Now, this might strike you as odd when you hear over and over that charter schools are destroying public education.  Kansas City and St. Louis each have more than one-third of their students enrolled in charter schools, and yet, the traditional public school districts seem to be getting better.  How can this be?

It’s possible that either by stirring competition, more efficiently sorting students into options that serve them, or relieving pressure from school districts, charter schools are helping once struggling districts turn a corner.  Whatever the reason, it is hard to look at these numbers and see charter schools harming either district.

I should also point out that both districts started in very bad places.  In 2011, Kansas City had a graduation rate of 50 percent and St. Louis was at 54 percent.  Even with their gains, the Kansas City School District sits at only 67 percent and St. Louis at 68 percent. This puts them on par with cities like Newark, New Jersey (68 percent) and Compton, California (65 percent). They perform worse in absolute terms than neighboring cities like Little Rock (75 percent) and even Chicago (70 percent).  Inauspicious company. Clearly, there is still a long, long way to go.

Around the rest of the state, there was both good news and bad news.

The overall graduation rate in Missouri is up, from 81% in 2011 to 85.7% in 2013. That gain represents the 6^th best growth rate in the country over that time period. At the same time, though, Hispanic students in the class of 2013 graduated at a rate of 81 percent, low-income students graduated at a rate of 78 percent, and African-American students graduated at a rate of only 72 percent.

The report also broke out the performance of districts with at least 15,000 students:

• Around Kansas City, North Kansas City saw a graduation rate of 91 percent and Lee’s Summit clocked in at 94 percent.
• In greater St. Louis, Hazelwood saw an 86 percent graduation rate, Ft. Zumwalt 89 percent, Francis Howell 92 percent, Parkway 93 percent, and Rockwood 94 percent.
• Columbia had a graduation rate of 86 percent and Springfield had one of 87 percent.

All in all, a very interesting report that should inform conversations about education around the state.

The post If charter schools are ruining education in Missouri, more please! appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“Mad in America” tells the story of a hardworking baker who moved to the United States for employment opportunities several decades ago. Now, his grandchildren are losing their jobs because businesses are hiring Asians who will work for less.

Bob Compton of 2 Million Minutes reacts:

Lacking an understanding of how competitive advantages must be upgraded over time with more education, constant innovation and personal creativity, the song simply laments reality – that ideas, jobs and capital are mobile.

And while that mobility is more pronounced now because of computers, cell phones, and the Internet, it has always been there. After all, the baker in the song didn’t stay in his native Finland — he came to America, where he competed with Americans and earned a low wage! The opening of the song undermines its message. “Mad in America” implies that it’s bad for jobs to go offshore, while immigration to the United States is fine. The website with the lyrics further emphasizes that its campaign is not about U.S. immigration policy. But what does it matter whether the competition comes to your job or your job goes to the competition? Either way, if someone is willing to do your work for less money, you’re in trouble.

It should be noted that workers can avoid this problem to some extent if they do a better job than anyone else. I realize this may not be quite so inspirational as A Message to Garcia, but for example, Delta decided to bring its customer service back to the United States because customers had trouble communicating with Indians. Businesses look at more than dollar amounts when they make decisions; they also care about quality. Of course, in a bad recession, even the best workers suffer. To quote General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, “We are living through history, and I don’t mean that in a positive sense.”

I love Compton’s post, but I’m confused by one of his comments. He contrasts the U.S. economy of a century ago with the economy today:

We were the cheap laborers with the strong work ethic, the desire for a better life for our children, the commitment to building schools for compulsory education.

We still have compulsory education, and it hasn’t prevented the outsourcing problem. In fact, 2 Million Minutes is constantly pointing out our education system’s failures.

That quibble aside, it’s a great post and I highly recommend reading it.

The post So True appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

"A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." — Joseph Stalin, aka Koba the Dread

"No, crime statistics are statistics, not facts" — Justin Hauke, aka impressionable young NWA fan

The funny thing about inter-office blog fights is that you argue with coworkers online instead of walking six feet to talk to them. Ain’t technology great? Seriously, I wonder whether Justin would like to tell the family of a murder victim that the crime was just a statistic, not a fact.

