Now it is, “What is the shape of it going to be?”

So much of choice now is being taken as a given. I think we are even seeing that within public school districts. Even in states that might not have private school choice or robust charter schools, they are at least saying, “Parents are going to need to have choice, and maybe we can keep the genie in the bottle by just having it within public school districts, or in between public school districts.” But the idea that we are going to go back to residentially assigned public schools…

Susan Pendergrass (01:41)
Like Kansas.

Mike McShane (01:50)
…with the odd aberration here and there, it just seems like that shift has happened. Now it is a question of what it is going to look like, and it is going to look different in different states. It is not a “whether,” it is a “how.”

Susan Pendergrass (02:03)
That’s right, because we have a whole bunch of second-generation choosers, right? We have parents of young kids whose parents chose it, so they are not, like you said, going to go backwards.

Another interesting outcome you have talked about over the years is that the Catholic school movement is growing again, right? Like in Florida, we are seeing a resurgence in Catholic schools, and in Iowa, because parents did not necessarily not want to send their kids to Catholic schools. Some got mad about the scandals…

Mike McShane (02:05)
Yeah, for sure. Iowa, Florida, and probably other places when data comes out, for sure.

Susan Pendergrass (02:32)
…or they did not want to pay tuition, and now they can. And certainly this survey you all have done for so long, on where parents would send their kids to school versus where they do send their kids to school, maybe we are going to see some sort of convergence where parents can actually send their kids to the school they want.

A couple of the words you said are going to be big in education in 2026, “participants,” is that right? Participants.

Mike McShane (02:34)
Yeah. Totally, absolutely. “Participants” is one of them.

Susan Pendergrass (03:02)
And “supply side.” What do you mean by “participants”?

Mike McShane (03:06)
“Participants” is, there is this big debate now, and in the piece I started with very general words that are part of the broader conversation, and then I got very narrow into school choice research words. “Participants” is kind of a school choice research word, but not entirely. I think it is going to be part of broader debates about choice in general.

There is a big question out there, who uses these programs? Who is going to participate? There are competing theories. Skeptics say it is going to be all rich kids, or kids who are already in private schools. Stronger advocates say it will be low-income kids, or kids desperate for more options.

The answer is probably somewhere in the middle, and it will probably be different in different places at different times. Some of the emerging research suggests that when universal private school choice programs first start, for reasons that are perfectly predictable, students who are already in private schools are the first movers.

Susan Pendergrass (04:01)
Sure.

Mike McShane (04:28)
That is probably because private schools find out about these programs and have an audience. They can say, “Hey, you all know how you are paying to go here? Now you do not have to do that anymore.” And then over time, the circle expands outward.

Susan Pendergrass (04:33)
They pass out a piece of paper in every backpack, yeah. “You should get this.”

Mike McShane (04:48)
More and more, those families have neighbors, cousins, and people they play YMCA basketball with. The word gets out over time. A lot of traditional channels for educating people do not work as well. It is not like everyone watches the nightly news or reads the local newspaper.

Susan Pendergrass (05:08)
“Put it on your website.” That’s a Missouri legislative mainstay, put it on your website.

Mike McShane (05:14)
So a lot of this comes out via word of mouth or discussions. You could look at the same state and see participation change over time.

Because these programs are rolling out in different states at different times, there is not going to be one national answer to who is participating. It could be the first year in Mississippi, but the second year in Alabama, and the makeup of students will be different. Because of the nationalized nature of coverage, people will keep pushing for “the one answer,” but there isn’t one. Though, to be fair, some people will say there is. I do not think that will be true.

Susan Pendergrass (06:07)
Yeah, I get a ton of questions around the rural issue. Either it is going to be the demise of our rural school system because we are all going to close, or rural families do not need it, which are opposites. It is opposites, right?

Mike McShane (06:09)
Yeah. It cannot be both. And yet a frequent criticism is that it will be both of them.

Susan Pendergrass (06:25)
But I get that a lot. “There are no private schools for them to go to,” and “it is going to cause rural schools to close.”

Certainly in Missouri, even our MOScholars program is quite small, and we do not really have charter schools outside of two districts, two very far away places. So I think for a lot of folks in Missouri, it is mysterious, who would do this, and why would anyone want it? And of course, “All the poor kids are going to go to the wealthy school districts.” Still a lot of talk about property taxes. It is almost like 2005 in Missouri, a lot of that going on.

But the reality is, in long-running programs, and now I am thinking open enrollment, anywhere you let parents pick, you get a lot of rural participation. They have the fewest choices, right? And you get a lot of urban participation, and some suburban participation. Like you said, I do not think you can…

Mike McShane (06:55)
Yeah, right.

Susan Pendergrass (07:20)
I have had so many parents over the years say, “We do not need that here because all our schools are good.” And I am like, I promise you there is a child who got on the bus with a stomach ache this morning because they did not want to go to school, for whatever reason. They think the teachers do not like them, or they are being bullied, whatever it is. I promise you there are families who would leave if they could easily do it.

Mike McShane (07:30)
Yeah, for sure. Totally.

One thing that is going to be interesting, as we watch this play out, with questions about who is participating and who is leaving public schools, is that there are broader trends of public school enrollment decreasing. You hear in some states, “My gosh, all these public schools are closing because of choice programs.” But the state next door that does not have a choice program, their public schools are closing too, because there are just fewer kids than there were before.

So that is another thing we have to disentangle, the broader population trends. I was just seeing something earlier about how congressional seats and electoral college seats are going to change because of population shifts.

Susan Pendergrass (08:17)
It’s huge.

Mike McShane (08:26)
You look at states like New York and California losing large numbers of people, Florida and Texas increasing numbers of people. These are people in general, because that is how it all happens. We have to start with that baseline and then layer these other things on top, because I feel like school choice is going to get blamed for this, even in places where it does not exist.

Susan Pendergrass (08:36)
Yeah. I cannot tell you how many times I have talked about this and shocked people. Every school district in St. Louis County, for example, has declining enrollment by large numbers. Clayton’s declining enrollment, Ladue declining enrollment, all declining enrollment. People are like, “Where are they going?” And I say, “They were not born.” They simply were not born.

We had our biggest kindergarten cohort in 2013. That moved through to senior year of high school like two years ago. It is just demographics. They just were not born.

Mike McShane (09:00)
Right? Yeah.

Susan Pendergrass (09:20)
We have net out-migration of some groups of people, people with bachelor’s degrees, but for sure, it is demographics. These kids were not born.

There is going to be this push and pull between five-to-seventeen-year-olds and retirees, basically, because we are getting more old people and fewer young people. Do we build a school or a nursing home? I think it is going to be a thing.

And we still have school districts getting bonds, 30-year bonds, to build schools and buy buses. I do not know if that is the right answer. At least the charter school sector, and probably similarly the private school sector, figured out how to not be in the real estate business, how to lease a building, or do different types of arrangements. They are going to benefit from this, while the public school system is still building schools. The kids are not being born, but we will see how that plays out.

Another thing you mentioned, one of your words I have been thinking about a lot, two of them, is “transparency.” I have wondered, can I start calling accountability transparency? Because accountability is kind of negative, but transparency, of course.

And you talk about “rage bait.” Sorry, I am rolling these into one, but with early media stories around some of these private school choice programs, like Arizona, people really jumped on what parents were spending their money on. As though they cannot be trusted to spend this money, in the way the public school system can be trusted with billions, I mean trillions, of dollars. Parents cannot be trusted with this $8,000, they will simply…

Mike McShane (10:52)
Totally. This is the irony. The irony is kind of like the discussion earlier, how there are no places in rural America, and everyone will leave rural schools to go to these non-existent places. Both cannot be true at the same time.

We cannot say these programs are not transparent and then talk about all the individual purchases families are making. That has to be transparent for you to be able to make those arguments. It is kind of a shell game people are playing when they talk about transparency.

When you say, “Here are ways in which ESA programs are not transparent,” your research is a perfect example of the opposite. Transaction-level data, you have published papers that offer transaction-level data on every purchase in the ESA program.

Susan Pendergrass (11:59)
Trust me, there are hundreds of thousands of records.

Mike McShane (12:00)
Right, hundreds of thousands of records that are available for anybody to look at.

I think this is actually good. We need to have discussions about what should be included in these programs and what should not. It is an education savings account, not just a savings account, so we have to draw the borders around what is an educational purchase and what is not.

We live in a big, vibrant democracy, so we need to have these discussions. Should you be able to buy a trampoline, or a Lego set, or whatever? Let’s talk about it. That’s fine. Maybe we decide in some cases it is allowed, and in some cases it is not.

This is part of transparency and accountability. You are democratically accountable, we need to participate in this.

But I am still blown away by the number of people who claim these programs are not transparent, when what we know about what parents are doing is more granular and more detailed than any public school district, any charter school network, almost any institution you are going to see. You just do not get transaction-level data on anything.

We can debate whether those are good purchases or not good purchases, but to say they are not being transparent is wild to me.

Susan Pendergrass (13:09)
No, I mean, my kids all went to public school. They certainly went to amusement parks. They certainly watched a lot of movies. They would not want anyone scrutinizing every, you know, you have 30 teachers buying 30 whiteboards. Decisions were made that were not the best.

I did not see anything in the transaction-level data that made me think, “This is outrageous.” And who am I to say woodworking is not an okay thing for your child to learn? Swimming lessons, I had to swim. I do not know.

I do not want to get into that conversation because I assume the best intentions for parents. I cannot understand why a parent would invest the time and effort to get into these programs to simply buy themselves a trampoline, and not really care if their kids are reading or not. I do not understand that, but that is what…

Mike McShane (14:04)
Right.

Susan Pendergrass (14:15)
…they are throwing mud at the wall to try to discredit. Clearly, it is what parents want.

I am baffled that, when you look at politics in the United States right now, those on the left just refuse to accept this fact. It is a fact. Parents want to choose their school.

There are certainly Democrats for education reform, and plenty of people working hard from the left, but the general approach feels very last century. The teachers’ union saying, “Nobody wants this, we have to stop it at all costs. We have to put a halt to this and put more money into the public school your address sends you to. We need to fund those fully first before we can ever let kids out.” That is such a failed argument to me.

Mike McShane (15:18)
Look, this is why “accountability” and “transparency” are two of the words for 2026. Opponents to choice have figured out they cannot just go out hammer-and-tongs against it, or directly say, “We are against choice.” People do not learn lessons in politics, but they learn that one.

I was looking at the gubernatorial candidate just to Missouri’s north in Iowa. It was interesting. There was an interview with the Democratic candidate for governor, Rob Sand. He would not come out and condemn the ESA program outright. The interviewer perceptively drilled down and asked, “Are you saying you are not opposed to this program, you just want changes?” He never said yes to that. He has never said, “I am for this program.” If you read between the lines, he is saying, “I am not for this program, but I cannot come out and say it.”

His pivot was immediately, “I am just talking about accountability and transparency.” He wants private schools to follow every single one of the same rules that public schools do, and expects them to somehow do better.

Part of it is, these are folks working in red states who need to make arguments that appeal to conservatives. Accountability appeals to conservatives. Fiscal responsibility appeals to conservatives, not wanting to waste tax dollars. So it is smart strategy. People need to see what it is.

If this is a blue state, these exact same people are making arguments that appeal to progressives. But you are in a red state, so they are trying to make arguments that appeal to you. If you think about it for a little bit longer, what they are saying does not hold a lot of water.

Susan Pendergrass (17:41)
Yeah, and with this federal tax credit program, even though every state has to decide whether or not they are going to take the money, it is going to be a weird shifting of resources. If I live in a state that says, “We are not going to take the money,” that is fine. I can give my $1,700 to a scholarship group in any state. I will just send my $1,700 to another state.

Some states, like Virginia, the governor, one of the last things he did when he left was opt in. Now the new governor is going to have to make this weird choice. Do I want to go against it? If you looked at any poll of parents, any poll, you would know they want to be able to choose where their kids go to school. Do you really want to be the person that withdraws?

Mike McShane (18:21)
Yeah, when she seems to be in a perfect position to just say, “Oh, the last guy did this on the way out, so I guess we are going to do it.” Once they do it for a year and everybody is fine with it, it is just, “Oh well, whatever.”

Susan Pendergrass (18:33)
I do not know. I did not do it.

I think it is going to be really interesting because, again, the way we started this, there is a groundswell. I do not think you are going to turn it back. If you stay on the side of saying it is better when kids can only go to their assigned public school, you are in quicksand. You are going to bury yourself.

