A version of the following commentary appeared in the Columbia Missourian.

As technology companies try to meet the skyrocketing demand for AI-specialized computing capacity, they are dotting the country with data centers to the dismay of some and the delight of others. As is all too often the case in Missouri, many of these companies are being offered taxpayer-supported subsidies or tax exemptions.

For example, Independence, Missouri, is giving Nebius more than $6 billion in tax breaks over the next 20 years for a “hyper-scale” data center, and Montgomery County has offered Amazon hundreds of millions in tax abatements to build a data center near New Florence. But why would subsidies be needed when it seems like data-center developers have money to burn and are desperate for suitable building locations?

Recent actions of data-center developers suggest that it is not the cost of building and operating those facilities that is the barrier; the main problems appear to be finding pathways to secure reliable energy generation and getting their centers online smoothly and quickly (speed-to-operation).

These two obstacles are so serious that the major technology companies (Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc.) recently met with President Trump and signed the “Ratepayer Protection Pledge” to supply and pay for their own power for their AI data centers.

Why would these companies agree to take on this expense? Because their constraint is not cash. For these firms, time is money. The costs of delays in permitting and interconnection outweigh the value of a local tax incentive.

The negative effects of economic development subsidies and tax breaks are well known. When local officials offer these incentives, they diminish positive benefits that could come from a new data-center development: increased property-tax revenue to fill in the gaps for local services or be used to lower the overall tax rate of the community.

With all of this in mind, rather than just doing what most other states do (handing out checks or tax exemptions) Missouri should work on policies that actually deliver what these companies need most: pathways to secure and reliable energy generation, regulatory certainty, and speed-to-operation.

For local communities, this means they should not offer taxpayer dollars. Even with big tech agreeing to pay for their own power, many municipalities will still try to lure projects with incentives. No doubt the companies will take whatever money is offered to them, but subsidies are unlikely to significantly drive their decisions about where to locate.

Instead, local communities should offer a stable, predictable permitting environment and a suitable location to build. That would help address the greater desire for certainty and speed-to-operation.

And at the state level we should think even bigger. Policies like consumer-regulated electricity (CRE) could help make Missouri a true hub for data center development—without using unnecessary subsidies.

CRE would enable private electricity providers to serve large, energy-intensive customers independent of the existing, permission-heavy grid structure by allowing them to build their own power plants. Rather than spreading the costs for this infrastructure, CRE would create a “parallel path to energy abundance” —one financed by the large customers who demand the power.

CRE would allow these data centers to work with a private partner to meet their own energy needs, with less red tape, more certainty, more control, and more freedom to innovate. These benefits are likely to be more appealing than subsidies.

Unfortunately, offering subsidies seems to be a reflexive reaction in Missouri when there is an opportunity to attract a new business. But especially in this case, Missouri would be better off focusing on what the data center sector really needs. Efficient regulatory and permitting policies (like CRE), a predictable and stable environment in which to construct, and abundant energy would be far better suited to attracting and improving data center development than taxpayer dollars.

The post Why Hand Out Subsidies to Data-Center Developers? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A version of the following commentary appeared in the Columbia Missourian.

Missouri, like many states, mandates that a certain share of electricity come from renewable energy sources. Those sources typically include solar, wind, and biomass—but in many states, including Missouri, they exclude nuclear energy.

A productive debate could be had about whether state government should issue any such mandates. But in the meantime, legislators in Jefferson City have introduced several bills using different approaches, each of which would broaden Missouri’s existing standard to include nuclear energy.

Governor Kehoe discussed the issue in his recent State of the State Address, recognizing the long-standing mismatch between policy and reality.

What Is Missouri’s Current Policy?

Missouri’s current renewable portfolio standard (RPS) mandates that no less than 15 percent of each electric utility’s sales come from generated or purchased renewable energy resources (such as solar, wind, biomass, small hydropower, and other non-nuclear sources certified by the state as a renewable). Many other states have adopted similar standards.

Justifications for RPSs vary. Some view them primarily as a tool to improve air quality or limit greenhouse gases. Others argue that portfolio standards help newer energy technologies compete with established fossil fuels or ensure a diverse and resilient mix of energy sources. In any case, if Missouri is going to have an RPS, nuclear energy should be included.

Is Nuclear Energy Clean?

If Missouri’s RPS exists in order to protect the environment, nuclear energy’s exclusion is unreasonable.

Nuclear energy is a zero (or near-zero) emissions energy source, in terms of both criteria pollutants (those that affect air quality) and greenhouse gases.

Further, to produce the same level of electricity, solar farms need 31 times more land than nuclear plants, while onshore wind farms need 173 times more land. In terms of total direct and indirect land use, nuclear is by far the most efficient.

What About Nuclear Waste?

This concern is common but often misguided. Nuclear energy does produce waste, but the waste is compact, carefully managed, and tightly regulated. Much of what is labeled “waste” still contains usable energy. In fact, only about four percent of nuclear fuel is truly unusable after each use, and the United States could reduce nuclear waste in terms of both volume and radioactivity if the industry recycled used fuel. While existing American nuclear power plants are not well equipped to use spent fuel, new advanced reactor designs are increasingly capable of using it to generate electricity.

Regardless, the presence of safely stored waste should not prevent nuclear energy from being included in an updated portfolio.

Government Interference in the Energy Market

Past arguments have held that subsidies level the playing field for renewable energy. Yet, while solar and wind have expanded rapidly in recent years, only seven nuclear plants have been constructed in the U.S. since 1990. Factors such as regulatory burden have also contributed to nuclear energy’s stagnation, but government interference has played a role. Subsidies, tax-credits, and mandates have actually significantly distorted the market in favor of renewables.

The lion’s share of the more than $80 billion in federal support for renewables came through tax expenditures—driven overwhelmingly by the investment tax credit (ITC) for solar projects, which is claimed when a project begins operation, and the production tax credit (PTC) for wind generation. State RPSs create guaranteed demand for these resources, while federal tax policy lowers the cost of supplying them—effectively a double incentive.

