The U.S. Department of Justice has joined a lawsuit alleging race and sex discrimination against the Missouri State High School Activities Association (“MSHSAA”), and rightfully so, because if reports are correct, the MSHSAA’s rules are indeed discriminatory.

According to reporting from the Missouri Independent, MSHSAA’s rules require two of its 10 board members to be “candidates representing the underrepresented gender of the current board or an under-represented ethnicity.”

Supporters view the rule as a tool to promote fairness and inclusion.

It isn’t. The problem comes when a position becomes vacant. If eight of the remaining nine board members are all men or all white, for example, the rule would indicate that the candidate must be a woman or an underrepresented minority. This effectively bars candidates based on sex or ethnicity.

The Constitution protects individuals, not categories. However well intended, policies that distribute opportunity based on identity rather than merit raise immediate equal protection concerns. It demeans people to reduce them to nothing more than an identity marker, and it undermines government efficiency to exclude large numbers of candidates for a position because of their race or sex.

We’ve seen this dynamic play out in other contexts. In Arkansas, for example, a prospective member of a state licensing board was effectively barred from consideration because state law required the board to meet racial composition targets. He sued, and the Arkansas Legislature repealed the law. Lawmakers made clear what should have been obvious from the start: public appointments ought to be based on “experience and expertise, not the color of their skin.”

What remains to be determined is whether the MSHSAA is a public institution. It is organized as a private non-profit, but its employees are eligible for the Missouri state employees’ retirement system.

At its core, the matter can be reduced to whether institutions should discriminate based on sex or ethnicity. Given the MSHSAA’s broad mandate, it should not.

The post When Diversity Becomes Discrimination appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The problem in Kansas City and elsewhere, however, is that the rules created under the pretense of coronavirus mitigation are not being applied evenly, or perhaps even legally. Enter a lawsuit by The Blue Line, a bar in Kansas City’s River Market district, that takes issue not only with what the city’s emergency orders do, but even how they were imposed in the first place.

According to The Blue Line’s petition, the emergency orders, which KCMO announced Nov. 16 and that went into effect throughout the city and county on Nov. 20, are illegal without approval by the KCMO City Council or Jackson County Legislature and unconstitutional.

According to the lawsuit, The Blue Line said it pays “a premium to Kansas City and the State of Missouri” for a 3 a.m. liquor license and that 40% of its revenue comes after 10 p.m.

That makes the closure of bars and restaurants—while casinos are allowed to continue round-the-clock operations, movie theaters can stay open past 10 p.m., and alcohol sales are permitted to continue at liquor and grocery stores— “arbitrary and capricious,” according to the lawsuit.

I agree with the bar that these rules are arbitrary and capricious. Casinos have not acquired a special immunity to coronavirus that would permit them to remain open in ways competing bars and restaurants cannot—though I’ll note that my solution isn’t to shut down casinos, but rather to leave bars and restaurants alone or otherwise subject to the same set of rules these big businesses get to abide by. What’s good enough for Walmart is good enough for everyone else; likewise, what’s good enough for big entertainment venues like casinos is good enough for the corner bar and grill.

We know that state laws protecting gun stores from being shut down during emergencies work, with local shops and big retailers having demonstrated throughout this crisis that they can remain open and operate safely regardless of their size. The Missouri Legislature must pass a law to ensure that all businesses similarly situated are able to enjoy similar protections to ensure that small operators don’t have to sue local governments to be treated fairly by them. Until that happens, I hope The Blue Line’s lawsuit helps establish a red line against unequal treatment and cronyism that local policymakers will be more hesitant to cross in the future.

The post Kansas City’s Dubious COVID Orders Prompt Lawsuit appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Blue Springs School District, a school district in Jackson County, sued the Jackson County Health Department after it was issued a notice of non-compliance with capacity limitation rules for its home opening football game.

What did Blue Springs do wrong? Attendance at the game exceeded the 100-person fan limit set by the county for outdoor events. The county is adamant Blue Springs cannot do that, threatening to ban all fans for the season and force the team to quarantine for two weeks if it happens again.