Mike McShane (19:03)
Yeah. The only thing I would say, and it was another one of my six words, is “rage bait.” It is always lingering in the background for me. I am seeing it more and more, all day, every day, stuff that shows up in your feed deliberately to upset you, terrify you, whatever.

Rage bait is unpredictable. You never know what is going to catch fire and cause a big shift. There is obviously potential for rage bait content, as we mentioned, we have crossed one and a half million, hundreds of thousands of people in various states, with lots of flexibility in what they can buy. People making bad decisions, people stealing things, it is totally possible that happens. Something egregious could happen.

With a large enough population, even very improbable events can happen. One fear I do have is that something rage-bait-y happens and people lose their minds over it.

But this is the key, if one parent in Arizona does something crazy, that does not mean the other 1,499,999 parents around the country should not have the right or opportunity to do this. We have to be able to say, “This is rage bait, this is not actually what is happening.”

Susan Pendergrass (20:51)
Yeah, we have talked about this. Those of us who have pressed for school choice for so long have said, “We will do anything you want, take our arm. We will put all our data out there, we will be as transparent as possible.” And your colleague, Marty Lueken, had a Substack about this recently, like, “We will take half the money. We do not need all the money, half the money will be…”

Mike McShane (21:08)
For sure.

Susan Pendergrass (21:19)
…150 percent transparent. We will jump through all these hoops just to get this thing that everybody wants, and it is from that transparency that we are going to get those stories. We are going to pay for that.

Mike McShane (21:29)
Yeah. It is important for people to be more attuned to the rage bait they are getting. People ask, “Have you seen this thing that happened in this place?” And I am like, okay, yeah, even if it did, what do you extrapolate?

A teacher in Sacramento did something crazy. There are north of a hundred thousand schools across America. There are north of three million public school teachers. At any given moment, someone is doing something dumb. I do not know what to extrapolate from that. It could just be one crazy person.

This is not just education. Across public policy, you point to one person in the military doing something terrible to delegitimize the military in general. Do not fall for this.

To be fair, sometimes we in the school choice movement, or education reform, have done rage bait of our own. People have used social media to point out, “My gosh, look at this assignment that a second-grade teacher in Poughkeepsie did, this is why we need school choice.” People have done that.

The measure with which you measure will be measured back to you. If you live by the sword, die by the sword.

Susan Pendergrass (22:54)
John Oliver did a story on charter schools. Remember, it was the guy in Florida that was letting a charter school be a nightclub at night? There is no way that is representative of charter schools.

Mike McShane (22:58)
Yeah, I remember that.

Susan Pendergrass (23:10)
That was an example I found shocking, but it is not representative. And you are right, they will find those stories.

Mike McShane (23:13)
Yeah, totally. We should all use less rage bait. We should not use rage bait to say just because one teacher in one place did something dumb, that is an indictment of public education in general. Nor should we allow the same thing to be done in reverse, which is, because one family did something crazy, we should not have choice at all.

Susan Pendergrass (23:49)
That leads to another one of your words, “slop.” There is so much talk about AI in schools and what to do about it. Is one person going to figure this out for every school everywhere, or are we all going to figure it out individually?

Mike McShane (24:03)
Yeah, I played out the scenario I am worried about. I do not know if it will happen in 2026, but it might.

We have heard a lot about AI in schools, students cheating, which is real and worrisome. But the specific scenario I have not heard as many people talking about is the prevalence of AI video, and the ability to create videos of things that did not happen.

How many, if you have a student in a classroom, after taking a picture or a short, unrelated video of their teacher, they can put it through a series of prompts, “Hey, have this teacher do,” and then insert whatever horrible thing, say something horrible, do something horrible.

Susan Pendergrass (24:34)
Yeah.

Mike McShane (24:53)
And if you are not savvy, and I will be the first to say I think I am a savvy consumer of the internet, I have been fooled or very close to fooled. AI videos of animals doing things, dogs protecting people from bears, or that one recently that went around with a bald eagle that had ice on its beak that someone knocked off, whatever.

Susan Pendergrass (24:58)
It is like a parlor game, right? No dogs are going off diving boards, just to clarify. The rabbits on the trampoline, these are not happening. But you are right.

Mike McShane (25:20)
People who are not as savvy, the thing I spelled out was, someone does that, and then suddenly the next PTA meeting is flooded with people because this viral thing went around. The superintendent or principal has to say, “This did not happen, it is not real.”

If you do not have the media literacy, it is like one person’s word versus another. “We saw it happen, it is on video.” “No, it did not happen, it is AI.” How we adjudicate those things, and how it could be weaponized by teenagers, or by bad actors, all of that stuff will happen. Whenever a new model is released, everyone tries to break it immediately, they are much more creative than I ever was.

I am worried for teachers, worried for schools, worried for school board meetings. It could be anything. It could be taking video at a football game and saying something happened that did not. Even if it all works out eventually, the time and energy wasted dealing with it…

Now, again, I am hoping more and more schools, this could be a real kick in the rear end to get phones out of schools and say, “We are not going to have phones in schools, because people are going to be making AI videos of their teachers.” That is one of a thousand reasons we should not have phones in schools.

But it is not the only place kids are interacting with one another, or with teachers. So we have to be really skeptical when we see that video of that teacher, or that student, or that principal doing something. Take a deep breath and ask, “Is this video real? Does this pass the smell test? Does this sound like something a teacher would actually do?” I am increasingly worried about that. There are many other things people worry about that I do not really worry about, but AI video in the context of schools, bad news bears.

Susan Pendergrass (27:53)
Yeah, I think we are going to have to start adjusting our thinking to only believing things that happen in front of our face, things we can touch. The prevalence of, you know, Amazon ads now, they are… I mean, I went to get my haircut and somebody was holding up a picture, and she was like, “Okay, well, that is not a real person.” We are going to have to default to disbelief if it is on a phone or on a screen. If it is happening in front of you, you can touch it, you can believe it. But the rest of it, I think we are going to become extra skeptical, because I do not believe much stuff anymore.

Mike McShane (28:22)
Totally. Are schools going to need CCTV cameras everywhere? Are we going to be oddly surveilled in a lot of different ways, just for CYA? “If people are going to be making up fake videos, we need the real video of what is going on.” I do not know how that is going to go, but…

That was the “rage bait” one, my plea to people, please do not fall victim to rage bait. It is pinging parts of our brains that we should not. I get wrapped up in it too. “My God, I cannot believe that is happening.” Then you take 10 seconds and you are like, “Wait, why am I fired up about this road rage incident in South Carolina?” Someone cut somebody off on the highway. Who cares? I am not there. It is not my deal.

I think this “slop” stuff is also something we are going to have to be really cautious about and thoughtful about, because it could cause lots of problems.

Susan Pendergrass (29:35)
Yeah, but then people are like, “I am not going to allow AI, I am going to check it.” I think AI, we are going to have to accept, right? We have to live with it.

Mike McShane (29:41)
Yeah, we are going to have to realize this is just part of it. There will be so many great things that come out of it, the creativity it will unleash.

In our own Substack, a bunch of the graphics we do are AI generated. I could not, I laugh, I have young kids, they are better drawers, I am horrible at it, but I can do this stuff with a couple of prompts in ChatGPT. “Hey, make me…” and they can be funny. You can do someone in the style of a famous painter and suddenly it is a Renaissance painting of me.

That is incredible productivity. The fact that I do not have to have a graphic designer, I can basically do it myself and put out essentially a small newspaper with some contributors and a bit of AI. That is an insane productivity increase, and it is incredible, but we have to be cautious of the downsides.

Susan Pendergrass (30:48)
Finally, your last word, “supply side.” In Missouri, folks will say, “Well, we do not need private school choice in our rural areas, there are no private schools,” as though the supply of private schools is fixed. It is treated like a natural result of how much interest there is, the kind of people who live in the community, and what is there is there, without thinking that if parents suddenly had $7,000 or $8,000 to spend, maybe somebody would open a new school.

Or not even a new school. Maybe somebody would open a visual arts business, or a soccer academy, tutoring, dyslexia therapy, whatever it is they think parents want or need. You would be free to be an entrepreneur in that space. That piece is largely overlooked, because it is like, “We have this many private schools with this many seats, so we can only have this many scholarships.” It is like, no, that is not fixed. Do you think we are going to see a lot of changes in that area?

Mike McShane (32:00)
Yeah, because another dimension where people think things are fixed is not only the number and locations, but the shape of what schools look like. “We are not going to have a private school in this small area because we cannot have a brick-and-mortar building with 30 rooms and 250 kids.” That is not what we are talking about.

If you can get 10 kids together at $8,000 apiece…

Susan Pendergrass (32:26)
There are no buildings.

Mike McShane (32:36)
…you can do a lot of interesting stuff. Especially if you can get space donated, leverage resources in the community, maybe some online stuff, and a local teacher. You could put together a heck of an education on $80,000 or $100,000.

It is happening. What makes it challenging to talk about is that it is happening across different dimensions. At the same time we are talking about Catholic schools growing and starting new schools in a traditional sense, two blocks away in some rented bungalow people are creating a Montessori micro school.

Because these things get spoken about in national terms and in a thousand-word news story, we struggle to discuss multiple dimensions. Existing schools are growing, new schools are emerging, and those new schools are going to look different. Some will grow, some will shrink, all these things can be happening at once.

Our job as researchers and observers is to do a lot of descriptive work, describe what is happening. There has been a push in earlier generations of school choice research toward causal results, horse-race comparisons, “Are they better than public schools?” “Is this type of private school better than that type?” But the only reason we were able to do that in 1998 is because, for a hundred years before, people did descriptive work to know, how many schools, what are they doing? Then you can talk about who is doing better, because you have to decide what they are doing, where they are, who is attending, are there differences.

It is almost like we are starting over.

Susan Pendergrass (34:39)
Yeah.

Mike McShane (35:01)
…doing that basic descriptive work. What is actually happening? What are people doing?

Susan Pendergrass (35:08)
Yeah, I know somebody who started a school in a barn on their property, and the parents came and converted the empty barn to a school. I know somebody who started a mobile school, basically in a big van, so that the school came to their house one day a week. And I know someone who started one in a high-rise in Queens. It is only limited by people’s imagination, basically, right?

And a like-minded group of parents. There are more people homeschooling now than used to be, so you could do this individually, but there are many more opportunities to do it. Parents, what emerged from the pandemic, at least, is they want their kids home maybe two days or three days. That is popular, and people are finding that two days out of the house creates unique opportunities in that space.

I think it is limited by people’s imagination, and some curriculum standards, and perhaps some accountability. But if you can meet those, I think we are seeing this idea.

I am not trying to be anti-traditional public school, but I butted up against this when my kids were little. “We are the only ones who know how to do this, so you have to accept our way of doing it because it is tried and tested and comes out of our schools of education at the universities.” This is the one and only way you have to teach the number line in third grade. “This is how it has to be, we cannot vary it because we are the great equalizer of civic society in the United States.”

Your boss, Rob Enlow, really shut me down on this. It has not panned out. We only read and do math less well each year.

I cannot imagine that letting all these flowers bloom is going to have a worse result. If we fast forward 20 years and look at median earnings and educational attainment rates, and we let this thrive, I think the outcome would improve. I do not see how it goes down.

Mike McShane (37:23)
That is the thing. You mentioned the interesting times we are living in now. So many of the “parade of horribles” choice opponents talked about forever, polarization, balkanization, people retreating to silos, it is like, hey guys, that already happened without choice. You cannot blame choice, because choice did not exist yet for that to happen.

Lots of people pushing each other in the streets went to public schools. Statistically, these are public school graduates having large problems with one another.

The conservative in me says things can always get worse. The fundamental progressive view is things can always get better, and the fundamental conservative view is things could always get worse. That strand in me says, yes, things could get worse. But across a lot of these dimensions, academic outcomes, civic outcomes, there is a lot of room for growth, and not nearly as much bottom end to fall out. So the risks associated with giving people more choices are not nearly as severe as proponents of the traditional public schooling system make it out to be.

Susan Pendergrass (38:58)
Yeah. Well, in Missouri, 40 percent of our fourth graders are below the basic level in reading, which means they cannot read at all. They cannot read. They are illiterate.

Would 40 percent of parents, if given the money to spend on their child’s education, have a nine-year-old and say, “Turns out they cannot read. I tried and tried, we just did not get there. They just cannot read.” I do not think so.

I know this is not the perfect solution, that accountability through parental choice is the answer. I am not saying that. But I do not think that if parents were truly put in charge, four out of 10 would just say, “Gosh darn it, this kid is never going to read, there is probably a lot of opportunity in the service industry.” I do not think so. I think that would be a much better check on the system.