This is not to argue that nuclear energy should be subsidized to a similar degree. However, including nuclear energy in Missouri’s RPS would at least make existing policy more even-handed. Nuclear energy meets growing electricity demand cleanly and reliably. The Missouri Legislature should update the state’s RPS to recognize this fact.

The post Missouri Should Update Its Renewable Portfolio Standard to Include Nuclear Energy appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

For years, the Show-Me Institute has scrutinized the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) —not out of malice, but out of a desperate desire to see our students succeed. The state’s commitment to education is vast, in terms of both a constitutional mandate and billions of dollars. Yet, as we examine the latest DESE budget request, it’s impossible to ignore the contrast between the department’s boldness when asking for money and its apparent bashfulness about what it will deliver to Missouri’s students. This disconnect reveals a fundamental weakness at the heart of the agency and a failure to act in a way that provides clear, student-focused leadership and results-based accountability.

In its FY 2027 budget request, DESE is seeking just under $9 billion, $7.5 billion of which comes from Missouri’s public coffers, to execute its mission. A large portion of the budget revenue is distributed to districts through the Foundation Formula. Other big-ticket items are the state institutions for students and adults with disabilities, subsidizing childcare for eligible families, and offsetting district transportation costs. Beyond this, there is a laundry list of programs managed by DESE and funded by the state, such as virtual education, teacher of the year awards, and summer enrichment programs. “And while there is a thousand-page accompanying document that explains what each budget line item is, there isn’t any real explanation for why the money is being requested or how it furthers education in Missouri.

Ideally, the budget request should correspond to the Strategic Plan created by DESE, with each line item of the budget request connected to a stated goal of the agency. Unfortunately, the two documents are only very loosely connected, and the disconnect demonstrates a lack of transparent, performance-driven accountability.

According to the DESE Strategic Plan for 2023–2026, DESE’s vision is to improve lives through education via the four pillars of (1) early learning and literacy, (2) success-ready students and workforce development, (3) safe and healthy schools, and (4) educator recruiting and retention. To accomplish this, DESE has given itself the following five performance measures and three-year targets.

1. The percentage of students entering kindergarten ready to learn (from 54% to 60%).
2. The percentage of students scoring proficient or advanced on the English Language Arts state assessment (from 43.5% to 50%).
3. The percentage of students pursuing gainful employment after graduation (from 91% to 94%).
4. The three-year average of initial teacher certificates issued (from 3,662 to 3,850).
5. The three-year average annual teacher retention rate (from 89.9% to 91.2%).

Setting aside the fact that according to its Strategic Plan Scorecard it hasn’t hit any of the targets yet, this very short list of performance measures reflects an agency that is more focused on process and inputs than on measurable student outcomes. Where are the performance measures for math, science and social studies? What are the outcome goals for students with disabilities? Is all of the work of the 215 employees of the Office of Childhood to be measured by just the percentage of students entering kindergarten “ready to learn”? How does one even measure “gainful employment”? At the very least it seems like an easy number to game. How can we possibly measure the appropriateness of a 369-page, $9 billion budget request based on just these five items?

As they return to Jefferson City after the first of the year, it is time for the Missouri legislature to demand more from an agency asking for $9 billion. To hold DESE accountable and ensure taxpayer dollars are serving students first, the legislature should, at a minimum, require DESE to publicly issue an annual report that explicitly links every major budget request line item to a specific, measurable goal in its strategic plan. If a request does not directly advance a key student outcome, it should be subject to maximum scrutiny. And there should be repercussions for missing targets year after year.

The state constitution vests the responsibility for education in the legislature, not DESE. It is high time the legislature exercises its authority and forces DESE to replace its bureaucratic double-speak with real, measurable results for Missouri’s children. Our students deserve a budget that reflects a true commitment to their future, not one that simply preserves the machinery of a struggling bureaucracy.

The post It’s Time to Hold DESE Accountable appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In 2001, a group of very libertarian-minded activists launched the Free-State Project, which encouraged thousands of libertarian believers in minimal government to move to New Hampshire. The overall success of the project has been limited, for a variety of reasons, but if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then I’d like to see people in Missouri flatter the Granite State and try to do a similar thing here in one of our many cities.

What would such a limited-government, free-market oriented municipality look like in Missouri? To start with, it should be modeled on successful, small-government municipalities like Weston, Florida, and Sandy Springs, Georgia, which provide many local services by contracting with the private sector. It should not be based on the more radical, no-government “utopias” like Grafton, New Hampshire, where the removal of almost all government services led to an increase in bear attacks.

How many limited-government activists would it take to create a free city in Missouri? Not very many. There are hundreds of existing municipalities here with less than a hundred residents where, at most, a few dozen show up to vote in local elections. If, say, 50 true free-market believers moved into one city, what types of changes could they make to create that desired free city?

To start with, they could remove all municipal planning and zoning rules and replace them with private contracts managed by property-owner associations where allowed. Those property-owner associations could manage issues like short-term rentals, trash collection, and home-based businesses.

Municipalities, especially small ones, could focus on contracting with larger cities or counties to provide many services, like policing or building inspections. The new free city could contract with private companies to provide many other services, like trash collection and recreation management. It could similarly contract with nonprofits for some other services where profit opportunities are limited, such as animal shelters. If it had municipal utilities, it could privatize them into regulated, private utilities. The free city could reduce local code requirements, permitting rules, and occupational licensing to the largest extent possible. The important ones, like fire codes and elevator inspections, could be kept, while arbitrary or obsolete regulations, like television repairman licenses and pool-table taxes, could be thrown out.