Blue Springs simply wants to allow for home football players, cheerleaders, and dance team members to give four tickets to their family members and two tickets to visiting team players—totaling 550 fans and 11 percent normal capacity. Yes, this exceeds the 100-person limit, but is the 100-person rule being enforced everywhere throughout the county?

Let’s compare this to the Thursday night opener for the Kansas City Chiefs. The county allowed roughly 16,000 fans, or 22 percent of Arrowhead’s normal capacity to attend.

Double standard? Absolutely. When the order was issued, the county intentionally exempted Kansas City, the city with the highest COVID case numbers in the county. Jackson County wants Blue Springs held at less than 2 percent of its stadium’s capacity while the Chiefs can have 22 percent. Shouldn’t Blue Springs be allowed to have the same percent capacity applied to its stadium?

Due to the limit set by the health department, Blue Springs decided that no visitor fans can attend games going forward. Even worse, with roughly 100 students on the active roster, each player/cheerleader/dance team member gets one ticket to give to their parents or guardians. Imagine a senior who has to choose between their mother, father, or grandparent attending their game. If one person from a “household” can attend, why can’t one or two more?

Jackson County defended the 100 person limit (2 percent capacity) for Blue Springs and 15,895 fan limit (22 percent capacity) for the Chiefs by saying, “Just because the Chiefs have the resources to do this in a relatively safe matter doesn’t mean that a high school stadium does.” But is this true? Blue Springs and the Jackson County Health Department developed a plan that health officials deemed safe for the school district to teach thousands of students each day indoors and in-person. The health department said Blue Springs has enough resources for that.

Wouldn’t the school district have enough resources to take a fraction of the people compared to the current school day and place them in a less risky area outdoors? I think so. The Jackson County Health Department should assist Blue Springs in implementing an 11 percent capacity plan instead of threatening to quarantine the players and ban its fans.

The post Local Kansas City Area School District Sues Jackson County Health Department – for Good Reason? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

But you know who’s doing just fine? Box stores like Walmart and Home Depot and online giants like Amazon. For those massive commercial players, coronavirus evolved into a windfall so great that some of these businesses had to shorten their hours or delay shipping packages.

You know who else is doing just fine? Gun stores, but not because of the goodness of local officials’ hearts. Under Missouri law:

The state, any political subdivision, or any person shall not prohibit or restrict the lawful possession, transfer, sale, transportation, storage, display, or use of firearms or ammunition during an emergency.

Despite attempts to temporarily shut down gun shops around the country, local officials in Missouri largely resigned themselves to applying social distancing guidelines rather uniformly against gun retailers, from Cabela’s to tiny mom and pop gun shops. The purpose of Missouri’s gun law—protecting individuals’ Second Amendment rights—is straightforward. But the effect of the law was to level the playing field between big and small gun retailers, which stands in stark contrast to how local officials treated other small businesses.

Small gun shops could stay open as legally “essential.” But what about small businesses that sold candles, or sporting equipment, or anything else that Walmart and a cadre of other protected operators sold throughout the pandemic? Those small businesses did not get to enjoy the protections of state law, were often deemed “inessential” by local officials and were shut down—in some cases for months.

That’s wrong.

If Walmart can stay open and sell, say, candles, Missouri’s locally owned candle makers should be able to stay open. There is no reason to believe that small businesses can’t undertake rational social distancing and cleaning practices that large retailers have used throughout this pandemic.

How do we know this? Because local gun shops did it. Missouri law should reflect this reality for all small businesses and ensure that Missouri’s entrepreneurs aren’t the victims of disparate treatment by panicked local bureaucrats.

And Missouri should come back into special session and pass a law that makes this clear: If Walmart is essential, all of Walmart’s competitors should legally be, as well. Whether this requires the creation of a brand new statute or can be achieved by expanding the section that already protects gun retailers, it doesn’t matter. What’s important is that legislators act now—before another round of the pandemic hits, and before local businesses can be victimized a second time by inequitable and uneven local public health enforcement.