Interesting stuff. Thanks so much for joining us. I really appreciate it, always.

Mike McShane (39:42)
Yep. Yeah. I agree with you. Agreed, 100 percent.

Susan Pendergrass (39:59)
So great to talk to you. What is your Substack called?

Mike McShane (40:02)
Informed Choice, so people can check that out. Informed Choice on Substack. Subscribe, it would be great.

Susan Pendergrass (40:05)
Yeah, it is really interesting. Great. Thanks so much.

Mike McShane (40:10)
Thanks for having me.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post The Six Words Driving the Education Debate in 2026 With Mike McShane appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The report is from an admissions workgroup consisting of university faculty and a handful of administrators. It focuses on a remedial math course UCSD introduced in 2016 to help freshmen fill gaps in high school–level math. The course initially enrolled about one percent of incoming students. However, instructors began to realize many students lacked even more fundamental middle- and elementary-level math skills. In response, the math department split the course into two courses: one focused on elementary and middle school math, and the other on high school math.

By 2024, more than 900 students—12.5 percent of the entering freshman class at UCSD—placed into these remedial courses.

To give a sense of the skill deficiencies among students in these remedial courses, the report shows specific math problems along with the fractions of students who could answer them correctly. Here are three example questions at the elementary level (edited very lightly for presentation here):

1. Fill in the blank: 7 + 2 = __ + 6

2. Round the number 374518 to the nearest hundred.

3. Find (13/16) ÷ 2

While it would be reasonable to expect every student who is accepted into an elite public university to be able to answer these questions correctly, many tested students could not. Just 75, 39, and 34 percent of test takers gave the correct answers to these questions, respectively.

The report identifies several factors that contribute to these disturbing—and frankly embarrassing—outcomes, including grade inflation in California’s K-12 schools that allows students to graduate with good grades but weak skills, the pandemic (every educator’s favorite scapegoat), and the UC system’s stubborn refusal to require standardized tests for admissions. But beneath all of this lies a deeper issue: a system-wide erosion of meritocracy. When merit is downplayed and standards are continually lowered, you end up with students arriving at elite universities unable to do elementary math.

To be clear, UCSD is not the only institution that has this problem, and I don’t want to punish it unduly for being transparent. In fact, the report talks about similar problems at other UC campuses, and what it describes aligns with my own experience as a professor at the University of Missouri.

There is evidence all around us of the shift away from meritocracy in education. Nationally and in Missouri, student grades, and high school and college graduation rates, are at historic or near-historic highs despite clear evidence of declining academic skills. Educational administrators at all levels of schooling have demonstrated a blatant disregard for excellence.

(Disclosure: I am a proud —though less so by the day—alumnus of UC San Diego, where I received my BA, MA, and Ph.D.)

The post We’re Destroying Meritocracy appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Missouri’s government continues to grow in both size and scope while tax revenues are expected to stagnate in the coming years.

The Solution

Complete a comprehensive review of Missouri’s government to rein in unnecessary spending and regulation.

Key Facts

• Missouri’s net general revenue collections for Fiscal Year 2025 were essentially flat and are expected to be similar in Fiscal Year 2026.
• Missouri’s spending of state revenue sources has increased by more than 75% over the past five years, and is expected to outpace tax revenue growth in the next few years.
• Successful state-based efficiency efforts have been enacted across the country over the past 50 years and have saved taxpayers billions of dollars.

Something’s Gotta Give

Missouri’s tax revenue collections have grown at an average rate of nearly 9% over the past five years, but state spending has grown at an even faster rate of more than 10%. To make matters worse, Missouri’s official estimates now project state revenues to remain essentially flat in the coming years. Given that the cost of providing the same level of services increases over time, and that Missouri’s constitution has a balanced-budget requirement, it should be obvious that this troubling trend cannot continue.

Learn from Other States’ Experiences

Nearly 60 years ago, then-California Governor Ronald Reagan established what was perhaps the most successful state-based cost-cutting initiative in history with an executive order. The “Governor’s Survey on Efficiency and Cost Control” enlisted the help of more than 200 private-sector leaders to recommend, in short order, more than 2,000 reforms to improve California’s government operations and reduce costs. All told, the recommendations included savings of upwards of $4.2 billion in today’s dollars.

Over the past year, following the lead of Reagan and the recent work conducted by the federal Department of Government Efficiency, more than 20 states have established their own cost-cutting initiatives. While Missouri’s general assembly created committees last year on the subject, no visible progress has been made on establishing a government efficiency program. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, Missouri can look to states that have already achieved success reining in government and take similar actions that could save billions of Missouri taxpayer dollars.

Step One of Many

Rightsizing Missouri’s government will not be easy. It will require leadership from both the executive and legislative branches of Missouri’s government, a clear plan of attack for identifying inefficiencies, and a commitment to exercising fiscal restraint over several years while implementing the reforms necessary to permanently change the state’s fiscal trajectory. This much is clear: There is no longer time to delay. Missouri’s elected officials must start reducing government spending today if there’s any hope of securing our state’s financial future tomorrow.

Policy Recommendations

• Establish an executive branch-led government efficiency initiative to provide a comprehensive review of Missouri’s government practices.
• Enlist the help of private-sector leaders to help review government, rein in excess spending, and recommend reforms to improve efficiency while reducing waste.
• Set clear goals and timelines for the initiative, with commitment from elected officials to make the efficiency recommendations a reality.

The post Office of Government Efficiency appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Robert C. Enlow, president and CEO of EdChoice, about the expansion of school choice and the organization’s work advancing parental freedom in education. They discuss Milton Friedman’s original vision, how states like Florida, Arizona, and Indiana have moved toward universal choice, Missouri’s legal fight over its scholarship program, and how parental demand is reshaping education markets, and more.

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Timestamps

00:00 Introduction to Ed Choice and Leadership
01:00 Milton Friedman’s Legacy in Education
02:26 The State of School Choice in America
04:57 Challenges in Missouri’s Education System
07:38 The Importance of Universal School Choice
09:39 The Role of Leadership in Education Reform
11:49 Parental Advocacy and the Future of School Choice
14:15 Market Demand and Private School Growth
16:59 The Evolution of Educational Options
19:49 Redefining Quality in Education
22:18 Civic Values and Shared Experiences in Education
26:05 The Debate on Public vs. Private Education
29:47 Legal Challenges and Advocacy for School Choice

Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00)
So I am actually very excited that you have joined our podcast, Robert Enlow. You are CEO or executive director of EdChoice—which one? President and CEO. How long have you been president and CEO of that organization?

Robert Enlow (00:08)
I’m president and CEO of EdChoice.

Well, that’s a great question, Susan. And thanks for having me, and thanks to Show-Me for all they do. I believe I’ve been president and CEO since 2009, but I joined the organization in 1996. We opened our doors on September 23, 1996, and I was the first guy walking in the door.

Susan Pendergrass (00:31)
And it was originally called the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation.

Robert Enlow (00:34)
Correct, the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation, obviously established after Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman and his wife, Rose. During the last decade of their lives, I got to know them—particularly in the last five years of his life. As a young kid coming from England who had these wild-eyed liberal ideas in some ways, it took me a little while for him and Rose to get to understand me and warm up to me, but they did, and it was an amazing experience getting to watch them work.

Susan Pendergrass (00:40)
And you knew them both. What do you think he would think of what’s going on right now in K–12 education?

Robert Enlow (01:04)
You know, I will tell you what he would say to me every single time we passed a bill in another state. He would say, “Robert, we’re on the right track, but you’ve got a lot more to do.” I think he would be happy that we got to universality of people. I think he would be really pleased with the fact that we’re now at a universe of eligibility. I think he’d be less pleased that we’re still controlling the marketplace and controlling the spigot of funds. So I think he would be saying we’re not getting to a true universal marketplace unless you think about supply and information and funding just as much as you think of everyone choosing. Like in a state like Texas, everyone’s excited—oh my God, everyone gets to choose. Well, not really. It’s a billion-dollar appropriation. That means only maybe 90,000 kids get to choose out of 6 million. So when you think about who can really choose, we’ve got to think about the money. And the same thing is true in Missouri with its $50 million—$75 million tax rate and $50 million appropriation still limits the number of fan futures. Yeah.

Susan Pendergrass (02:02)
Like nobody. Tiny, tiny. But we do have an Arizona and a Florida now. I think, you know, I remember a very long time ago working with you on an Arizona voucher that got vetoed by the governor, but now Arizona is essentially universal school choice, and Florida. What I’m seeing most recently that I really love is with their universal school choice and more than half of parents choosing something, the public schools are getting in the game. The public schools are like, okay, spend your scholarship dollars with us, because we’ve been at this a long time. And they’re not seeing it as this us versus them. It’s like, we are all working together to educate our kids. And maybe, you know, we all have a place in this.

Robert Enlow (02:30)
That’s right. So people ask me all the time, Susan, they’re like, well, when will you work with the opponents of school choice, or when will you work with public schools? I’m like, we’ll work with public schools when there truly is a level playing field for all families to be able to choose. Now we actually see there are three aspects to that that we care about, right? All families can choose, right? They can choose all the options, and they can choose with all available dollars. We see five states that have that criteria now: Florida, Arizona, West Virginia, and now New Hampshire. Arkansas—Arkansas. So Arkansas, yeah, Arkansas, Arizona, the A’s; W’s—West Virginia; Florida; and New Hampshire. And what’s really interesting about that, if you look over time—we do this thing called the EdChoice Share, which is what we really care about: how many people are choosing all the options that they want. Florida and Arizona are the top two. And it’s really amazing to see what’s happened in Florida.

Susan Pendergrass (03:16)
Arkansas.

Robert Enlow (03:39)
—people, of families going to traditional assigned public schools. Now, even in that, they are choosing by buying a house, right? So that’s gone from 86.2% in 2001–2002 to now, today, just 51.8%. About half. Isn’t that crazy?

Susan Pendergrass (03:46)
Sure, sure, sure. About half. And I will tell you from my experience in Missouri, that sort of reality—where almost every kid just goes to their assigned public school, whatever’s on the utility bill, that’s where you go to school and you have no other options—is still assumed to be almost universal. In fact, it is in Missouri, because we only have charter schools as punishment. We have that tiny little scholarship program. You can go to a full-time virtual, which isn’t for everyone. So essentially, you see the address on the utility bill is where you go to school. And I just think that it’s been really hard to sort of break through that mindset and let folks know, like in Florida, only half of parents are doing that. And probably, like you said, a sizable percentage of that half decided where to live based on what school their kids would go to. So they are, in a sense, exercising some choice. And I just wonder, when you have two states in the same nation that are so completely divergent, where does that lead us to? So Missouri’s kind of surrounded.

Robert Enlow (04:57)
Well, it’s—yeah, so Missouri is surrounded, and where it leads you to is a couple of things. It leads you to a metric of in-migration. In Indiana, one of the things I get asked a lot is, you know, what’s the success metric for your state? And I say the number of people migrating to our state because they have educational options. Right. So we are a state of educational options on your border, almost, and everyone can choose. Right. And it’s a big deal, and it’s why we’ve had more and more families. You’re ranked in our study 28th out of 51. And you really have not seen a change. Well, I mean, you still have 80.3% in traditional schools, but what you’ve done is you’ve allowed magnet schools to grow and you’ve had some charter school—your charter school growth has been—let’s take a look. You’ve actually had a decent—

Susan Pendergrass (05:32)
That seems high, to be honest. Yeah, but I can tell you our charter schools are punishments. They’re only in Kansas City and St. Louis, only in non-accredited districts. So right now there might be a charter school in the works in a fully accredited district—in Columbia 93—and people in Columbia 93 are freaking out about a charter school opening. This is how sort of, like, behind the curve we are. They’re freaking out that a charter school might open, and they’re arguing we don’t need it. And I will say—I want to get to the lawsuit against our scholarship program. We have a very strong, what I sort of call the—

Robert Enlow (05:52)
Yeah, that’s great.

Susan Pendergrass (06:16)
—educational establishment in Jefferson City. That is the teacher union leadership, the Association of School Boards, and the Association of Superintendents. Because we have 520 districts, there’s a lot of superintendents and a lot of school boards, and they will show up to a hearing to make sure that parents don’t get to choose where their kids go to school.