None of these examples are farfetched. Every one of the above examples is already in place in a city somewhere in Missouri. Private utilities provide water, gas, and electricity to millions of Missourians. Cities contract with counties and other cities for services all over the state. In St. Louis County, every municipality (88 at last count) contracts with the county for at least some inspection services. Nonprofits provide important services to the public, like Pinnacles Youth Park near Columbia, and operate many animal-care facilities. Private businesses operate city-owned golf courses and manage municipal swimming pools throughout the state.

How would a free city fund these services? It would maximize private contracts between residents and companies and enact user fees to the largest extent possible. Low general sales and property taxes could fund the rest, along with revenues shared from other sources, like the gas tax. Importantly, such a city would avoid special deals such as tax abatements or tax-increment financing, for some businesses or people. Making the sales and property tax bases as wide as possible would allow the rates to be as low as possible for everyone. This free city would absolutely avoid the errors of a local income tax such as exist in Kansas City and St. Louis.

Overall, a Missouri free-city project would create a municipal government system not all that different from those in many rural, unincorporated parts of Missouri. It would just be in a more urban or suburban setting. It may seem unrealistic to expect hundreds—or even dozens—of people to make such a move based on political philosophy. But as a model of quality, low-tax local government, it is perfectly realistic. While no city may have enacted all of these ideas, each of them has been enacted with success somewhere. We just need the right number of people to put it together all at once.

I vote we try it somewhere near the Lake of the Ozarks.

The post The Free-City Project for Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Governor Kehoe has appointed four new members to the Missouri State Board of Education, including two who will, if confirmed, replace the president and vice-president. Given that the current president, Charlie Shields, has held the position for a decade and his term expired five years ago, I would say it’s about time. Hopefully these new members will bring new energy and fortitude as they tackle a challenging to-do list.

First, there is the glaring issue of (a lack of) accountability. Currently, Missouri school districts are held accountable through the Missouri School Improvement Plan (MSIP) 6. According to the standards set by this plan, like those in versions 1 through 5 before it, all but six of Missouri’s 520 school districts receive the state’s seal of approval, also known as full accreditation. It defies logic that a district like St. Louis Public Schools, with its numerous academic and financial problems, could be fully accredited. Part of the reason is that when the board switched from using MSIP 5 to MSIP 6 in 2024, it determined that the MSIP 6 results for a single school year were not reliable enough to justify changing any district’s accreditation status. Rather, the board decided to use a three-year rolling average to make that determination, meaning that accreditation decisions will need to wait until 2027. The new Board needs to recognize this for the nonsense that it is, and it needs to create a meaningful accountability system.

Second, the new Board should get fully behind the governor’s effort to revise the Foundation Formula, which distributes most state education dollars to districts. The existing formula is over 20 years old, and at least one-third of our districts don’t even use it. Instead, those districts are “held harmless” and given the amount they received in 2005, regardless of any changes in enrollment or property values. The board, as stewards of billions of dollars in public funding, should insist on a new formula that is highly targeted to student need, is transparent, and allows funding to follow a student to the school of their choice. Ironically, the same MSIP 6 that can’t be trusted to measure student achievement has been deemed perfectly reliable when the board requests that the legislature raise the formula’s base funding amount per student. Which is it?

Third, the Board’s job is to hold schools and districts accountable for their performance, not to hide or apologize for failure. Currently, students who have mastered grade-level content and are ready for the next grade are classified as “Proficient.” In other words, they’re where they should be. But a bill currently under consideration in the Missouri Legislature would add a classification called “Grade Level.” If you didn’t know better, you might think that meant something very similar to “proficient,” but it would actually describe students who may be on grade level. What purpose could this new classification have, other than to provide false reassurance to parents whose children are falling behind? The Board should resist any attempts to water down results.

Finally, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) has a website that is notoriously difficult to use. One of DESE’s main jobs is to disseminate information and data on our 2,500 schools and the 850,000 students who attend them. If Missouri were to allow students to choose a public school other than their assigned one, DESE would need a functioning website to track those students. If the Foundation Formula is revised, taxpayers deserve to be able to easily track public funds as they follow students. The Board should prioritize the building of a user-friendly and comprehensive website with easy-to-find, accessible, and transparent data.

Last year, four in ten Missouri 4th-graders tested in English/Language Arts couldn’t read. This fall they will move to middle school, and one can only imagine the difficulty they’ll be having when they can’t read their textbooks. DESE used to publish the percentage of high school graduates who were deemed either college- or career-ready by DESE standards. The percentage for the last year I could find (2017) was 42 percent. My own calculations from last year put the number at around 62 percent. When fewer than half of our young students can read on grade level and only about half of our graduating seniors are prepared for what’s next, we are in an educational crisis.

Being appointed to the State Board of Education is an honor, but it comes with responsibilities. We want board members to know the truth about how Missouri schools and students are faring, and we want them to tell us the truth about it. We want them to have a plan to fix what’s broken. That may include a performance audit of DESE to make sure the agency is functioning at the highest possible level. It may include working to expand rather than restrict parents’ choices for the education of their children. It also should include requesting the appropriate amount of state funds for their budget, rather than reflexively asking for more money each year. Time will tell which direction this new board takes, but one thing is crystal clear: It can’t be business as usual.

The post New State Board of Education Has a Long To-Do List appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I love science-fiction movies that portray a future, usually bleak, society. Thankfully, the predictions generally have not been borne out, yet. Los Angeles in the 2020s is a much nicer place than was predicted in The Terminator and Blade Runner. I appreciate futuristic settings where the all-powerful government maintains a sense of incompetence, like in Brazil. The byzantine bureaucracy in the future’s all-powerful dictatorship may be more sinister, but I doubt they will become more capable.

There is, unfortunately, one aspect of society that classic dystopian movies and novels did get correct: the surveillance state we live in. Still, one big difference remains between the surveillance state we have today and the one predicted in 1984 and other works. Instead of it being secretly imposed on us by the national government and the military-industrial complex, we have largely brought it upon ourselves with Ring Cameras, Life 360 phone apps, etc. It’s more Truman Show or Rear Window than Blue Thunder.