The post There Oughta Be A Law: If Walmart is Essential, Small Retailers Are Too appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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

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

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

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

The post Education Department to Revisit Title IX Guidelines for Sexual Assault Investigations appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In New York City, it is incredibly difficult to remove a tenured teacher. There are, however, many differences between teacher tenure laws and policies in New York City and those in Missouri. In New York, teachers are granted tenure after their third year of teaching. In Missouri, it is five years. New York City has a cumbersome collective bargaining agreement; collective bargaining is a relatively new concept for Missouri teachers. Still, teacher tenure remains an important and contentious issue in Missouri.

Missouri statute says teachers earn an “indefinite contract.” However, state laws also allow school administrators to remove teachers for reasons of misconduct or incompetence. The question really is, how difficult is it to remove a tenured teacher for his or her performance in the classroom? And should it be easier?

On one side, teachers’ unions say state laws simply grant due process. On the other, some claim removing a tenured teacher is a herculean task. In a recent policy study with Kacie Barnes, I explored this question. We wanted to find out from the group that should know best — superintendents — how difficult it is to remove a tenured teacher.

We surveyed 192 Missouri public school superintendents about the topic. According to superintendents, it is not impossible to remove a tenured teacher, but it is certainly not easy, either. Nearly 75 percent indicated it was either “somewhat” or “very difficult” to remove a tenured teacher. This difficulty primarily comes from the time and paperwork necessary to navigate the bureaucratic process.

Administrators also must consider important political dynamics and the cost involved. Because the circumstances can vary greatly, estimates of the cost involved to remove a tenured teacher can vary widely, from very little to hundreds of thousands of dollars. For these reasons, among others, very few tenured teachers are removed for their performance — three-tenths of 1 percent, by our estimates.

Should we reform teacher tenure? According to superintendents, yes. Ninety-two percent of superintendents in our survey indicated they would be supportive of some type of teacher tenure reform. One superintendent unequivocally stated, “Teacher tenure is the greatest restraint to student performance!”

A possible solution many superintendents in our study mentioned is multiyear contracts. Ultimately, it seems more superintendents would like the ability to develop local policies that best meet the needs of their teacher labor force.

We may not have rubber rooms, but Missouri superintendents recognize that teacher tenure is an issue that should be addressed.

James V. Shuls, Ph.D., is the education policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy. You can find the full policy study, “The Power to Lead: Analysis of Superintendent Survey Responses Regarding Teacher Tenure,” online at showmeinstitute.org.

The post Time For Teacher Tenure Reform? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

We surveyed 192 Missouri public school superintendents. We thought these individuals would be in the best position to tell the truth about teacher tenure. What did we find?

Seventy-three percent of superintendents in our survey stated that it is somewhat or very difficult to remove a tenured teacher. They note that the process of removing a teacher based on his or her performance in the classroom takes much effort and could cost a significant amount of money. For these reasons, among others, approximately 92 percent of the superintendents stated they would be supportive of some type of tenure reform.

According to the superintendents in our survey, it is time for tenure reform. The question is, what type of reform should it be? Superintendents have thoughts on that as well.

You can read the full paper below.

The post Is It Time For Teacher Tenure Reform? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Saint Louis City’s system violates due process because  tickets sent to alleged violators do not contain information about a court hearing date or the right to contest. That means, attorney Bevis Schock (a Show-Me Institute board member) told KMOX, that “. . . there’s no way the defendant, the person receiving the notice, understands that there’s a right to a hearing.”

Hopefully this ruling will help bring about the elimination of red light cameras in Missouri. In our state, red light cameras have not been shown to increase safety. But they are popular, perhaps because they can help a city raise a great deal of revenue from traffic tickets.

This latest ruling throws the continued operation of red light cameras in Saint Louis City into question. One Saint Louis attorney has said that he would advise family members to not pay red light camera tickets because the penalty for the ticket appears to be just threatening letters from a company in Texas.