Robert Enlow (06:35)
Yeah, so this is one of the reasons why, in 2016, when the Milton Friedman Foundation changed its name to EdChoice, we focused on universality. Because I think we realized that the fights for school choice—where they’re fighting to make sure that children can escape from bad schools—is the wrong message. The message is that all families need to have some freedom to choose what works best for them. And that should be across all income levels. Why are we okay with giving billionaires access to gated, segregated public schools, but freak out when we give them the options to choose private schools? Moreover, you can’t continue to ask Republican legislators to vote for something that they’re going to get killed for in their district. Right. And so one of the key points of universality has been being able to say, we need you to support choice so that constituents of yours can get an opportunity. So in your state, one of the challenges has been: how do we get eligibility to where it’s supposed to be universal? And you’ve done your—yeah.

Susan Pendergrass (07:38)
Funding, funding. I mean, we had tiny funding up until this $50 million. The only scholarship dollars we had were fundraised from individual and corporate donors. So getting that money together has been a real challenge, and I think we got to $15 to $20 million finally. And ironically—I don’t know, you may not know this because it’s very in the weeds—but when that ESA program, when that scholarship program passed, we agreed—the legislature agreed—that any district that lost a student to the scholarship program could continue to count them for five years. So this year they’re asking for $30 million to cover the kids who took the scholarship. Thirty million dollars is going to go to public schools for the kids who took the scholarships, but they don’t want the scholarship program to get $50 million. And I just think the irony kills me.

Robert Enlow (08:25)
Well, hold on—just, I think—so this hold-harmless thing, let me just ask a question. I think Show-Me then should put in a bill like this: if they want to be held harmless when a student leaves, then anytime a child moves from one public school to another public school, they should hold that other public school to account. Public schools are getting—they’re the ones where families are moving the most, right? So aren’t other public schools in Missouri taking more money from other public schools than any kind of choice or charter program?

Susan Pendergrass (08:42)
That’s right. Yeah, and God forbid that we’re sending kids to Indiana for your in-migration, right? Like, when kids leave, somehow we should—and we do have these crazy hold-harmless policies that you guys have analyzed—but I feel like it’s starting to feel like we have sort of two different worlds. If you raise your kids in Florida or Arizona or Arkansas, when they get to be four or five years old, then good news: you get to sit down and look at your options and look at your kid and look at where you work, what might fit your schedule, and you can pick from a number of things. If you live in Missouri, you cannot. And I just think that’s gonna start to diverge.

Robert Enlow (09:25)
So here’s what I’m going to say about that. I agree with you. And there is a divergence happening, particularly in the states in America that have broad choices—and I don’t just mean private school; I mean charter and all of that. But once you get a taste of choice—we have really believed this over time—once you start to get a taste of choice, and if you make it broad enough and open enough, parents begin to start utilizing that option; they learn over time. And so it didn’t happen overnight that Florida went from 90% to 51%. It happened over 20 years as choice grew and became more eligible. So, you know, key point is you in Missouri now have a program. It now has some public funds attached to it. And the goal is to get that utilized as much and as broadly as possible in every district. I say this all the time: one of the reasons why Indiana’s Choice Program is so defensible is—we love our charter schools—but charter schools, I think, are in 30 districts and 30 legislative districts. Private schools are in every single legislative district in the state, and all of them take choice dollars. And so you have a built-in constituency of support. We now have 110,000 families using choice out of our million kids. And so it’s amazing, the growth. It didn’t start off that way. It started off with 3,500. Right. And so you see the growth of choice over time. And as long as your legislatures are willing to move forward, then you’re going to continue to see that change. And no amount of union hacking and no amount of school board association—because they’re ultimately disconnected with what the parents want. And that’s particularly true after COVID, because there’s a ton of micro schools and a ton of—Milton Friedman used to say, you know you’re ready for a free market when there’s the presence of an underground market. And there’s a huge underground market for education happening all over Missouri right now in the form of micro schools and pods. Parents are wanting to move. And as the legislature starts giving them access to public funds, you’ll see growth over time.

Susan Pendergrass (11:22)
And we’ve got some parent advocacy groups that have appeared on the scene, like Activate Missouri. And I know, like in Florida, there were some very loud parent groups that influenced elections because they wanted school choice. And I do believe that parents are going to be the ones that sort of drive the change in Missouri. But you guys in Indiana also had very strong leadership. You had Governor Mitch Daniels—like, you had very strong leadership. We’ve had a bit of a vacuum in that regard in Missouri. Our new governor supports the idea of school choice. I’m not sure that he’s willing to put his political capital on the line for it in the way that you guys—

Robert Enlow (11:57)
Yeah, so there’s a lot of feeling out there now—oh my God, if I get a governor, it’ll be a savior, right? And look, governors are super important and they are critical for getting it over the line. Mitch Daniels was critical to take this movement in the country to the next step. Prior to Mitch Daniels, we’d sort of seen the failure of a voucher program in Florida—Jeb Bush’s voucher program—and so we’d gone to this tax-credit scholarship model, right? And Mitch said, no, we’re going to do something big, statewide and large. And when he did that, he sort of opened the floodgates for a bunch of states. So that was really important. Governor Pence was supportive. But the governors after that haven’t been, like, massively out in front driving stuff. They’ve not not signed it when it comes to their table, but they haven’t been out there leading the way. Having a Speaker of the House like Representative Todd Huston—by the way, it’s amazing. So having leadership roles is critically important. I can’t say enough for someone like Speaker Huston. So, you know, it’s important to have a governor, but it’s super important to have leadership in the House and Senate.

Susan Pendergrass (13:05)
Yeah, you must, because I know you have the third-grade non-retention for kids who are behind in reading. I know that you guys are out in front on the—really the first really meaty—federal waiver request that the Secretary of Education has been asking for states to send in their waiver requests. And Indiana’s is certainly the most robust. You’re going back to letter grades for your schools. I mean, you’re not just doing choice. You guys are seemingly moving on a lot of fronts in education in a way that will make it very attractive to families. And I try to make this point all the time in Missouri: families are gonna leave and businesses are gonna leave because we have all of these second-generation choosers, right? So kids who chose their school are having kids, and they expect to choose their school.

Robert Enlow (13:47)
Look, the idea of customer choice is embedded into anyone who’s under 30, right? And so when they begin to realize that’s going to be true in education, they’re going to be like, why am I getting this one-size-fits-all system that doesn’t actually fit either my values or my safety or what I think of academic quality—or what if I want something more hybrid? I mean, the reality is that families under 30 now—they’re not having kids; we have a baby bust here—but those under 30 are definitely saying, “I want more choice and customization.”

Susan Pendergrass (14:15)
Yeah, and as you know, you have multiple kids, I have multiple kids—they’re not even all the same. So what works for one might not work for all of them within a family. Now, another argument that we get in Missouri, in terms of the need for private school choice, is we don’t have enough—you know, we don’t have very many private schools, and most rural districts don’t have any. And we are seeing some research emerge that the private school market responds in these scholarship programs, right?

Robert Enlow (14:38)
I love hearing this, Susan, and I’m sorry if I am frustrated by that question. I don’t think you ever, ever ask—no one in the world ever asked—and I know this is not comparing education with this product—but no one in the world ever asked Lay’s Potato Chips how many bags of Fritos they need. They figure that out based on customer and market demand. This idea that somehow private schools don’t exist—of course they exist to market demand.

Susan Pendergrass (14:45)
Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah.

Robert Enlow (15:06)
When it comes and when it’s free and when it’s open. Let me give you an example. In Indiana, when we first started our program in 2010, it was like, “There’s not enough private school spaces. There’s not enough private school spaces.” Okay, so we did a survey of all the private schools. We got all the private schools to get together on how many spaces they had. They had 22,000 available spaces. We went through district and grade. Great. And then when we expanded it in 2013, the governor says, “We need to know how many spaces there are going to be.” All right, we’ll do another survey—since no one believes that markets respond, right? Well, we did a whole other survey. How many spaces do you think there were? Twenty-two thousand. Exactly. My point is—like 20 or 22,000, right? This concept of “Oh, we don’t know if there’s enough supply.” Look, markets will respond so long as markets are free to respond. So one of the biggest challenges right now going forward is—look, try to—

Susan Pendergrass (15:41)
I don’t—

Robert Enlow (16:01)
School choice—or private school choice, or educational choice—can do one of three things: fill seats in existing schools, build new seats in existing schools, or build new schools, right? Now, the way we’ve run private schooling in America is we’re only doing one and two. We’re filling seats in existing. And just remember, private schools in the last 25 years lost 10% market share total, right? So there’s a ton of spaces. There’s a ton of spaces in private schools all over America, right? So if you think you lost 10% of—

Susan Pendergrass (16:20)
That’s right. Closed. A lot of schools closed. Ahem.

Robert Enlow (16:30)
—five million, right? Or whatever the number is. You have plenty of spaces out there in private currently. Now we need to grow those spaces and grow the different types of models. That’s going to require legislators to be a bit more willing to take some risk around the types of schools that they allow to be, quote-unquote, “accredited,” right? So you need to allow micro schools. You need to allow new entrants into the marketplace. And the more you do that, the faster it will grow. But there are slots out there. And what we’re really finding from the emerging research is that private schools are growing faster in rural areas—like in Florida—and they’re actually growing. I mean, Susan, you did this research for us about Florida and Arizona, so why don’t you tell us how fast they’re growing?

Susan Pendergrass (17:07)
Right. Well, they’re growing in Arizona. What I will say that comes out of that research is parents don’t really care what the label is on the bill. They are calling a lot of things “schools” now, right, that you might not have called schools before. And you guys survey parents—you do your monthly surveys. Schooling in America—what’s it called? What’s your monthly survey? Yeah. You’ve been doing it since COVID.

Robert Enlow (17:27)
It’s called Morning Consult—sorry, Schooling in America polling.

Susan Pendergrass (17:32)
And what I think is one of the most interesting findings is that consistently, now that COVID’s way in the rearview, parents want their kids to go to school two or three days a week. More parents want their kids home a couple days and in school a couple days than want five days in school or five days at home. People sort of want this—they like this sort of flexibility thing. And what I think we’re seeing is a growth in, like you said, micro schools, hybrid schools, homeschool co-ops where I am homeschooling a couple days, then a couple days my child is going somewhere to be part of group activities. And parents are doing online coding schools, and that’s a school to them, right? It’s an online situation where their kids are learning to code, and they’re calling it a school. So, yeah, the definition of what is a private school—the fact that it’s not a nonprofit provider, that it’s a private provider and they’re providing all sorts of different things—is really getting blurry. I think that that is a definite finding. And where that’s allowed to thrive, like Arizona, where you have this massive ESA program, and Florida—that’s where you’re seeing parents are only limited by what they can think up, right?

Robert Enlow (18:39)
So how much growth was there in Arizona and Florida? You saw it. Tell me how much there was.

Susan Pendergrass (18:44)
In the number of private schools? Well, I will say this: private school data is messy. And in most states, it looks like they’re declining. Florida and Arizona are two of the states where you can say for sure—outside the error ranges—they have more private schools now than they did 10 years ago. And that is the exception to the rest of the country. You can say for sure California and New York have fewer private schools than they did 10 years ago.

Robert Enlow (18:45)
Yeah. I love you, Reese Richard.

Susan Pendergrass (19:08)
And the nation as a whole has fewer private schools. But in Florida and Arizona, you’re seeing the opposite direction—and Ohio. So the market is responding, but it might not be, you know, a full-on brick-and-mortar cafeteria-gym-library private school. It might be something that doesn’t look exactly like that. And to a parent, it’s a school. And that’s what I think we’re seeing. And I know that in Florida, parents are combining scholarship programs to have their child see a paraprofessional and get some specialized equipment if they have a disability, and be part of a group activity. And I think that is one of the most exciting things that’s happening—these really interesting, expansive, curated experiences that parents are putting together.

Robert Enlow (19:49)
Yeah, you saw in one year a growth of 150—think—private schools or private options in Arizona in just one year. So it’s not like the market won’t respond.

Susan Pendergrass (19:56)
Yeah. And more of them are accessing online schools than they used to. Right—Stanford has a school, BYU has a school. If you can access these online schools, they don’t have to be in-state. That’s because the parents are deciding where the money goes. But in Missouri, Missouri has accredited Missouri virtual schools, and that’s where you have to enroll your child. But when you let the parents and word of mouth—say, you know, “Hey, I’ve got a great foreign language school”—word of mouth works. Then I think you definitely see a massive expansion of what parents are accessing through these programs. And I can only imagine, based on Milton Friedman’s—what, 1955? 57? 55—premise on this, that achievement should go up. I mean, I know that this isn’t the thing that we are focused on, but it should.