Which brings us to the expansion of Flock camera systems throughout Missouri. Flock camera systems are license plate readers along roads that connect into criminal databases. They alert police when a car involved in a crime is located. Columbia is just the latest city to contract with the company to install such a system throughout the city. The city council approved the plan in 2024, and they are currently being installed. These Flock plate readers are becoming ubiquitous in towns, counties, and subdivisions. Supporters, including the Columbia police department, claim the cameras will both help solve and deter crimes. Opponents are concerned about privacy violations and potential abuses.

As an opponent of these cameras, I will readily admit the claims about crime are true (although perhaps overstated) and that some good comes from these cameras. I am glad the murderer of the CEO in New York City was caught using the power of the vast surveillance system (much of it on private property) in Manhattan. I am also happy that the cameras can help solve many, lesser crimes.

I rarely read about supporters of the cameras acknowledging their opponent’s concerns, however. Even with the safeguards from abuse that Flock and local police have put in place, including a limited time that it maintains the data and a focus on the plate rather than the driver, these systems undoubtedly will be abused by some. For example, a police chief in Kansas used the system to stalk a former girlfriend.

Just as concerning is the troubling idea that your car is being tracked incessantly as you simply travel around. I am aware there is no “legal” right to privacy in public settings. That doesn’t make this kind of tracking right, though, and being concerned about such systems doesn’t make you a conspiracy theorist.

More legally secure but even more morally troubling is the embracing of Flock systems by private neighborhoods. If there is anything more terrifying than giving your local busybody homeowner’s association head some sophisticated tracking equipment, I have yet to see it. Imagine Tom Cruise in Minority Report, but this time it’s a Karen who’s angry about a high school party. Just because you don’t have a right to privacy when driving in someone else’s subdivision does not justify that subdivision tracking your comings and goings along (usually) public streets.

Nobody, including me, wants local government to be a partisan debating society where every decision is put through a philosophical prism. However, I wish that more of the part-time local officials around the state would have some type of larger political philosophy instead of just doing whatever the city manager or police chief recommends. These license plate readers and similar systems may be legal, but that doesn’t mean they are right, and the speed at which the entire system is expanding around Missouri is frightening.

Caged birds are safe but hardly free. Politicians at every level need to push back against the expansion of the surveillance state. The pursuit of happiness includes the ability to exist without being tracked. At this point, we may get to 1984 yet. The best we can hope for is that it is more like Idiocracy than Soylent Green.

The post The Surveillance Society Is Here appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

David Rosman provided a typical example of this criticism in an editorial for the Columbia Missourian: “Conservative religious leaders and politicians see public education as inferior to private, charter and religious education, but there is no proof supporting that belief.” Rosman then goes on to support his claim by arguing that we do not have an effective way of comparing public and private schools academically, noting that public schools have to accept all students, and pointing out that public school students have won more Scripps National Spelling Bee titles.

It is not clear that Rosman’s examples actually support his claim, but the bigger problem is the claim itself. He says proponents of school choice support the cause because they think public schools are inferior, particularly in the area of academics. Yet academics is just one of the many reasons families support having school choice options.

While I’ve never met a parent who has chosen a charter school or a private school because they believe it will help their child win the Scripps spelling bee, I have met many parents who chose a charter or private school because their children felt bullied in their assigned public school or because they did not feel their children’s needs were being met. I have met parents who have chosen an arts school for their children and some who have chosen a STEM school. And, yes, I have met many parents, from nearly every faith tradition, who have chosen a religious school for their children.

When advocates argue for school choice, it is not because we think all private schools are inherently better than all public schools. Quite the contrary. There are many excellent public schools and many private schools where I would never send my own children. This is not a public versus non-public issue. It is a choice versus no-choice issue. It is a freedom versus control issue.

Proponents of school choice believe parents should be able to direct the upbringing of their children. They also believe that parents should be allowed to choose the type of school that best meets the needs of their children and aligns with the goals of their family.

In short, school choice supporters see assigning students to schools as inferior to a system that allows people to choose from a myriad of educational options.

The post Choice versus No School Choice appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

There is probably no better opportunity for counties and municipalities to share services and save tax money than in emergency 911 dispatching services. As vital as the service is, if the technology is effective and the operator is properly trained, it makes no difference if the emergency call is answered down the block in New Madrid, Missouri, or across the ocean in old Madrid, Spain.

In southeastern Missouri, Perry County and the City of Perryville reviewed numerous options for upgrading their 911 system. In late 2023, they determined that the best option from a service and cost perspective was to contract with neighboring St. Francois County, which has already implemented the improved technology a modern 911 system requires. Perplexingly, some residents of Perry County have objected to this.

According to news reports, the main objection is the loss of a few 911 system jobs, as if the main role of local government is to keep as many people on the payroll as possible. That’s how political machines function, not quality local government. The objectors have succeeded in putting the consolidation question on the upcoming April election ballot. Hopefully, the voters will value tax savings and improved public safety over government job protections.

Many counties and cities around Missouri share emergency operations dispatching. County sheriff’s departments can do more than simply share service with other county sheriffs; they can operate together with city police departments, fire districts, university police departments, ambulance districts, and more. The economies of scale here allow for implementation of better technology in larger 911 systems, saving taxpayer money. The city of Flint, Michigan, saved over a million dollars a year and was able to eliminate 23 positions by joining the Genesee County 911 system.

To give a Missouri example of savings for taxpayers, Lake Ozark recently contracted with Miller County to handle its 911 system. Lake Ozark will save around $200,000 per year in direct costs while avoiding spending even more to upgrade its own soon-to-be obsolete 911 system.

Closer to Perry County, the Cape Girardeau County sheriff’s 911 dispatch system handles calls not only for the sheriff but also for eight other fire and ambulance districts and police, fire, and ambulance calls for Jackson. Does anyone seriously think the public would be better served with 10 different 911 systems in the county, each one struggling to hire and train employees and regularly upgrade expensive technology?

