This week the Kauffman Foundation released Edwise, an “online tool to help parents, educators, school districts, policymakers, and the public make informed education decisions.” It has comparable data for every school and district in Missouri (and some in Kansas) on everything from ACT scores to enrollment to student-teacher ratios.

As school choice expands in the Show-Me State, access to information regarding schools must as well. While the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) already provides data for every school district and charter school, their website is notoriously hard to navigate.

Increasingly, websites such as stlschools.org and greatschools.org are helping parents find a school that fits their child’s unique needs.

Edwise makes a great contribution with its easy-to-navigate map tool that makes data that could be daunting to comb through incredibly user-friendly.

I encourage you to check it out!

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As it stands, the pay schedule for Kansas City teachers starts low and provides only modest increases in the initial years. Largest pay increases come at the end of a career, in a manner to maximize pension value. As my colleague James Shuls has argued in previous posts, this is a disincentive for new and effective teachers to stay on. Dane Stangler and Aaron North of the Kauffman Foundation wrote in a March 2014 op-ed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Because most of the pension value accrues in the final years of an educator’s career, the typical new teacher in Kansas City or St. Louis does not benefit from the current system. Based on our research, we estimate the likelihood that a traditional public school teacher in St. Louis stays in the profession long enough to earn the maximum pension benefit to be about 4 percent. In other words, 96 percent of teachers in St. Louis will leave prior to reaching the full benefit and the percentage is comparable in Kansas City (approximately 3 percent).

As a result, new teachers are less likely to stay on. According to the Show-Me Institute’s Michael Podgursky, “After eight years, roughly 70 percent of teachers remain on the job. The eight-year survival rates in STL and KC are far lower, ranging from 10 percent to 30 percent.”

Podgursky’s paper urges more transparency and,

Given the relatively small share of new teachers in Kansas City or Saint Louis who can expect to complete an entire career in either district, as a strategic recruiting tool it makes more sense to raise front-end salaries, 

rather than “generous end-of-career retirement benefits.”

Certainly, there are many reasons why teachers in Kansas City and Saint Louis are much more likely to leave, and creating a more fair pension system will not solve all of them. But one thing we can do in Kansas City is to let new teachers know they are valued early on in their careers and that we want them to stay on.

The post Ideas for Kansas City Schools: Pay Teachers More Sooner appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Missouri’s teacher pension systems are back-loaded. That is, teachers accrue much of their pension wealth toward the end of their careers. Unfortunately, very few teachers in Saint Louis and Kansas City ever reach this point. The figures above come from a recent report that the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation issued. Today, Dane Stangler and Aaron North, from the Kauffman Foundation, have an op-ed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. They wrote:

Because most of the pension value accrues in the final years of an educator’s career, the typical new teacher in Kansas City or St. Louis does not benefit from the current system. Based on our research, we estimate the likelihood that a traditional public school teacher in St. Louis stays in the profession long enough to earn the maximum pension benefit to be about 4 percent. In other words, 96 percent of teachers in St. Louis will leave prior to reaching the full benefit and the percentage is comparable in Kansas City (approximately 3 percent).

That is just one of the problems with Missouri’s current teacher pension systems. As I have written before, the separate pension systems for Saint Louis and Kansas City put the urban districts at a disadvantage.  Stangler and North pointed out:

There is no reciprocity between the plans, so if a teacher begins her career in Springfield and leaves for a position in Kansas City or St. Louis, she will lose much of the pension wealth she had earned by either forgoing the employer contributions or having the value of her pension frozen at the time she quits.

Missouri’s teacher pensions are great for teachers who stay for 25 to 30 years in a single pension system. For teachers who work less or more than that time in a single pension system, the current system is not so great. Indeed, those teachers are subsidizing the retirement of others.

More importantly, these systems are not good for kids in Saint Louis and Kansas City because they act as a barrier to recruiting veteran teachers to the cities.

The post Public Employee Pensions Are Great . . . Except When They Aren’t appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In Missouri, students in unaccredited school districts can now choose to enroll in neighboring accredited school districts. Some students who have elected to leave their struggling school now find themselves riding a bus for more than two hours a day. This has led many to question the school transfer idea and look for alternative solutions. Some have begun to ask, “What if instead of busing students from failing school districts to accredited ones, we bused great teachers from accredited schools into the failing districts?” It is an idea that has won a fair amount of attention.