In related news, at the most recent Columbia City Council meeting, city officials reported that the installation of red light cameras had resulted in more than a four-fold increase in tickets. The city has issued more than 3,500 tickets since the cameras were installed in September 2009, compared to an average of about 330 tickets before the cameras were installed.

And earlier this year, Kansas City found that red light cameras in its city had not increased safety, as promised. In fact, the study found that both accidents and fatal accidents had increased at a majority of intersections where red light cameras are installed.

For more information about the policy questions regarding red light cameras, watch Show-Me Institute Policy Analyst David Stokes’ recent vlog on the Saint Louis red light camera issue, or check out our “Policing By Camera” panel discussion with Lembke, Saint Louis Alderman Antonio French, and Redditt Hudson of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The post Another Judge Rules Saint Louis’ Red Light Camera System Unconstitutional appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

1. Teachers could be fired for doing a bad job.

Most of us live in a world where doing consistently bad work means you lose your job.

Not so for teachers.

Under the current laws, a tenured teacher can be fired only for egregious conduct, such as willful or persistent violations of the school laws, excessive or unreasonable absences, and felony convictions. Even then, a severely truant teacher would get generous procedural protections from termination: a majority of the school board must vote to fire the teacher, and the teacher can appeal the board’s decision through an administrative hearing.

If this bill passes, boards could not only fire convicted felons, but they could also dismiss teachers for unsatisfactory performance.

2. No more indefinite contracts for teachers.

Most of us also have to live with the reality of at-will employment.

Again, not so for teachers.

Under the current laws, a teacher who survives a five-year probationary period becomes “permanent personnel” with an indefinite contract to teach.

The proposed bill, on the other hand, gives school administrators more discretion to retain teachers they actually want teaching in their schools. Schools could contract directly with teachers for up to four years; and what’s more, the board would retain the power to terminate a multi-year contract if the teacher scored poorly on evaluations.

3. Teachers will get paid for what they do, not how long they have done it.

That is right, teachers do not live with the reality of performance-based pay either.

Under the current laws, school districts are prohibited from basing salaries on performance-related criteria. Instead, districts pay their teachers based on length of service and level of education. The proposed bill removes this prohibition and requires school boards to consider teacher evaluations when making decisions related to pay, retention, promotion, and dismissal.

Not surprisingly, the unions started speaking out against HB 1526 before it was even proposed. Missouri National Education Association President Chris Guinther told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch last week: “we’ve got to be given the protection that we need to give those kids the quality education that they need.” Wouldn’t our kids be getting a better education if school boards could dismiss failing teachers more easily, like this bill would allow? The problem with the union perspective is that it focuses on teachers, not on kids. Tenure is not about having due process, as Susan McClintic, president of the Columbia Missouri National Education Association, told the Columbia Missourian last week. On the contrary. Teachers do not have a right to their jobs; it is the students who have a right to a public education, and they should have good teachers to boot.

The post Teacher Tenure: Why Should Educators Be Different? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Brenda disagreed with the charge that she had run the red light for four reasons:

1. She tries very hard not to run red lights, and to obey other traffic laws.
2. Neither she, nor any member of her family, was in Kansas City on Feb. 16.
3. The car in the video was not her car.
4. The license plate in the photo was not her plate.

Outside of those four reasons, Kansas City had a really good case. Brenda, as the head of a free-market policy organization with a history of opposing these red light cameras as a money-raising device ineffective policy, was in a unique position to enjoy this letter. For just about every other Missourian, something like this is a major pain. Even if you are wrongly accused, the prospect of losing more time and money may well mean that it’s more worthwhile to make it just go away by paying the fine than to fight it. More offensive to me than the mistaken fine, though, is the assumption of guilt implicit in having a camera decide that you are guilty and need to pay a fine. If I ever had any faith in the fact that a police officer is “supposed” to be “reviewing” these tickets, I’ve lost that faith after seeing that an officer signed off on a ticket for the wrong car with the wrong plate. Brenda admits that the plate looked similar — they confused a “V” with a “Y” — but the car wasn’t all that similar.