For one final example, in 2016 the City of New Madrid and New Madrid County partnered to consolidate their 911 systems and upgrade their technology. I hope the citizens of Perry County realize how common and beneficial these types of partnership are in Southeast Missouri.

Saving money by sharing the costs of technological improvements is more important than ever since salaries for 911 dispatchers are increasing substantially in an effort to recruit more people to the job. Currently, staffing shortages are the major problem facing dispatching systems all over the country, and have been partially responsible for recent 911 system problems in Kansas City and St. Louis. Maintaining multiple systems requiring more employees using lesser technology isn’t going to help the people of Perry County.

These are just a few good examples of 911 consolidation around Missouri. While there are many success stories in both urban and rural parts of our state, numerous opportunities for change still exist. Wherever you are in Missouri, enhanced public safety technology and more efficient use of tax dollars through 911 consolidation are two things we can all support. Hopefully, the voters of Perry County will recognize these benefits in April.

The post 911 Systems Are a Great Opportunity for Local Government Cooperation appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Earlier this year, Missouri homeowners received their reassessment notices on the value of their property. For many homeowners, the new values were quite a shock. In Jackson County, for example, the average assessment increase was 30 percent.

Missouri’s Hancock Amendment is supposed to require tax rate rollbacks as assessed values increase. Reassessment is not supposed to be a tax increase. However, the high inflation of last year allows local governments to roll back rates far less than usual, if at all. Columbia announced it was keeping its city tax rate exactly the same, despite an eight-percent average valuation increase in Boone County. Don’t let your county or other local government do the same.

In September, counties throughout Missouri are setting their tax rates for 2023. Many of them are seeing large increases in the assessed valuations within their boundaries. Missouri taxpayers need to demand that their counties—and other taxing districts within certain charter counties—roll back rates to offset the otherwise large property tax hikes people will see later this year. Yes, this means local governments should roll back rates even more than is required by Hancock.

Large increases in assessed valuations don’t have to translate to large tax increases, but they will if local officials keep their tax rates the same or lower them by the bare minimum required. High inflation shouldn’t be an excuse to hammer taxpayers with large tax hikes. Taxpayers deserve—and should demand—better treatment from their county officials and other local governments.

The post Taxpayers should demand larger rollbacks than Hancock Amendment requires appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

How would your family feel if your entire neighborhood had 5G internet access and you were still using dial-up? I’m guessing the kids might complain. After all, 5G is simply better, and sticking with an obsolete system seems like a stubborn refusal to change. That’s the situation Missouri families with school-aged children face. Just about all our neighbors wrapped up their legislative sessions by finally giving up address-based school assignments and letting parents choose where to send their children to school. We’re the last one in the neighborhood sticking with the outdated system.

• Early in their session, Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds signed the Students First Act, which will allow families to receive up to $7,600 per year to use toward private-school tuition. The law is phased in, but by 2025, every family in the state will be able to use the program.
• Heading west, Nebraska’s Governor Jim Pillen signed the Opportunity Scholarships Act. Although similar to Missouri’s Empowerment Scholarships program, this bill commits twice as much money and the scholarships are available to children statewide, not just in the largest cities as in Missouri.
• Over in Kansas, a robust public school choice bill passed last year will go into effect in fall 2024. No longer will Kansas school districts be able to opt out of accepting transfer students from other districts. Previously, each district set their own policies regarding whether or not to accept students. As of this fall, Kansas families can apply to transfer to a school of their choice.
• Oklahoma took an innovative approach to school choice in its session. All families in the state can now take a dollar-for-dollar credit against their state tax bill for up to $7,500 in private-school tuition. Homeschoolers can receive up to $1,000 off their state tax bill. And the tax credit is refundable, meaning that the state will pay families back if the tax credit is more than they owed in state taxes.
• Arkansas passed one of the most significant education reform acts this year. The Arkansas LEARNS Act, signed by Governor Sanders, gives families the option of having 90 percent of their state education funding deposited into an Education Freedom Account for private-school tuition and other education expenses. By 2025–26, all Arkansas families will be able to participate.

So, there you have it. School choice is not just happening in the far-flung states of Florida, West Virginia, and Arizona.  It is literally all around us. Our neighbors have figured out what Missouri hasn’t. School assignment by address is antiquated, it isn’t what families want, and it doesn’t work.

Imagine a school district as an ice cream shop that can only stock one flavor. They’re required to do their best to satisfy every student, so if most families want vanilla, vanilla it is. If some kids show up wanting pistachio, those can be tossed in. A couple of kids want chocolate? Add a chocolate ribbon. But now some kids want bubble gum in their ice cream. Does it really make sense to insist on offering a single flavor that turns out to be vanilla-pistachio-chocolate-bubble gum? No one wants that. There is no single, secret flavor that’s everyone’s favorite.

What our neighbors seem to understand is that it is better for the kids who need pistachio ice cream to get the very best pistachio out there. Parents are in the best position to know. And they may have a pistachio kid and a bubble gum kid in the same family. Try to please everyone at once, and you end up satisfying no one.

Over half of the 50 states now have mandatory open enrollment programs that allow families to choose any public school in the state. The number of states that include private schools among the options offered is growing fast. Missouri has neither. We allow charters only as interventions in our worst performing districts, rather than opportunities for districts to expand their portfolios. We have a scholarship program that addresses the needs of children in larger communities, but not rural children. Our legislature did not have the courage or determination to overcome their differences this year to bring even voluntary open enrollment to Missouri families.

Change can’t have been easy for policymakers in neighboring states, either. But they did it. Maybe it was out of a sense of fairness to children stuck in poor-performing schools, or maybe it was because they wanted their states to be attractive to growing companies and young families. It sure would be nice if such considerations would motivate lawmakers here.