Last November, the Cooperating School Districts of Greater St. Louis pitched the idea of providing high-quality teachers as instructional coaches in struggling schools. A similar idea was raised by CEE-Trust, the consulting firm that the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education hired to address problems in the Kansas City School District. The CEE-Trust proposal called on accredited school districts “to play a significant role in helping [unaccredited] systems improve.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch heaped praise on this idea, calling it among the “more promising ideas.”

However, there is one easily overlooked obstacle standing in the way of turning this localized version of a teacher peace corps into a reality in Missouri’s two biggest cities: the incompatibility of different pension systems.

With the exception of Saint Louis and Kansas City, which have autonomous pension systems, all of Missouri’s school districts are part of the Public School Retirement System (PSRS). If a teacher moves from PSRS to one of the city plans, he or she will incur a significant loss in pension wealth. Koedel, Ni, Podgursky, and Xiang, economists at the University of Missouri and authors of a recent report from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, put it this way:

Consider two teachers who work thirty-year careers in the profession. The first teacher works all of her thirty years in a single plan. The second teacher works fifteen years in one plan and then fifteen years in another. Because of the way pension wealth accrues in these plans, the latter teacher will have less than half the pension wealth of the former teacher at age fifty-five.

Though this may sound like a Missouri problem, it has bearing nationwide. As the Kauffman report notes, Missouri’s separate pension systems are “a microcosm of larger national issues concerning teacher pension systems—particularly the ability of teachers to move between systems.”

Just as teachers in Missouri cannot move between pension boundaries without incurring a financial penalty, teachers cannot move across state pension boundaries without incurring similar costs. Which means, a charter operator with campuses in multiple states, like KIPP, Uncommon Schools, Achievement First, or Rocketship Education, cannot freely move a teacher or school leader between their schools in various states. Indeed, these systems punish all teachers who move from one state to another.

Koedel, Ni, Podgursky, and Xiang liken the costs associated with switching between pension systems to a tariff, “Rather than promoting free trade and labor mobility, the pension plans effectively are imposing a tariff on the import or export of human capital between” the separate pension systems.

This “tariff” on labor is not a new problem, but a longstanding one that Saint Louis and Kansas City have been struggling with for years. Prior research has demonstrated that the separate pension systems create a barrier to recruiting school leaders into the two urban school districts. The separate pension systems also limit the pool of teachers who are willing to work in the cities. Jeffrey Kuntze, chief operating officer of the Confluence Charter Schools in Saint Louis, says “the separate pension systems make it extremely difficult for us to recruit veteran teachers from the county. We can get them when they retire, but not mid-career.”

Missouri’s pension boundaries would make it practically impossible for high-performing school districts to operate a program, run a school, or loan teachers within the Saint Louis or Kansas City boundaries, just as state pension boundaries would make it impossible for schools to effectively work across state lines. They simply could not move teachers or school leaders across pension boundaries without making them suffer great financial penalties.

The only real way to solve this problem is to close the current systems to new entrants and place them in a new, statewide system that participates in Social Security and has smooth wealth accrual. Before this idea causes mass hysteria, let me stress that this would not affect current employees’ or retirees’ pensions. They would remain secure in their current system. It would, however, remove the artificial pension boundaries and allow us to create a better pension system for teachers and students.

Opponents of this idea claim that closing the current defined benefit systems would be financially unsound, as it would lead to considerable “transition costs” that would far outstrip any benefits that we may receive. This is the very issue tackled in a recent Show-Me Institute policy study by Andrew Biggs, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Biggs examines the evidence for “transition costs” and concludes that the concerns are “largely mistaken and should not stand in the way of public employee pension reforms.”

Whether you believe busing teachers into failing schools is a viable solution or just another feel-good proposition, fixing this pension problem should be a top priority for Missouri and other states throughout the country. Missouri should not have a system that puts our neediest communities at a disadvantage when it comes to recruiting talented teachers and states should not impose a tariff on attracting quality teachers and school leaders.