Near the beginning of his post, Justin writes:

Dave has probably never been to Compton, Calif. Neither have I, for that matter, and I believe most sensible people haven’t. You can not honestly tell me that St. Louis is a more dangerous place to live, I’m sorry.

Well, Justin, it is true that I have never been to Compton, although I did once go to an NWA concert at the old Arena. As a quick aside, I went to the show back in high school with my buddy Dave G., and everyone before us in line got a full body search and everybody after us in line got a full body search, but we were just waved on through by security. True story, as Krusty would say, although to this day I still can’t figure out what was different about Dave and I in comparison to the rest of the crowd.

But back to Justin’s post. I am not the one substituting my personal impressions gleaned from the entertainment world for crime statistics compiled by law enforcement. One of us is trusting the statistics (which, while some would argue are skewed, nobody is saying they are false) and one of us is writing a blog post while envisioning himself doing an 8-ball with Eazy-E while pumping the radio front and back and side to side, and jockin’ some bit’ young ladies in suburban Cali.

Justin next writes:

The first problem I have with the data is that St. Louis’ bizarre municipal boundaries make the per-capita crime statistics appear much higher than they otherwise would be.

St. Louis is by no means the only city that can not expand its boundaries. In fact, the majority of cities either can not or do not do that. Some, such as the ones he mentioned in his post, certainly do. But there is a long list of Midwestern and Eastern cities that have not expanded their boundaries in decades. And St. Louis has a higher crime rate than all of them, except Detroit, which sort of plays the role of Mississippi in always placing last (or first) in these types of rankings. As I said in my own post, as long as the crime stats are comparing St. Louis to Kansas City rather than Jackson County, or Atlanta rather than Fulton County — and they are — then our apples are being fairly compared to other, less violent apples.

I have to reprint the next paragraph in full, as Justin truly enters bizarro world:

My second point of contention, though, is that crime at the national level is grossly underreported, particularly within low-income and minority neighborhoods. I imagine that Compton, Calif., gets a much better rating because most of the crime that occurs within its borders never gets reported to the police. I mean, it’s not like the Crips go to the police station every time a Blood robs one of their fellow gang members. In contrast, I imagine that a significant portion of the crime being reported in St. Louis comes from those trepid suburbanites that make the five-mile trek into the city and become easy prey.

Where to begin? I guess at the beginning…

• IF crime at the national level is underreported in low-income and minority areas, then that happens in all of those areas, not just cities like ours trying to spin their crime stats.
• Gang members are not just confined to Compton, you know — there are plenty of them in St. Louis, too. And they are not more or less likely to report their activities depending on what the RCGA would have them do.
• As for "significant" crime reporting in St. Louis coming from suburbanites who become crime victims when they visit the city, at least Justin began that statement with "I imagine," because that idea is just a fairly tale. And even if it were somehow true, does that make the crime less important? Or less reportable?

Justin returns to reality with his summary: "I believe it is unfair to single out the city for idiosyncratic features that should be washed out of any truly unbiased statistical study." As is clear from my own posts, I am far from convinced that the city’s features are indeed idiosyncratic — and a crime is a crime, no matter who reports it or where it comes from. If St. Louis wants a lower crime rate, there are a number of things officials can do — economic growth and education being the only real answers that would be effective in the long run, and putting people in prison being the only real answer in the short run.

But trying to deny that the city has a crime problem, and a serious one at that, doesn’t do anyone any good. And trying to convince people that it’s safe to come downtown, and to the West End and Soulard — while completely true — does not do any good for the citizens who still live in the other parts of the city where violent crime is a normal fact of life.

The post Justin Channels Stalin appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Dave has probably never been to Compton, Calif. Neither have I, for that matter, and I believe most sensible people haven’t. You can not honestly tell me that St. Louis is a more dangerous place to live, I’m sorry.