The post Missouri Becomes an Education Island appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The goal of this language change would be to address concerns about diversity statements resembling “loyalty oaths” or “litmus tests,” Choi explained in his letter. MU spokesperson Christian Basi said Friday afternoon that the university does not and has not used these practices during the hiring process but wanted to clarify its practices. . . .

The Show-Me Institute, a Missouri-based think tank that advocates for “free markets and individual liberty,” also criticized the state’s universities for using diversity statements as “loyalty oaths” in the hiring process.

“We do not use loyalty oaths or litmus tests but a few of our job advertisements contained information that may give some readers the impression that such a request was inferred,” Choi wrote in his letter this week.

As reported by the Columbia Missourian, the new “values” language reads as follows:

We value the uniqueness of every individual and strive to ensure each person’s success. Contributions from individuals with diverse backgrounds, experiences and perspectives promote intellectual pluralism and enable us to achieve the excellence that we seek in learning, research and engagement. This commitment makes our university a better place to work, learn and innovate. In your application materials, please discuss your experiences and expertise that support these values and enrich our missions of teaching, research and engagement.

Without nitpicking, I will say that this language is an improvement over previous university job application expectations, such as noting that ideal candidates for a math professor position “employ justice-oriented frameworks (e.g., anti-racist, abolitionist, decolonial, indigenous)” in their work.

No one should blind themselves to the fact that the woke mindset has penetrated deep into Missouri’s higher academy. The incidents I cited were not isolated, and they are likely the tip of the iceberg. President Choi’s statement was good as far as it goes, but so far as I can tell no university employee was disciplined for requiring diversity statements, and the bureaucracies that produced them remain untouched.

Barring a legislative solution, we are going to see the woke agenda continue to consolidate its control over Missouri higher education.

If the system’s move was made to halt a statutory solution, Missouri legislators should not oblige. While I welcome President Choi’s improved and appropriate expectations for prospective hires, he doesn’t lead every public university in the state, and there’s nothing to stop other universities—or the University of Missouri System in the future—from falling back on woke bad habits.

President Choi’s decision to excise woke loyalty oaths from university hiring documents is encouraging. The legislature should finish the job.

The post University of Missouri System Walks Back “Loyalty Oaths” in Job Listings appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Opponents of open enrollment argue that the gap between wealthy and poor schools will grow because of sports—athletes will want to transfer to bigger, wealthier schools that offer better facilities and have more competitive teams. Here’s how a Missouri superintendent put it:

If this bill goes through, we expect to lose 100 or more students. Some will go play softball at Sullivan because they have a state-contending team, some to Union because they have a beautiful gymnasium, and some to Pacific because of their weight room facilities. Our football team was undefeated in . . . the regular season but we’ll lose kids because our facilities are not as nice and we can’t afford to fix that.

Yes, some students will likely transfer to schools with more successful sports programs to improve their athletic careers. However, this already happens. There are plenty of stories of the families of elite athletes moving to a new district, paying for a private school, or receiving a scholarship from a private school. SB5 and HB253, two bills that would create open enrollment, include provisions that restrict transfer students from playing the sport they played at their previous school for 365 days from the date of transfer.

Transfers can also go the opposite way—kids at bigger schools can transfer to smaller schools. Students can transfer to a different school to get playing time, showcase their skills,  play in a system that caters to their strengths, or play for a different coach. For some, winning is not as important as getting to consistently play in front of your friends and family. Sometimes, a player just needs a new environment to enjoy a sport or unlock their full potential.

Iowa has had open enrollment for the past 30 years. A recent Columbia Missourian story quoted Margaret Buckton, professional advocate for Rural School Advocates of Iowa, on the state’s experience with sports and open enrollment:

Buckton said some rural schools would call open enrollment “the savior of their budget” because it has allowed them to afford programs they could not have otherwise. Buckton said many students prefer rural districts because they have smaller class sizes and sports programs, which gives a student a better chance of standing out on a team.

Both common sense and Iowa’s experience tell us that worrying about athletes transferring isn’t a good reason to oppose open enrollment.

The post Will Open Enrollment Create High School Sport Powerhouses? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Until the last city council meeting, roll carts were banned in Columbia due to a poorly constructed public referendum on the issue. Thankfully, the council has changed those rules and now can restore sanity to the current system by instituting roll carts at some point in the (hopefully near) future.

The current, byzantine system of using only city-authorized trash bags taken by hand to the curb for personal collection by city employees is as outdated as a police call box. In addition to changing this rule, Columbia should strongly consider privatizing the entire trash system and using roll carts and automated collection trucks. This will, of course, be opposed by those who view local government as a job program first and foremost. From a Columbia Missourian story (emphasis added):

Although privatizing trash collection would relieve the city of its issues, the waste division claims it would eliminate city jobs, involve a difficult transition and likely not improve residents’ fees or quality of service.

City governments exist to serve the public in the most efficient way possible, not to put as many people as possible on the public payroll. My beloved Uncle Leo, who was a Chicago precinct captain for many years, would have hated privatization and roll carts. The jobs were what mattered to Leo and the Chicago machine. But trash privatization and the automated roll cart system (yes, you do have to roll it out once a week, as I do) is the system that best serves Missouri communities. Columbia has taken a key step to get there. Here’s hoping it keeps going forward.

The post Columbia Repeals Ban on Trash Roll Carts, Repeal of Ban on Dancing and Proms Is Next appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A version of this op-ed was published in the Columbia Missourian.

Missouri and Kansas are no strangers to border conflict. No, we’re not talking about the chaos that inspired ‘The Outlaw Josey Wales.’ The fear today is over cross-border job poachers. However, that doesn’t justify giving Fidelity Security Life Insurance $12.7 million just to stay in Kansas City. No one gets a gold medal in a race to the bottom — but politicians will waste endless taxpayer dollars trying to tell you that they’re ‘winning.’