From Brenda’s perspective as a responsible adult, the story has a happy ending. From my perspective as a blogger, it has a terrible ending. Brenda called the customer service line of the red light camera company, and was able to discuss all of the above issues in a call that took about 20 minutes. The customer service representative — Kyle from Tempe — promised that the company would put this ticket into their review category. The Show-Me Institute is in a pretty unique situation, so we might be the only people in Missouri who would hope for the bureaucratic nightmare, so we’d have something even more interesting to write about. Sure enough, though, the evidence was so bad that they rescinded the ticket, so our nightmare did not emerge. Still, it took Brenda about 20 minutes of her time to work out the situation.

(I wonder whether Kyle’s father-in-law set him up in a starter home in suburban Tempe.)

The post Red Light Camera Tickets Strike the Show-Me Institute appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

One group that is fighting to close down Lure is the Partnership for Downtown St. Louis, headed by Maggie Campbell. According to downtown Saint Louis business owner Bob Ray in his letter to the editor printed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Partnership for Downtown St. Louis is trying to overstep its rightful authority as a civilian group. From his letter:

The Partnership for Downtown St. Louis is seeking to participate in the approval and revocation of liquor licenses downtown.
[…]
I am shocked by the subjective nature of the Partnership’s process. The Partnership does not have an official policy detailing the criteria or evidence required to trigger the revocation process. When asked whether a nongovernmental membership organization with no public accountability should have the right to oversee the revocation and issuance of liquor licenses, Ms. Campbell said that the Partnership considers closing down a business to be its right under the First Amendment.

David Stokes has discussed in this blog the unlawfulness of revoking liquor licenses as punishment for unrelated infractions, such as customers smoking cigarettes in areas where they are banned. The Partnership for Downtown St. Louis seeks to take this a step further, by placing the power to grant or revoke a license into the hands of one group of civilians. There is already an established legal process for dealing with dangerous businesses or persons who disturb the peace. If a particular business makes it through this process with its liquor license intact, it is not the job of the Partnership for Downtown St. Louis to take that license away.

The post Who Can Revoke a Liquor License? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Policing by Camera, a panel Q&A – Show-Me Institute
from Show-Me Institute on Vimeo.

French has spent nearly a year trying to get surveillance cameras installed in some of the high-crime areas of his ward. He maintains that the cameras will help police officers identify criminals, while deterring crime.

Lembke has argued against the use of red light cameras. The cameras, he says, violate due process because the owner of a car seen running a red light is presumed guilty — even if the camera cannot identify the driver.

If you are interested in how our local elected officials view the trade-offs between liberty and security, I encourage you to watch this video. Both the moderator and the public asked probing questions, which Lembke and French answered thoughtfully.

I hope that we can host similar, engaging discussions in the future. You can check back on this blog, join our email list, or become a fan of the Show-Me Institute to get updates about future events.

The post Red Light Camera and Surveillance Camera Discussion Now Online! appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In 2008, Mark Jenney was issued a ticket for traveling 79 mph in a 60 mph zone. At his municipal trial, the charge was revised to 70 in a 60 mph zone. Radar results were deemed inadmissible at all trial levels.

Traffic violation cases are increasingly becoming the locus of a fundamental reinterpretation of the rights of the accused, in ways that already begin to set a wider precedent for shift the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused.

Take, for example, the 2009 case of Gant Bloom in St. Louis, who fought — and won — his red-light camera ticket appeal. Representing himself, Bloom successfully argued that he could not be charged with running a red light, because the city could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he, rather than his girlfriend, was the driver of his BMW at the time of the incident.

The recent ruling in Ohio provides yet another reason why Missourians ought to be concerned about how traffic cases are handled, lest this nascent precedent that abrogates the rights of the accused for traffic violations be spread to other states and other areas of law.

The post No Radar Love in Ohio appeared first on Show-Me Institute.