I believe that the St. Louis data might be skewed and there are a couple of reasons why. For example, Dave might remember a few weeks ago when the Post-Dispatch reported that the Illinois side of the river is more dangerous than the Missouri side (according to Illinois data, which the FBI rejects). In fact, Metro East is apparently safer even than the national average.

Really?

The first problem I have with the data is that St. Louis’ bizarre municipal boundaries make the per-capita crime statistics appear much higher than they otherwise would be. Crime is a problem in areas of most U.S. cities, but the difference is that it is generally spread out over a larger population. But when St. Louis unincorporated itself from St. Louis County more than a century ago, it effectively land-locked itself. So, unlike metro areas such as Phoenix or Houston (which continue to incorporate “safe” suburban satellites within their municipal boundaries), St. Louis is stuck with inner city crime with nowhere to run. And that is an idiosyncratic feature of the data that should have been accounted for.

My second point of contention, though, is that crime at the national level is grossly underreported, particularly within low-income and minority neighborhoods. I imagine that Compton, Calif., gets a much better rating because most of the crime that occurs within its borders never gets reported to the police. I mean, it’s not like the Crips go to the police station every time a Blood robs one of their fellow gang members. In contrast, I imagine that a significant portion of the crime being reported in St. Louis comes from those trepid suburbanites that make the five-mile trek into the city and become easy prey.

The point of my post was that while I agree that the city has crime problems (I thought I stressed that point when I mentioned that I was mugged outside of my apartment), I believe it is unfair to single out the city for idiosyncratic features that should be washed out of any truly unbiased statistical study. Maybe the data is right, but even then, I don’t see how reporting these statistics does anything but blur the issue.

In closing, I want to add Mark Twain’s famous quip about statistics: “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics." As a native Missourian, he might have had a problem with the St. Louis crime data, too.

The post No, Crime Statistics Are Statistics, Not Facts appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

But in a tense 90 minutes on the phone, Jenkins would not budge, Fleming said.
"His dismissive conclusion at the end was, ‘Go fight crime.’"

I say this as someone who lived in the city for a long time (1995 to 2002) and moved out for reasons that had nothing to do with crime or safety. I go to the city regularly and always feel safe, except when I am trying to steal crack from drug dealers late at night in dangerous neighborhoods, but — heh — you’re not supposed to feel safe when you do that.

The numbers are the numbers, and I trust the numbers to be more accurate than Justin’s impressions of Compton, Calif., which I am sure he got entirely from rap albums. As for inconsistencies in how cities collect the numbers, the publishers discounted cities that really do a bad job of collection, like Chicago. Furthermore, I would have more sympathy for the "different data methods" argument if St. Louis City Police had not had its own scandal a few years back with underreporting rapes. If the most compelling argument you can make is that other cities underreport crime, too, you don’t have much of an argument. As long as the stats are comparing St. Louis City to Detroit rather than Wayne County, and to Kansas City rather than Jackson County, as I believe they are, than we are talking apples to apples — and the stats are legit, if impolite.

The post Crime Stats Are Facts, Not Opinions appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Apparently we no longer hold that honor. We’re now number two.

These statistics continue to amaze me, because I find it very difficult to believe that St. Louis is more dangerous than, say, Compton, CA; Camden, New Jersey; or Gary, IN (or really, for that matter, Kansas City). And the annual studies have been routinely criticized for their methodologies, which are grossly inconsistent and dependent upon idiosyncratic crime referencing systems used by municipalities. In short, I tend to agree with Michael Tonry, president of the American Society of Criminology, when he states:

[These rankings] do groundless harm to many communities. They also work against a key goal of our society, which is a better understanding of crime-related issues by both scientists and the public.”

Of course, I have been mugged and robbed in St. Louis, so who am I to really say differently?

Also of note, my hometown of Sugar Land, Texas, was ranked the fifth safest city in America.

Because apparently I like extremes.

The post In the City, City of Compton … I mean, StL appeared first on Show-Me Institute.