The post The Kansas-Missouri Border War Isn’t Over appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Although it’s a little trite, “the early bird gets the worm” is harmless enough as far as old sayings go. Still, living by those words is one thing, and governing by them—as Lake Ozark seems to be doing—is quite another.

Food truck operators want to set up business along The Strip in the city of Lake Ozark, but the Planning and Zoning Commission is prohibiting them from doing so. While identifying consumer desire for food truck options in this area, the Commission says that its intent is to protect brick-and-mortar businesses that are already there. As the daughter of a restaurant owner, I fully support brick-and-mortar businesses, but why is the Planning and Zoning Commission choosing to protect these businesses at the expense of others, namely food trucks? Why are we only allowing the early bird a chance at getting the worm?

The commission fears that food trucks would compete with existing businesses. That is not something that should be feared; it should be expected and encouraged. In the same way that existing businesses compete with one another, food trucks should compete with other restaurants—and may the best food and dining experience win! It’s through this competition that we end up with a collection of businesses that consumers really want. That’s how competition in the market should work; consumers, not commissioners, pick winners and losers. It shouldn’t be the early bird that gets the worm, but the best bird.

After the Great Recession, many were looking for cheaper, on-the-go food options, and a lot of culinary experts were unemployed, laying the groundwork for a surge of food trucks. (And it’s not a stretch to think that our current economic situation could increase the demand for food trucks even more.) From 2013 to 2018, the number of food truck establishments in the U.S. doubled, employing over 16,000 workers in 2018 and reporting sales of $1.2 billion in 2017 according to the U.S. Census Bureau. More options increase the chance that consumers find exactly what they are looking for at a price they are willing to pay. Additionally, more businesses mean more entrepreneurship and opportunities for workers.

Other cities have found ways for food trucks to operate that would be better options than an outright prohibition. For example, Clayton allows for food trucks to operate for city or private events provided that they follow specific guidelines. Branson prohibits food trucks from operating within 100 feet of a restaurant and also allows for food truck courts. While these examples still place regulatory burdens on the food trucks, they show that there are ways for brick-and-mortar restaurants and food trucks to coexist.

Existing businesses should not receive special treatment just because they already exist. We allow brick-and-mortar restaurants to compete with one another—is it really that dangerous to allow them to compete with food trucks? Lake Ozark says it’s working on an ordinance to lay the groundwork for food trucks operating in the area. I say, let all the birds go and see which one gets the worm.

WATCH: More From Show-Me on Food Trucks

The post Why Should the Early Bird Get the Worm? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Imagine painting yourself into a corner—as someone of limited means who is subject to wacky increases in the cost of something as basic as renting an apartment. I do mean wacky, with this big component in the cost of living not just doubling, but going up no fewer than eight times over the course of a single year.

That happened to me in 1975 as the sole breadwinner in a family of three. I offer this small bit of personal history as something to think about in pondering today’s news.

In the beginning of that long-ago year, I quit my job as a newspaper reporter at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and moved to Beirut as a self-deployed freelance writer. This was shortly after the OPEC oil embargo and the quadrupling of oil prices in 1974. Thinking the Middle East would experience one of the greatest transfers of wealth in the history of the world, I wanted to be there as an observer.

My wife and I left a three-bedroom, two-bath apartment St. Louis’s Central West End. Our rent was $165 a month. With one young child, the cheapest, somewhat comparable place we could find in Beirut cost $700 a month.

The civil war in Lebanon erupted in early April, shortly after our arrival. By the end of the year, fighting in the streets of Beirut became so fierce it led to a mass evacuation of most of the city’s large expatriate business population. As a result, the Lebanese capital was suddenly “halas” —the Arabic word for finished—as the regional center for business in the Middle East. But the spending spree in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other countries was just beginning. We resettled in Bahrain, where more sticker shock awaited. We moved into a three-bedroom, two-bath bungalow that cost more than $1,400 a month.

Why would it cost more than eight times as much money to find a place to live in the Middle East as it would in St. Louis?

The Middle East had been bitten by a strange curse—known in economic literature as the “resource curse,” or the paradox of plenty. Resource-rich countries are all too likely to squander the windfall wealth that comes from possession of precious metals or vital resources such as oil. Bubbles develop as people who have benefited the most from a sudden influx of money bid up the price of real estate and other assets that then become increasingly unaffordable for many other people.

I got lucky. I landed a full-time position with Mideast Markets, a high-priced publication that had sprung up to provide ongoing coverage of the fast-changing business scene in the Middle East. My new employer paid the full cost of our move and our housing as well. Bahrain became my jumping-off point for traveling throughout the region over the next three years.

With my own eyes, I saw the inevitability of prodigious waste in places where money was no object. I also saw how the resource curse exacerbates the divide between haves and have-nots. In Bahrain we lived across the street from a Persian family where eight sons—all in their twenties and thirties—were still living with their parents. Though they all had jobs, they had been priced out of the housing market—and this at time when others we knew were making fortunes in speculating in real estate.

Today our own government in Washington, D.C., is acting in much the same way as the governments in the newly oil-rich countries of yesteryear. Since the onset of the pandemic, our government has been passing out “free” money all kinds of reasons—from paying the unemployed to stay unemployed (knowing they would lose money by going back to work) to $3,000-a-child tax credits and $2,800 handouts to households with annual incomes of up to $140,000. And now we are seeing some of the same (if not quite so wild) distortions in housing prices and other asset values I saw in the Middle East.

I am not arguing against a safety net for the truly needy. Nor am I saying that there should be no compensation from governmental entities for government-ordered lockdowns that have forced thousands businesses to close their doors and deprived millions of workers of their livelihoods.

But where is all the money to come from to pay for what looks like a massive and ill-considered increase in the size of the welfare state? Not from current tax revenues or any gain in productive capacity. It is coming from funny money—trillions of dollars of borrowed or newly created money used to grease the wheels of an already strong recovery. If not repudiated through inflation, these financial obligations will have to repaid by American taxpayers in future years.