Robert Enlow (20:36)
Yep, 1955.

Susan Pendergrass (20:46)
I’ve always said, like, if 25% of Missouri eighth graders are proficient in math, I don’t think 75% of Missouri parents, if they were given control over it, would just accept the fact that their kid didn’t learn math.

Robert Enlow (20:56)
So one of the challenges I think we have with that is: what do we determine to be quality, and how do we measure that, right? I’m one of the few that think that the standards movements of the 1980s did more harm to K–12 education than good.

Susan Pendergrass (21:02)
Yeah, that’s a big question. Tell me why.

Robert Enlow (21:14)
Because I think the standardization to such a point—which then meant you had to have state tests aligned to that standardization, which then meant you had to create very rigid scope and sequencing for teachers—it really did, in a way, de-professionalize the teaching industry and make it a widget industry. And so, as a result, I think we’ve lost this ability to educate, and we’ve created this desire to—

Susan Pendergrass (21:17)
—teach to it.

Robert Enlow (21:43)
—to inculcate in terms of how to get them to do a test. I’m not a big fan of state tests. I think they get gamed all the time and changed all the time. I’m not a huge fan of state standards. I think you can have standards, but align them to something else. We had the Iowa Test of Basic Skills growing up, and that was a fine test, and we could do the same. So we, for example, are believers in testing choice and think we should allow families to do that. So when you look at quality—

Susan Pendergrass (22:10)
You mean pick a test—allow them to pick a test? And how would you hold any schools accountable, or would you? Would you do the Ashley Berner or the British approach? What would you do?

Robert Enlow (22:13)
Yeah, they should all be taking tests if they want. I think—no, look, first of all, I think parents hold schools accountable. We’re learning that from Arizona, right? By the time they close a charter school in Arizona, there’s like 12 parents in it, right? So, I mean, parents know quality. But you’ve got to remember, parents are choosing for different reasons. I think about this all the time. I had a son who had special needs, and I didn’t want to send him to the local public school because it was going to be bad for him, in my opinion. He wasn’t going to be served. So I went and did a whole bunch of searching around, and I picked a school that was 15th on the I-STEP for third-grade results—that was Indiana—versus the other school that was seventh, right? Why did I do that? Well, I did it because I thought he’d have a safer environment, he’d have a more moral environment—an environment with my values—and it was cheap enough for me, and it was good enough. So, parents make decisions based on a whole host of factors, and I think it’s silly for us to think that they don’t. The other thing is: what do we mean by quality is a big deal. I am not a fan of saying quality is only a test score. I think quality is much more than that. I don’t know about your kids, Susan.

Susan Pendergrass (23:18)
That’s a great question. But do test scores matter?

Robert Enlow (23:43)
I’m not sure I’d say—they matter insofar as you inform parents how kids are doing relative to others. I think it’s important that families know that. I’m a big fan of the one thing I do like about the British system—just ranking all the schools. That’s what they do: they take a test and everyone gets put on a league table. I love that concept. Everyone gets on a league table, and you can say, “Oh, you’re going to a school that’s 100 out of 200. Well, you’re mid-table. Why aren’t you going to a school that’s 85 or 60,” or something like that? So I think it’s really important to just put it on a table, because I think keeping up with the Joneses is actually a valuable part of society. But think about—

Susan Pendergrass (24:01)
We do that at the Show-Me Institute. For Missouri schools, we do rank all the schools. But one more question—just to push back on that a little bit, but not exactly that. One thing that we’re seeing, or that I’ve seen in these scholarship programs, is that kids are potentially—we’re growing the number of kids who are not having shared experiences with their peers. And by that, I mean probably going to have a lot fewer kids playing the trumpet or playing the cello.

Robert Enlow (24:10)
No.

Susan Pendergrass (24:28)
Because when you go to middle school and you say, “I’m going to take band,” and then they’re like, “Let’s pick an instrument,” right? That is kind of hokey, but that was what a lot of us did. And now you have parents who are simply having their child go to guitar lessons or piano lessons because that’s what their kid wants to play. And you’re not going to have kids hauling their flute home on the bus. And that’s kind of a shared experience. Also, things like the weird PE classes I had to take, like square dancing or, I don’t know, bowling. You know, we’re going to lose some of that from a civic point of view. We’re going to lose lots of the shared experience, and kids are going to have these algorithm-driven or curated experiences. What do you think?

Robert Enlow (25:06)
Okay, comrade. Let me just say, okay, comrade. I can’t believe I just heard an apologist for school buses, right? I mean, everyone get on a bus with a snotty—listen, common cultural experiences happen by common cultural things, not by being in the same place at the same time. This idea that schools are the locus of all of our common cultural experiences is part of the problem we have in education. So in Arizona—

Susan Pendergrass (25:08)
Come on, come on, what do you think? You have to ride the school bus?

Robert Enlow (25:35)
Yeah. Yes, yes. There are tons and tons of common cultural experiences right now. The fastest-growing type of tutor is music and physical instruction, right? Are they not taking classes together? Are they not working together with other kids? They’re just not working with other kids in a common—in a socialist—environment of a school bus or in a school, right? This idea that acculturation and socialization happen only inside of a K–12 school building strikes me as very socialistic.

Susan Pendergrass (26:05)
I hear it. I hear it a lot from the—air quotes—other side. I hear that they are the great equalizing institution: traditional K–12 public schools.

Robert Enlow (26:13)
Okay, if that were the case—if that were the case—why is the data extremely clear in voucher programs and choice programs that the civic values of kids in choice programs who attend private schools are far greater than the civic values and virtues of those who attend traditional public schools? I say this all the time: if you go to the GLSEN survey—the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network survey of kids and their issues in dealing with being gay—Which school system is the worst on gay kids? They get dead. Based on the data that they bring out, public schools have significantly higher rates of abuse of gay kids. Right? How tolerant is that? Now, what ends up happening is they hear about it more in religious schools—they hear about being gay—but they’re not bullied. So you actually ask yourself this question: Do you want your gay kid bullied, or do you want them to hear about it more?

Susan Pendergrass (26:42)
I’m guessing you’re going to say traditional public schools.

Robert Enlow (27:06)
These are legitimate questions to ask. And by the way, we’re not doing well with this at all in any school system. But this idea of civic virtue coming from a homogenized institution strikes me as naive at best—particularly since, if you think those schools don’t teach values, you’re wrong. They absolutely teach values. And then they teach values based on their school assignment, which is based on where they live. And if you don’t think neighborhoods produce value and values, then you’re wrong. Anyone who knows me knows that I rail against suburbia all the time—it’s just part of who I am. Gated, segregated communities really bother me. It bothers me. These ideas of living in enclaves piss me off, because I don’t think that’s what America is supposed to be about. But that ends up what’s happening in schooling, right? And what private schooling and choice does is it breaks that apart. How are you getting more civic tolerance—how are you getting more integration—in private schooling than you are in public schools? Whenever I hear, “Public schools are the center and locus of our community shared experience,” I actually cringe and start worrying about what they’re teaching.

Susan Pendergrass (28:13)
Yeah, I also saw a comment the other day on a Signal chat I’m on that charter schools are part of the right-wing conservative agenda to kill public education, which just makes me crazy, because charter schools by and large serve poor kids of color, and there’s nothing to do with the—there’s no right-wing conservative agenda there. And I know a lot of parents who would very much disagree with that. But that is the perception that’s out there—that you guys, with your school choice and your vouchers—and I know that you guys did a whole market test on the word “voucher,” which I think is brilliant, because no matter what the program is, folks on the left call it a voucher scheme. There’s a “scheme,” and that it’s killing public education, and then we won’t have a civic-minded, you know, equal electorate, basically.

Robert Enlow (28:39)
Yep. Can we start to redefine—and I have to redefine—look, I am a huge believer in public education. I want an educated public. I want kids to be educated. I want those—because I think society is benefited. That is a very different thing from running a system of common schools that was built off the backs of a potentially bigoted idea in the 1840s, right? I think there’s a different conversation. I think government-run, district-run schools, while a reality, are different than public education. Kids are educated to the public interest if they go to a school or learning environment where they get educated. And so that’s why Milton Friedman’s original idea—separate the public financing of education from the government running a school.

Susan Pendergrass (29:47)
Well, it’s a brilliant idea, and I appreciate you coming to argue with me about it. That’s great. I could go on, but I’m going to let it go at that. I appreciate that you guys—I didn’t really get into it—but that you’re an intervenor in the Missouri case. Clearly you believe that more Missouri families should have access to this. The parents who are the defendants basically have a sibling that they would like to join the program that one of their kids is in. And I suspect that—

Robert Enlow (29:51)
I love arguing with you. You’re one of my dearest, oldest friends. There’s very few people like you, right?

Susan Pendergrass (30:17)
I think we’re going to be successful. We had one successful ruling so far where the program gets to continue.

Robert Enlow (30:22)
Yeah, we’re the intervenors. Choice Legal Advocates is the intervenor in Missouri National Education Association et al. versus State of Missouri. So we are intervening on behalf of parents. Currently, the district court denied a temporary injunction, so they allowed the program to continue. We’re excited by that. We’re strongly positive that we think it’s a good sign for us and that we should end up on the right side of this. You know, I’m just shocked that the unions continue to be on the wrong side of parents all the time.

Susan Pendergrass (30:49)
They sure do. All right. Well, I appreciate it, and I appreciate you taking the time to join us on the podcast.

Robert Enlow (30:54)
Thanks for having me, Susan.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post From Milton Friedman to Modern School Choice with Robert Enlow appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Show-Me Institute Director of Municipal Policy David Stokes about his new paper in the Free-Market Guide to Missouri Municipalities series on planning and zoning. They discuss how fragmentation among local governments can limit overly strict zoning, how zoning rules affect housing affordability, and why “last house syndrome” poses risks for Missouri’s future growth. From accessory dwelling units and minimum parking requirements to the debate over multifamily housing, Stokes explains how smart reforms can protect property rights and keep housing costs down.

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Timestamps

00:00 Introduction to Planning and Zoning in Missouri
02:35 The Impact of Fragmentation on Zoning
05:24 Housing Affordability and Zoning Regulations
08:22 The Role of Municipalities in Housing Development
11:18 Challenges of NIMBYism and YIMBYism
14:21 Accessory Dwelling Units and Short-Term Rentals
17:00 Planning and Infrastructure in Missouri
19:57 Future Papers and Conclusion

Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00)
Thank you, David Stokes, so much for being on the podcast this morning. You have a new paper out with the Show Me Institute. Well, it’s actually part three of an existing series on your free market guide to Missouri municipalities. And this one is on planning and zoning. So thanks for joining us to answer some questions about it. Great. I do have one question that I was just saying before we started recording. I’ve seen this paper a few times.

David Stokes (00:19)
Delighted to be here.

Susan Pendergrass (00:26)
And one thing that I noticed up front is that I complain about the number of school districts in St. Louis County and how fragmented it is. And other folks have also said similar things, too many small municipalities. But it seems to be the case that when we’re talking about things like planning and zoning and permitting and regulations, that can be a good thing. Is that right?

David Stokes (00:46)
Absolutely. Because it’s harder to enact comprehensive planning, zoning, major things like urban growth boundaries—the extreme things like an urban growth boundary that we don’t have in Missouri. But it’s harder to enact that the more governments you have to get in line to agree to it in the first place. So it’s definitely—I don’t want to say it’s a causation. I don’t think the data is there to—

Susan Pendergrass (00:47)
What?

David Stokes (01:14)
But it’s definitely a—I would say it’s a truism—that there’s a strong connection between the metropolitan areas that have less strict zoning around the country. And over the past decade, we’ve really changed a lot in American local public policy to realize the harms of overly strict zoning. Until the past decade or so, it was just sort of assumed that strict zoning was a good thing. So now that we recognize the harms of it, we see that the places like St. Louis—and to a lesser extent, Kansas City—that have more fragmentation. St. Louis by any measure nationally has extreme fragmentation, meaning a whole lot of local governments, be they cities or school districts or fire districts or streetlight districts. I mean, we can really get into the obscure ones here in Missouri, but the more you have of that, the less strict zoning you’re going to have. And then that results in lower housing prices.

Susan Pendergrass (02:00)
You—

David Stokes (02:10)
What is the good that comes from that in the end? I think there’s lots of goods that come from it and some harms too. But the real good—the point of this paper, and the good for somebody who doesn’t care about public policy or libertarian thoughts or anything and just wants to be able to buy a nice house at an affordable price—is: the less strict zoning you have, the more fragmentation you have, the more you see that in lower housing costs.