Good luck with that. How can making people less reliant on doing things for themselves and more dependent on getting checks from the government be a recipe for sound money and future success?

The post Return of the Resource Curse: The Trouble That Comes from Too Much Money appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Make no mistake—people across Missouri are losing their jobs, and state income tax revenue is going to decline as a result. The timing of Missouri’s fiscal year may obscure the crisis to some extent this year, but next year will be tough. Public school districts are going to take a hit. Education is one of the very few areas of the Missouri budget that can be cut, and it will be. School districts and the legislature should be planning now.

But before we get to what districts should be doing, we need to acknowledge that we won’t have firm numbers on how many students are being educated by each district for several years. For per-student funding purposes, Missouri law allows districts to use their current enrollment or the enrollment from either of the two previous years to calculate state public education spending. Obviously, districts will want to use the highest possible number. But this year in particular students are moving around—opting for microschools, private schools, or homeschooling. There is some evidence that enrollment in the MOCAP public virtual education program is way up. At some point, we need to figure out where every student is being educated this year. It may be hard to take attendance on Zoom, but legislators cannot make informed decisions about the public education budget without solid enrollment numbers.

In the meantime, districts need to up their fiscal game, and here are a few suggestions:

• Reduce administrative costs. According to the most recent federal data (from the 2016–2017 school year), Missouri spent almost $350 million on district administrators, school boards, and their support staff. It may be time to reconsider having 520 school districts in a state with 114 counties.
• Consider how noninstructional services are provided. Could transportation or food services costs be reduced through competitive contracting? Could districts work together to share resources?
• Reconsider collective bargaining agreements and employee benefits. Step-and-ladder pay schedules, coupled with expensive pension obligations, make it very difficult for districts to reduce expenditures when their revenue declines. Salaries and promotions should be flexible, and retirement plans should be transportable 401(k) accounts.
• Delay or forego capital projects. These projects commit funds for the long term and reduce flexibility during economic downturns.

The state legislature could be doing its part as well. The current Missouri school funding formula has too many outdated “hold harmless” clauses that distort the distribution of state public education funds and, in some cases, send state funds to wealthy districts that would not normally qualify. According to the Forward through Ferguson “Still Separate, Still Unequal” project, in 2017–18, almost half of the 29 school districts in St. Louis County received hold harmless funding, including $578 in state funding per student in Ladue and $562 per student in Clayton. In addition, nearly half of the school districts in the state use property values from 15 years ago to figure out how much their local contribution of public education dollars should be, regardless of how property values have risen or fallen. That needs to change.

Finally, this year has made it clear that it’s time for public education funding to follow the child. Missouri parents who in the past gave little thought to school choice are discovering what it means to have no choice but a bad choice, and those who can afford to do so are taking matters into their own hands. Parents across the state are paying for tutors, pod coaches, private school tuition, and childcare. Meanwhile, their children are still being counted in the enrollment numbers of the schools they attended last year. It is only fair to give all parents access to a portion of their state education funding so they can spend it on options that work for their children. In several other states, governors have used stimulus funds to give parents quick access to scholarships to pay for these much-needed options. Missouri should do the same and make such scholarships a permanent option going forward.

The storm that was 2020 is going to linger for a few years, and policymakers in Missouri should be taking steps right now to weather it.

The post Belt-tightening Time in Public Education appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In the coming weeks, Susan Pendergrass and others at the Show-Me Institute will dive deeper into the numbers. For now, I want to take a quick look at the data to show the schools in the St. Louis area (St. Louis City, St. Louis County, and St. Charles County) with the highest and lowest spending. I display the top and bottom ten high schools and elementary schools.

For a similar report on Columbia, Missouri, schools, check out the Columbia Missourian.

The post Highest and Lowest Spending Schools in the St. Louis Area appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

We have been debating the issue of school choice in Missouri for more than 20 years now and it doesn’t look like our lawmakers are any closer to reaching a consensus. Meanwhile, a revolution has taken place in Florida. Ron Matus has documented this change in his terrific piece, “Miami’s Choice Tsunami,” appearing in the winter edition of Education Next.

Matus explains:

Today, 45 percent of Florida students in K-12 attend something other than their assigned schools. Charter schools are part of the mix. So are private schools that can be accessed with choice scholarships. So is an ever-growing array of district options.

This wave didn’t just happen.

In 1996, the Florida Legislature passed a law allowing creation of charter schools. The first opened that fall in Miami’s Liberty City community. Two decades later, Florida had 295,814 students in 655 charter schools—and one of the largest charter sectors in America.

In 1997, the Legislature created the Florida Virtual School to ramp up online learning. It started with 77 students and five courses. Today, it serves more than 200,000 students a year.

In 1999, the Legislature created the McKay Scholarship, a state-funded private school voucher for students with disabilities. In 2018-19, it served 30,695 students in 1,525 private schools.

In 2001, the Legislature created the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship for low-income students. As of June 2019, it was serving 104,091 students in 1,825 private schools. In students and funding, it is the largest private school choice program in the U.S.

The results in Florida speak for themselves. The state is seeing incredible gains in student achievement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as “The Nation’s Report Card.” As the Orlando Sentinel reported, “Something very good is happening in Florida.” Indeed, it is.

In Miami, the focus of Education Next article, the beloved superintendent, Alberto Carvalho, embraced school choice. Matus writes, “Instead of resisting the inevitable forces of choice and customization that are re-shaping public education, Carvalho and Miami-Dade chose to harness them . . . They realized it was too powerful to avoid—and too brimming with opportunity not to embrace.”

It is time for Missourians to stop debating the merits of school choice. Choice is good. Options are good. Competition is good. While we fail to act, innovation is happening elsewhere. Now is the time to act. Now is the time to expand educational opportunities in Missouri.

The post Stop Debating School Choice. Give Us Options Now! appeared first on Show-Me Institute.