Susan Pendergrass (02:35)
Yeah, and if you were starting a business too and one municipality, let’s say Clayton, has really high restrictions on what you can build, where you can build a health office and be—I don’t know if they do or don’t—but then you could just simply go next door to the next place and pick a different place that has fewer restrictions.

David Stokes (02:52)
You can, and that does happen. One of the ways they’ve solved that dilemma in St. Louis County especially is they do a lot more code enforcement and permitting at the county level than at the municipal level. Because nobody wants to have to get—if I’m going to be a plumber—nobody wants to have a plumbing license in 88 different cities. So they do that at the county level. You get your county license and it’s good throughout all of St. Louis County. Now, there are good aspects of that—mostly that you have to get one license instead of 88, which is an obvious good—but it’s also subject to abuse as well. It’s sort of the counterargument to the benefits of fragmentation in that it’s easier for special interest groups, like in this case, say the plumbers union, to capture licensing in St. Louis County if they only have to dominate one board as opposed to 88 boards. So there are two different ways to go—there’s the good and then the part of it that might not be quite as good.

Susan Pendergrass (03:59)
Yeah, so you make the point in this paper that while St. Louis does not necessarily have a housing affordability issue—or maybe even Missouri—it’s still worthwhile for folks who are working at the municipal level, like if you’re working as a newly elected Board of Aldermen or newly elected county board official, to educate yourself on what is and isn’t possible to make sure that you avoid what you just described as the pitfalls of over-regulating.

David Stokes (04:28)
Absolutely. A lot of this paper is about—in the not very scientific term—sort of low-hanging fruit. Just because zoning in Missouri may be less strict than in other states… there’s actually, I discovered in researching this paper—I’d always understood and known that zoning in Missouri and in St. Louis and Kansas City was less strict than in many other parts of the country—but then I discovered that there is actually an index out of the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania that ranks metropolitan areas by zoning strictness. And St. Louis is the least strict for zoning of any metropolitan area in the country in this ranking. And Kansas City is sort of in the middle. But then you see that Kansas City on the Missouri side is closer to St. Louis, and it’s the Kansas side that is more strict and puts them in the middle. So we really do have not-strict zoning.

Susan Pendergrass (05:05)
That’s hilarious.

David Stokes (05:24)
And that’s a wonderful thing, but it doesn’t mean that cities shouldn’t make some of these reforms that are coming nationwide that would still benefit Missouri, such as abolishing minimum parking requirements, allowing smaller lot sizes, allowing people to build accessory dwelling units on their own property. It’s a great reform focus—from the Show Me Institute’s perspective—because these are changes that can be made that enhance people’s own property rights and what they can do with their own property, while at the same time giving people more choice. And in the long run, if you do more of these, you’ll help keep housing prices down even more for people. And in a good way—you’re not doing this through mandates or rules; you’re just saying we’re going to allow people to build even more. And I’m not against every limit on every property thing ever. There are some that are reasonable—particularly in Missouri we have floodplain limits on where you build that are very reasonable in many cases—but there’s still a lot of good stuff we can do.

Susan Pendergrass (06:33)
Yeah, I saw recently last week that in the upcoming election cycle, housing affordability is a top issue for folks. This is really bubbling up the list of priorities because it’s gotten so expensive and, you know, I keep reading about why people can’t afford to move, and they can’t afford to sell their home, or they can’t afford to buy a home. And certainly some markets—like you mentioned in the paper, like Portland—and you mentioned this briefly: Portland’s got a brown zone and a green zone, and you can’t build in the green zone. You have to stay in the brown zone, and it makes it very prohibitively expensive to build new housing stock in Portland, and the prices have gone up dramatically. We do not yet have that problem in St. Louis, but I know that it’s on a lot of people’s minds and certainly, statewide, we still have some concerns about having enough affordable housing for everybody. I do think it’s important to make sure that we don’t let regulation creep happen so that we find ourselves raising our prices artificially.

David Stokes (07:36)
And you see this in disputes in our exurban areas now in, say, St. Charles and Jefferson County—surrounding counties of St. Louis—and on the Kansas City side as well. Last year, for example, in St. Charles County, a big new subdivision was rejected in a wooded part of the county—I think it was near Weldon Spring. They’re also allowing some, but—

Susan Pendergrass (07:56)
Was it Weldon Spring, or what was that?

David Stokes (08:02)
And that’s the dilemma that people face: as places like St. Charles and Jefferson County grow and get more full, there’s going to be inevitable pressure from the people there now to stop new building. It’s called last-house syndrome: “Great, my new home here is great. Now don’t build any more because I got the house and it’s perfect.” You see that everywhere, and you understand the concerns. I try not to completely ignore the concerns of the folks, because they’re not always wrong—of course, we’ll go back to the floodplain issue—but you’ll have people worry. It’s the people there now: concerns about traffic and overbuilding and destruction of wooded areas and too dense and all those things. But you want people to realize that other people probably said the same thing before they built your house, and it was a good thing that people in most instances really said no to that, and it allowed that construction to continue. And I really want people to realize that.

Susan Pendergrass (08:34)
Yeah. That’s right. ⁓

David Stokes (09:00)
If we go—it’s not about any one subdivision, because look, there probably are certain instances in certain places where the new zoning is too dense, whatever it may be—it’s not that every rejection is always completely wrong. But if you start in Missouri making a pattern of this in the outer areas of Kansas City and St. Louis, where you start turning down a lot of these new subdivisions to preserve whatever it is that people moved out there for 20 years ago, then housing prices are going to increase in Missouri. They will increase substantially, and it won’t take that long if you really do stop the building. So that’s one of the takeaways from this paper: to the largest extent possible, we need to keep allowing the building of these new homes or apartments. And obviously a big part of the paper is that apartments should be generally allowed in more places too. That’s how we’re going to continue to have low housing costs, and that’s the benefit of it. It’s not about one subdivision in one space, but if it becomes a trend, it’s really going to be a problem—the trend being protecting it.

Susan Pendergrass (10:15)
Yeah, and the multifamily for sure. What are your findings around that? People don’t seem to want to have to look at apartment buildings. Is that right?

David Stokes (10:25)
They don’t—there’s just some natural rejection against it. And it’s frustrating to see. In some spots—I remember in the City of St. Louis; this is one where, when you lived in St. Louis, you lived near there—at the corner of Skinker and Delmar there was a proposal for a large apartment building right there, and it got a lot of opposition, and it has not moved forward. It was stopped. I hope it comes back because it’s a perfect lot for an apartment building. It’s just an empty lot—it was a chicken restaurant for many, many years and a popular one—but it’s been vacant forever. And it’s right near public transit. So it’s the perfect idea where you should be able to build there, and you shouldn’t have generous or extensive—

Susan Pendergrass (10:59)
An abandoned empty lot, right?

David Stokes (11:18)
—parking requirements for those buildings, because one of the projects—

Susan Pendergrass (11:21)
That’s what people were kind of freaking out about though, was the parking. Like, where are all these cars going to go? And there was one across the street and they had only put in like one parking space for every two units or something, and they figured that people would use public transport. Anyway, I remember the pushback on that. And it’s this NIMBYism–YIMBYism thing, right? It’s so hard to push people to YIMBYism—yes in my backyard—because of things they don’t… I don’t… These same people often talk a lot about housing affordability, so I don’t mean to overgeneralize, but there are some of the very same people who are so concerned about it who don’t want to look at apartment buildings.

David Stokes (11:50)
Right, don’t want to—and you understand. That’s a very liberal area that we’re talking about. If you were to define the politics of that area, you’re right: many of the residents of those communities in both the city and in University City right there would, in theory, in the big picture, probably agree, but then, “Oh, we don’t want this development here.” And it was a perfect place for a new apartment. Again, of all the St. Louis area, it’s one of the best areas served by public transit—

Susan Pendergrass (12:06)
Yes.

David Stokes (12:31)
—with buses and MetroLink and the WashU shuttles, because so many people who would be in those apartments would be WashU students. They’ve got that extensive shuttle system. But it was rejected, and I hope it comes back. And that’s just one of many, many examples of it.

Susan Pendergrass (12:31)
Yeah, yeah. What about the—what part of zoning and planning is this push in the City of St. Louis, anyway, to try to get people to move downtown? Is that something that’s coded in? I feel like they’re trying to get people to go downtown.

David Stokes (13:03)
They are. And thankfully, I don’t think zoning is preventing that. Of all the reasons people may or may not be choosing to move downtown—fear of crime and businesses leaving downtown, the jobs—as somebody who lived downtown in the late 1990s and early 2000s, to move down there when many of the jobs have left—fear—it’s a harder thing to convince. But I don’t think there’s— I don’t think it’s difficult or has ever been difficult for the loft developers of the ’90s to get permission to take an empty commercial building and turn it into lofts. There might have been a lot of issues they had to deal with, but zoning—I don’t believe—was one of them. Thankfully that’s a very good thing. But it’s one of the fun parts about this paper, right? We’re talking in the other papers and in the ones to come about the best ways to do public safety and public works and a lot of things. In most of these instances we all agree somebody has to do this service, and it’s just a question of: does the city provide it themselves? Do they contract with a neighboring municipality to do it—such as a small city contracting with a neighboring city to do police service? Should you let the private sector do it in a regulated manner, like utilities? But we can all agree it has to be done. Whereas I started this paper saying: despite the fact that it may be incredibly common, cities don’t actually need planning or zoning—life can exist without it. And that’s where the current HOA options come into play. And the history of HOAs in St. Louis, in the private place model, is such an interesting part of that. So there’s a little bit of the historic discussion of all of this in the paper too.

Susan Pendergrass (14:53)
So where do Missouri municipalities for the most part right now stand on things like—two questions I’m going to ask you—accessory dwelling units and short-term rentals or Airbnbs? Where do they stand on ADUs?

David Stokes (15:06)
Well, slowly but surely, we’re starting to permit ADUs. We haven’t had any sort of statewide, to my knowledge, overarching legislation. And that’s where the fact that we have low housing costs in Missouri matters. I don’t think we’re going to see the California situation that had to go statewide because none of the municipalities would agree to it. I don’t think we’ll see that here because there’s not the tremendous high-cost-of-housing crisis to push that. But slowly but surely, cities are starting to allow more ADUs, and that’s a very good thing. When you get out into rural areas—and in some places that don’t even have zoning in the first place—you can do any ADU you want to, or the zoning is so loose that of course you can build an apartment above your garage if you’d like to. Why are you even asking? But the cities have the rules against it.

Susan Pendergrass (15:52)
That’s where I live.

David Stokes (16:03)
Slowly but surely moving in the right direction there. And then it’s going in the opposite way with short-term rentals. Slowly but surely most cities are instituting short-term rental limitations. I’m not automatically opposed to that in every case. I get it: if you have a neighborhood and all of a sudden there’s a house where big parties are being thrown every weekend because they’re renting it out to different groups of people to throw parties, you’re going to hate that, and that’s going to impact the quality of your life. So I’ve been saying for a few years now that the short-term rental regulations I support would generally be things that don’t go to a blanket prohibition. I think that’s too far—and most cities aren’t doing that—but rather really focus on punishment of the property owner for repeated rule-breaking. One party is maybe one party, but if there’s a trend where you own the property and the people you’re renting to are consistently out of control, then the fines should be increased. I wouldn’t be opposed to them getting fairly steep up to a point too—that if it happens too often, you would lose your business license to operate that short-term rental. Because I do think that if you’re doing it a lot—if you’re routinely renting it out—you should be treated a little more like a hotel. We don’t want to give short-term rentals an advantage over the hotel-motel industry. You want that playing field to be as level as possible, especially for people who are renting their houses or condos or whatever out a lot. So then pull that license if it’s an abuse that’s happening consistently. But let’s try to—

Susan Pendergrass (17:55)
Well, I had that on my street.

David Stokes (17:56)
—go to a method through crackdown on rule-breaking, not blanket prohibitions.

Susan Pendergrass (18:00)
Yeah, we had that on my street in St. Louis, and it was a street of, I don’t know, three- or four-bedroom houses, and they somehow had eight bedrooms and a pool, which was very rare in my neighborhood. So they mostly just rented it out to college students and got called all the time—the police got brought in all the time for noise complaints. And there wasn’t really a good mechanism in place at the time to prevent it from happening. So I agree that there should be some limitations around them, but not to make it so strict that people can’t use it as intended. I mean, I stay in Airbnbs all the time. I like having them, but—

David Stokes (18:36)
Now, that police dilemma—that’s something in St. Louis and probably Kansas City, a few big cities, where the cops just have better things to do than break up parties. I mean, they’ve got violent crimes to address. That’s an issue: how are they going to take it seriously enough? In the average Missouri suburb or mid-sized cities, the police are going to take that a little more seriously, I would think. And a good comparison I like is in Lake of the Ozarks, where some cities have instituted strict rules against short-term rentals, while others, like Osage Beach—at least as of our research—hadn’t instituted anything and took a much more free-market approach: “We’re a tourist area; we want tourists to come here.” So it’ll be a good natural experiment over time to see how it affects property values, how growth is affected, as different comparable cities in the Lake of the Ozarks region choose different paths to move forward. So I definitely look forward to following that.

Susan Pendergrass (19:37)
Well, then I’ll know—another component to this paper is on planning. I think you just said a city doesn’t have to do planning if they don’t choose to, but are Missouri cities or municipalities planners? I mean, is that a planned thing, or are we more like anything goes?

David Stokes (19:56)
Most Missouri cities have plans. Right?

Susan Pendergrass (19:57)
I’ve been to New Town, by the way. I just want to say I have visited New Town, so—before you start talking.

David Stokes (20:03)
Well, that’s the architectural planning—how do we want to design it? Then there’s the legal, defined planning. And luckily, again, I really don’t think Missouri cities need to do any planning outside of general infrastructure planning. So I shouldn’t say they don’t need to do any planning—there’s the general infrastructure planning that pretty much everybody supports, meaning you should have an idea of how growth is going to go in your city and where you’re going to put sewers and sidewalks and streets. You want a general long-term plan for that, even if that plan is—as it should be—thoroughly adjustable and can be changed as growth happens naturally. But then you get into planning like we mentioned with Portland earlier—urban growth boundaries—where the planners really start to say, “You can live here; you cannot live here; you can build here; you cannot build here,” and it gets to be really extreme. We don’t really have that in Missouri. Thankfully, the plans that cities do adopt can be easily amended by any city council. They can be changed. When I worked at St. Louis County, we dealt with the county planning commission for the parts of the council district I worked in that were unincorporated, where the planning commission had a lot to say on that. So elected officials can and should be able to change that plan as they go. And then the biggest—let’s say you permitted a development that’s against your plan, but the elected officials want to do it anyway—I usually don’t have a problem with that. The fact that it’s inconsistent with your plan would generally be something that, if locals want to sue to stop the development, they would cite in the lawsuit—that it was inconsistent with your process and your plan—and then it would be determined by judges and the whole legal process. But planning in Missouri is something that, outside of basic infrastructure planning, cities shouldn’t really do. And to the extent that they do it, it’s easily amended and changed. And that’s a good thing.

Susan Pendergrass (21:55)
Mm-hmm. So the first two papers in your series were taxation, right?

David Stokes (22:20)
Taxation was number two, and the first one was just sort of the structure of municipal government in Missouri. It had a lot to do with city managers. And then the fragmentation issue was addressed as well in the first one that we discussed here, because that’s a part of that, obviously.

Susan Pendergrass (22:23)
Introductory. Okay. And taxation. And this is zoning and planning. Right. And then what’s on deck? What’s the next one?

David Stokes (22:41)
We don’t actually know yet what number four will be—germinating. Most of them are ready to go pretty quickly, so I think the next one will be released within the next two months—certainly this year. And I think it’s going to be on public works. But we have papers coming on public works, public safety, parks and recreation—which is one I’m really going to enjoy. You go to Forest Park and there’s all the great things in St. Louis’s Forest Park, and then you realize that many of the wonderful things there are actually done under contract with the private sector, either for-profit businesses like the Boathouse and the ice rink that pay the city to operate, or nonprofit businesses like the Muni that have been in the park for a long time. So it’s a great option to talk about all the different ways to provide parks and recreation services.

Susan Pendergrass (23:18)
Yeah.

David Stokes (23:35)
But those are at least three of the upcoming ones. And then there’ll be a concluding, summarize-it-all-up section as well.

Susan Pendergrass (23:41)
I look forward to hearing more about those, and thanks for coming on to talk about planning and zoning. It’s going to be a great series when it all gets put together. Thanks.

David Stokes (23:48)
Thank you very much, Susan.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

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The study by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Center for Building in North America found that small apartment buildings with one stairwell are just as safe as those with two. But Missouri’s biggest cities—Springfield, St. Louis and Kansas City—use building codes that require two stairways in buildings taller than three stories. That rule drives up construction costs and makes many projects financially unworkable.

These two-stair rules are based on the International Building Code, the widely adopted national standard. But they block a housing type common in Europe and now gaining traction in U.S. cities such as New York and Seattle.

The data challenge the logic of the two-stair mandate. In New York, none of the 4,440 single-stair apartment buildings built since 2012—each equipped with fire sprinklers—has been tied to a fire death caused by blocked exits. Seattle shows the same pattern: no increase in fatalities for single-stair buildings.

What’s changed? Modern safety systems such as sprinklers, smoke detectors, and fire-resistant stairwells have significantly improved safety in multi-unit buildings. The redundancy of a second staircase adds cost without increasing safety.

That trade-off matters. A second staircase means longer hallways, less usable space, and fewer units—especially in tight or oddly shaped lots. For developers trying to build mid-size, lower-cost housing, the extra stairwell often kills the project.

Critics may argue redundancy is good policy. But the evidence shows single-stair buildings, built to modern standards, are safe. Other states are already adapting. Washington and California have created carve-outs or pilot programs allowing single-stair buildings under certain conditions—typically height limits and requirements to use safety features like sprinklers.

Although Missouri is one of a handful of states without its own statewide codes, if our cities want to expand housing options without major subsidies or rezonings, removing outdated design rules is a practical place to start.

The post Missouri Should Rethink Fire Code Rules that Block Small Apartments appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The study by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Center for Building in North America found that small apartment buildings with one stairwell are just as safe as those with two. But Missouri’s biggest cities—Springfield, St. Louis and Kansas City—use building codes that require two stairways in buildings taller than three stories. That rule drives up construction costs and makes many projects financially unworkable.

These two-stair rules are based on the International Building Code, the widely adopted national standard. But they block a housing type common in Europe and now gaining traction in U.S. cities such as New York and Seattle.

The data challenge the logic of the two-stair mandate. In New York, none of the 4,440 single-stair apartment buildings built since 2012—each equipped with fire sprinklers—has been tied to a fire death caused by blocked exits. Seattle shows the same pattern: no increase in fatalities for single-stair buildings.

What’s changed? Modern safety systems such as sprinklers, smoke detectors, and fire-resistant stairwells have significantly improved safety in multi-unit buildings. The redundancy of a second staircase adds cost without increasing safety.

That trade-off matters. A second staircase means longer hallways, less usable space, and fewer units—especially in tight or oddly shaped lots. For developers trying to build mid-size, lower-cost housing, the extra stairwell often kills the project.

Critics may argue redundancy is good policy. But the evidence shows single-stair buildings, built to modern standards, are safe. Other states are already adapting. Washington and California have created carve-outs or pilot programs allowing single-stair buildings under certain conditions—typically height limits and requirements to use safety features like sprinklers.

Although Missouri is one of a handful of states without its own statewide codes, if our cities want to expand housing options without major subsidies or rezonings, removing outdated design rules is a practical place to start.

The post Missouri Should Rethink Fire Code Rules that Block Small Apartments appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post Why America Can’t Build Enough Housing with Edward L. Glaeser appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

That certainly is the number Fox4KC reported. And that number does come from the Streetcar Authority itself.

At over $100 million per mile, Kansas City may have just built the most expensive streetcar system in the country. A quick search online seems to support this (see table below). While this places the KC streetcar extension as the most expensive of 2025, we will only hold that title for a short while. California’s Orange Country streetcar—dubbed the Trolley to Nowhere by our friends at the California Policy Center)—will blow past our cost-per-mile when it opens in 2026.

Randal O’Toole, who authored a Show-Me Institute policy study on various streetcar proposals in Kansas City, told me “the average for streetcars is about $91 million a mile.” Although he added, “Seattle wants to connect two streetcar lines together at a cost of $220 million a mile.” So maybe Orange County’s record will itself be short-lived.

Recall that the streetcar system has done nothing to drive up assessed market value of the properties along the route above that of the county as a whole. It has had no measurable economic impact—despite the continuing and unsubstantiated claims made by streetcar supporters.

At best, we in Kansas City can—for a short while—lay claim to the most expensive system in the country. Yay!

The post “It cost what?” —KC Streetcar Announces Opening of New Extension appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Shaka Mitchell, senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, about how a new federal scholarship tax credit, created through the One Big Beautiful Bill, could transform K–12 education across the country. They discuss what this means for Missouri families, the legal threats facing the MOScholars program, how education policy is shifting nationally, and more.

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Timestamps

00:00 The Evolution of School Choice in Missouri
02:59 Charter Schools and Teacher Innovation
05:40 The Impact of Lawsuits on Educational Freedom
08:35 Federal Tax Credit Programs and Their Implications
11:19 The Future of School Choice and Parental Empowerment

Episode Transcript

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Susan Pendergrass (00:00):
Thank you so much for joining us on the Show-Me Institute podcast, Shaka Mitchell of AFC. But I think you wear a lot of hats. We’ll just do that hat for now. There have been a lot of changes in the last few years—certainly since the pandemic—regarding how kids end up at the school they attend, especially with parents now getting more opportunities to choose instead of just being assigned. I know you’ve been on the front lines of this, especially through your work with charter schools.

In Missouri, we’re sort of creeping into it. We have a scholarship program now that’s growing, and finally, like in so many other states, the legislature has decided to put some public funding toward it. And now it’s tied up with a lawsuit. Are you following what’s going on with Missouri’s scholarship program?

Shaka Mitchell (00:45):
Yeah, thanks Susan. Thanks for having me on. I sure am following it. I’ve been encouraged in recent years by the steps Missouri has taken to expand school choice. As you know, there had been a charter school law for years, but it was really limited—to Kansas City and St. Louis. That’s a lot of students, but still many others couldn’t access those schools.

Then you had the MOScholars program, which I bet we’ll talk about. On the one hand, there are some encouraging developments coming out of Missouri. And then, per usual, there are lawsuits. Because, in the words of the famous 20th-century philosopher Taylor Swift, haters gonna hate.

Susan Pendergrass (01:30):
That’s right.

Let’s go back to this charter school thing for a minute. Now, for the first time, a charter school can open anywhere in the state—but only if the school board is the sponsor. That happens all over the country, but in Missouri, no school board would even consider authorizing a charter school. Not running them, just authorizing them.

Now there’s one other county where they can open without the board as the sponsor. But there is such strong resistance to the idea of charter schools. Do you find that surprising in 2025?

Shaka Mitchell (02:06):
Yes and no. I’ve worked in charter schools and with several charter networks. I have lots of friends still working in that space. At the American Federation for Children, we’re school-type agnostic. We support parents’ ability to choose.

In some ways, it’s not surprising that school districts—which have in many places become jobs programs for adults—don’t want to disrupt the status quo. Budgets continue to increase, while enrollments decrease. So they’ve got fewer students per classroom, but more money per pupil.

They’ve got it pretty good in terms of job security. But I think what you’re getting at is important: there are great educators who want to do right by kids. And many of them are trapped within that system.

We’re seeing some start their own schools or move to other states or online programs. There’s a lot of innovation happening. But unfortunately, you mostly see the negative reaction from public school districts when it comes to innovation and choice.

Susan Pendergrass (03:42):
Yes, and what’s so tragic in Missouri is that we’ve shut the door on teachers as entrepreneurs. We have plenty of entrepreneurial teachers. Some of the strongest charter school networks were started by teachers who said, “I have a great idea, and I need to do this outside the regulations and bureaucracy.” Cutting off the teacher-as-entrepreneur option is tragic.

Shaka Mitchell (04:10):
Yeah, super tragic. One of my colleagues, Dr. Patrick Graff at AFC, has done work on teacher spending accounts—similar to ESAs.

It’s a great idea. Teachers often say their classrooms are under-resourced. Every parent knows it’s almost back-to-school season—we’re about to get a list of supplies.

Every time I get that list, I think, “Why haven’t we budgeted for enough glue or crayons?” Patrick’s idea is that teachers should have accounts to buy what they need. Surprise: teachers love it, and legislators do too.

But when you say, “Cool, it works for teachers—now let’s do it for parents,” suddenly it’s hair-on-fire. The education establishment just says no. It’s unfair.

Susan Pendergrass (05:19):
Yeah. Public funding for MOScholars in Missouri currently serves mostly low-income students and students with disabilities in Kansas City and St. Louis. That’s where the program started. It’s expanded a bit—but only through tax-credit fundraising, and the organizations have to ask for donations.

Now the lawsuit is basically saying those kids have to go back to their old schools. That we can’t publicly fund private schools for students. It’s saying, “You have to go back to the school that didn’t work for you.”

I know the teachers’ unions brought the lawsuit, and they often take on the PR risk of being on the wrong side of things—like trying to take scholarships away from kids. I don’t see how they can sit well with that.

Shaka Mitchell (06:20):
Yeah. I had the great fortune of meeting a parent in Missouri, Becky Ucello. Her daughter was able to attend a private school through the program. Becky is a public school teacher.

So the idea that private choice programs are anti–public school is a myth. Of course she wants the best for her students—and her own daughter, who has exceptional needs. The district school wasn’t working. Who among us wouldn’t want the best for our child?

The unions get this wrong every time. And they usually get defeated in court. I expect the same in Missouri. There’s strong federal and state case law supporting the idea that parents can choose and that funds given out in a non-discriminatory way can be used at religious schools—because the parent is making the choice, not the government.

Susan Pendergrass (07:47):
In addition to the lawsuit, there’s a potential initiative petition in Missouri to amend the constitution to say you can’t spend public funds at private institutions for students.

But we already have several higher ed programs that work like Pell Grants—you can take them to public or private colleges. We have Bright Flight. This petition might even cut off those programs, too.

And even when open enrollment comes up, it’s often the lowest-performing districts that say, “We can’t be part of it—we can’t let our kids leave.”

Shaka Mitchell (08:41):
It’s totally short-sighted. Nearly every district already outsources some of their special needs education to private providers. That petition could cut off even that.

It’s absurd. Districts don’t make their own computers, books, or desks. They purchase from private companies all the time. The idea that public education is this sacred, fully public institution is a fiction.

Susan Pendergrass (09:33):
Cisco trucks are in every school. Pearson brings the textbooks. Public education is filled with private corporations. And we’ve made so much progress nationally.

I’d love for you to explain the potential for federal scholarship expansion through tax credits. What is that new program, and how will it work?

Shaka Mitchell (10:09):
Sure. The federal scholarship tax credit passed as part of the One Big Bill earlier this year. It’s the first-ever federal K-12 tax credit program.

First, it’s a tax program—not from the Department of Education. So it’s not adding to federal bloat or undermining local control.

Any federal taxpayer can direct up to $1,700 of their tax liability to a scholarship granting organization—like the ones already in Missouri. So instead of sending it to the IRS, I could say, “Let’s send this to a scholarship org in Kansas City.”

Then, the organization can award scholarships to families, most of whom will qualify based on income. The families can use them for a range of educational expenses—just like ESAs. It’s really exciting.

Susan Pendergrass (12:09):
I’ve heard opponents call it a federal voucher—but it’s not a voucher, right?

Shaka Mitchell (12:18):
Correct. Think of it like when your tax return asks if you want to give a dollar to the presidential campaign. But now it’s $1,700 to a scholarship org.

In Missouri, we have Catholic, Hebrew, and non-sectarian scholarship organizations. You can choose which one to support.

Susan Pendergrass (12:59):
Do you know the total amount of available tax credits?

Shaka Mitchell (13:06):
It’s unlimited, within that $1,700 per-taxpayer cap. Initially, there were discussions of state-by-state limits, but now the limit is per individual—not by state.

Susan Pendergrass (13:34):
So governors have to opt in, right?

Shaka Mitchell (14:10):
Yes. Governors or other state officials need to opt in. That may look different state to state. Some legislatures, like North Carolina’s, have already voted to participate.

Susan Pendergrass (14:45):
Where does Missouri stand?

Shaka Mitchell (14:59):
Probably not much discussion yet. It doesn’t go into effect until 2027, so there’s time. But Missouri is in a good spot—you’ve already got scholarship organizations and experience with tax credit programs.

Susan Pendergrass (15:20):
What about blue states like Oregon or California?

Shaka Mitchell (15:27):
Great question. All eyes are on states like California, Pennsylvania, New York. There are a lot of taxpayers there.

Imagine millions of California taxpayers sending $1,700 each to scholarships in Missouri. It would be crazy for a governor to allow that much money to leave their state. But we’ll see.

Susan Pendergrass (16:13):
What do you think those states will do?

Shaka Mitchell (16:25):
Hard to say, but some Democratic governors have said they’re researching it. It’s not really a partisan issue—it’s just the tax code. And everyone pays taxes.

Susan Pendergrass (16:55):
It’s an interesting political move—making school choice national.

Shaka Mitchell (16:59):
Exactly. And because it’s tax-based, it reaches everyone—Republican, Democrat, or Independent.

Are states really going to let billions in scholarships go to other states? I doubt it.

Susan Pendergrass (17:45):
It’ll be interesting to see how private school supply responds. Like in Arizona, where more parents have access, vendors have stepped in with customized, creative options. This could fuel huge innovation. The fact that it’s unlimited in size is surprising.

Shaka Mitchell (18:43):
Yes. These federal scholarships could stack on top of state programs.

Say your state gives $6,000, but tuition is $9,000. The federal credit could close that gap. That’s a big deal.

Susan Pendergrass (19:38):
Will there be a lawsuit?

Shaka Mitchell (19:39):
There probably will be. Lawsuits are easy to file. But this program is part of the tax code—it’s hard to challenge. It’s not clear who would even have standing.

If unions want to burn money on a lawsuit, I say go ahead.

Susan Pendergrass (20:27):
I think what works against them is how happy families are with these scholarships. Satisfaction is high.

Shaka Mitchell (20:53):
Yes. Since 2019, we’ve seen an explosion of education freedom.

And there’s now long-term data—like from Ohio—showing EdChoice students, especially Black and brown students, have higher college attainment. That kind of data is compelling.

Susan Pendergrass (21:59):
And the ROI is incredible. You keep one kid out of prison or help one finish college—you’ve already saved more than the scholarship cost.

These families take $6,000 when the public system spends $18,000. They make it work. I’ve never seen anything in traditional public education with this much impact.

Shaka Mitchell (23:10):
It reminds me of the early 2000s with the excitement around No Child Left Behind.

But this is even more grassroots. Parents are organizing—helping each other on Facebook, answering questions, forming communities. That’s powerful. You can’t put that genie back in the bottle.

Susan Pendergrass (24:34):
Right. I don’t think we’ll go from more choice to less. And I know people who considered moving to Missouri until they realized they couldn’t pick their child’s school.

Kids from these programs are having their own kids now. It’s not going backward.

Shaka Mitchell (24:40):
Exactly.

There was a great article today in the New York Times saying, “The monopoly is dead.” I mean—from the New York Times!

Susan Pendergrass (25:21):
That’s what these lawsuits feel like: a desperate last gasp.

Never underestimate parents. They’ll show up. Thank you so much for joining us today. That was fascinating. I know you’ll be following the lawsuit.

Shaka Mitchell (25:59):
Happy to do it. Thanks for having me, Susan.

Susan Pendergrass (26:01):
Great, thanks.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post The One Big Education Opportunity with Shaka Mitchell appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

• Homework and weekly tests would no longer count toward students’ final semester grades.
• Semester grades would depend entirely on a final exam, which students could retake multiple times.
• Tardiness and absences would have no impact on grades.
• Cheating or copying would carry only non-grade-based consequences.
• The threshold for earning an A would fall to 80 percent.
• The threshold for a D would fall to 21 percent.

My first reaction was to laugh out loud. I suspect many others feel the same. Still, it’s worth pausing to consider where these ideas come from and why they resonate with some educators. Like many flawed policies, these changes are rooted in good intentions. Proponents of “Grading for Equity” see grade gaps between students from different backgrounds—by race, poverty status, etc.—and are trying to reduce those gaps. I see the same gaps, and I want them reduced, too.

But here’s the reality: grade gaps reflect real gaps in skills and knowledge. And when school ends, it’s not the letter grades that shape students’ futures—it’s the underlying skills and competencies those grades are supposed to reflect. “Grading for Equity” is just wishful thinking. It is a refusal to grapple with the truth.

Fortunately, I’m not aware of any Missouri school districts as extreme as SFUSD, and I haven’t heard of any “Grading for Equity” initiatives here. But this episode is a useful reminder that some educators seem to misunderstand what it takes to prepare students for success. Lowering expectations to conceal skill gaps will not help anyone in the long run.

This is also a powerful example of why we need high-quality, comprehensive tests in our public schools. Standardized tests compel schools and districts to confront the reality of student performance. They offer families and the public reliable, externally benchmarked data about what students have—and have not—learned. In an ideal world where we all prioritized student learning, such tests might not be necessary. But in the world we live in, they’re a vital safeguard.

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Taxes are going down, right? That’s a good thing, right? My answers are “yes,” and a hesitant “maybe?”

I like low taxes, but I like low taxes evenly spread out for everyone. How we tax is almost as important as how much we tax. Whether they are income, property, or sales taxes, and whether they are at the national, state, or local government level, too often lately we are cutting taxes for some people in some instances for some things. These highly targeted cuts might work out overall, but often they are done because they make good politics, not good public policy. Taxes should be broadly based for several reasons, including fairness, certainty, and administrative ease. This is the opposite of what is happening.

Congress seems likely to pass changes to federal income tax rules that would exempt income from tips and overtime from taxation. This is absurd. The airport skycap who works a 50-hour week should be admired for his hard work, but his tax treatment should not be any different from that of the woman processing tickets behind the airline counter for 40 hours per week. This proposal treats things that are, essentially the same—regular, tipped, and overtime wages—as entirely different things for taxes. That’s a dangerous road to travel.

Staying in the same realm, one of the most hotly contested items in the ongoing federal tax debate is whether to raise the state and local tax (SALT) deduction. Currently, the SALT cap is $10,000 per household. This means that you can deduct state income taxes, local property taxes, etc., up to $10,000 from your federal income taxes. Currently, congressmen from higher-tax states are fighting to significantly increase the SALT deduction cap. The latest number is $40,000. That means that high-tax states would be able to continue increasing taxes knowing that their taxpayers would in part be subsidized by other federal taxpayers. California (or any high-tax state) would get to keep the tax money, and Missouri taxpayers would get to subsidize California taxes. This is preposterous.

The same things are happening locally in Missouri. A few years ago, legislation was passed allowing counties to freeze the property taxes of senior citizens. Scores of counties in Missouri have since done so. As a result, the wealthiest sector of the population gets its property taxes frozen upon turning 62. Younger families working and raising kids will see their taxes continue to rise, and those taxes will almost certainly rise more than they otherwise would have without the senior tax freeze. This is insane.

Another example includes Missouri’s sales tax rules. The legislature passed a law removing sales taxes from diapers and feminine hygiene products. We can all sympathize with the aim here. But adding more products to the sales tax exemption list will increase pressure to raise sales tax rates (or institute entirely new sales taxes) on the other products that are still taxed. Your diapers will have cost less due to reduced taxes, but your infant’s clothes will cost a little more with the new sales taxes on them.

Each of these targeted tax changes will have unseen, harmful effects. High-tax states will continue to get away with tax increases if the SALT deduction is raised. More workers will see their pay come via high-pressure “tips” instead of typical wages. Seniors will avoid beneficial downsizing simply for tax purposes. As fewer goods are subject to regular sales taxes, new special taxing district sales taxes will be added onto everything else. These targeted taxes will likely succeed for purposes of short-term politics, but they are going to fail by any longer-term fiscal measure.

Is there anything going right with tax policy? Sure. Keeping the federal tax rates from rising by passing those parts of the “big, beautiful bill” will benefit everyone, although the entire plan needs further spending cuts. In Missouri, the state income tax rate has been steadily coming down for everyone over the past decade as revenue targets are hit. Finally, the sales tax base has been broadened by taxing online sales and legal marijuana in the past few years. All of those moves are consistent with good tax policy.

If you are a wealthy California homeowner over 62 who still works for tips on overtime while buying diapers online for your Missouri grandkids, you may benefit from all of these changes. But if you are like most people you will benefit from maybe one while being hurt by the others. Of course, the one you benefit from will be clear and obvious, while the multiple ways you are harmed will be small and harder to detect. You will think you’re a winner in this game of tax politics. But in reality, you won’t be, and neither will the government’s fiscal condition.

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