James V. Shuls, Ph.D., earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in elementary education and taught for four years in the Republic School District. Currently, he is an education policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy. His wife is currently vested in PSRS.

The post Current Teacher Pension Systems Impose A “Tariff” On Labor appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

According to its release:

The Review looked at 1,130 institutions that prepare 99 percent of the nation’s traditionally trained teachers.

Overwhelmingly, it found that U.S. colleges and universities are turning out first-year teachers with inadequate knowledge and classroom management skills. On a four-star scale, less than 10 percent of rated programs earned three stars or more.

University of Missouri administrators may have expected they would perform poorly, as they actually denied researchers access to teacher syllabi, claiming they were intellectual property and protected under federal copyright law. A judge has ruled in favor of the school’s refusal. That’s right, the university system did not want to share even an outline of what it teaches its students, the same outlines that are distributed to students at the beginning of the course.

That is too bad, but their resistance won’t last long. NCTQ will be conducting a study of education schools each year and publishing the results in partnership with U.S. News & World Report, which has become the standard-bearer for university ratings. Missouri will eventually have to share with everyone exactly what it teaches its would-be teachers. We can’t move forward without knowing where we are right now; universities should support this. Moreover, students should have access to this information when deciding which college they would like to attend.

The post Who Teaches The Teachers? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Yet, it is worth noting that the business leaders who responded to Chief Executive did not hold Missouri in especially high regard. The Show-Me State ranked 31st in business friendliness compared to the rest of the United States. Lucky for us, our neighbor Illinois came in at an abysmal 48th place; unlucky for us, Kansas came in at a comfortable 19th. (Incidentally, the Chief Executive survey results resemble the Kauffman Foundation’s findings last month on business friendliness.)

Houston, we have a problem.

Speaking of Texas, there is one other thing worth noting about Chief Executive‘s survey — what the states in the top five have in common. Three of the top five states — Texas (first place), Florida (second place), and Tennessee (fourth place) — do not have an individual income tax. Indiana (fifth place) just enacted legislation to cut its income tax; North Carolina (third place) is pushing hard to reduce its income taxes as well.

I have talked before about the Growth Corridor developing in the Midwest. Missouri should cut income taxes of all sorts, not only because they harm growth in a vacuum, but also because we are surrounded by neighbors who are enacting pro-growth policies in an effort to grow their states’ businesses . . . and to attract ours. Kansas may be the most visible example these days of a state’s tax policy posing a threat to Missouri’s economic future, but it is not just about Kansas. It is about the whole region.

We cannot wait any longer to start cutting these taxes. Missourians need tax relief, and they need it now.

The post Missouri Is 31st For Business Friendliness In CEO Survey appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Kansas was viewed favorably for its support of small business, improving upon last year’s A- ranking. The state graded well for the ease of starting a business, especially its regulatory systems.

Missouri slipped slightly in 2013 after earning a B- a year ago. That decline can be attributed partly to issues with licensing and permitting requirements.

You can find an interactive map that looks at all the aspects the survey examined — including regulations, health and safety, licensing, and more — here. As with any index, all of the survey’s findings have to be put in the proper context: survey methodologies, assumptions, and objectives do matter, so your mileage may vary on whether you think Thumbtack.com and the Kauffman Foundation are balancing their factors credibly. In that context, I think it is still worthwhile to highlight their topline results, visually represented in the screenshot below and available on Thumbtack’s website.

That Midwestern section sure looks like the kind of growth corridor I have discussed in the past, but unfortunately, Missouri sticks out like a sore thumb on the map. The question is, will Missouri be a part of this growth corridor? Will Missouri go the way of Kansas . . . or of Illinois?

The post Small Business Friendliness Survey: Kansas Gets ‘A,’ Missouri Gets ‘C,’ Illinois Gets ‘D’ appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Half of Silicon Valley start-ups were founded by immigrants, up from 25% a decade ago. […] A recent study by the Kauffman Foundation found that immigrants are 50% likelier to start businesses than natives. Immigrant-founded technology firms employ 450,000 workers in the U.S. And according to the National Venture Capital Association, immigrants have started one quarter of all U.S. venture-backed firms.

Nicklaus also highlights a National Bureau of Economic Research paper that documents immigrants’ exceptional productivity.

Just as fascinating as those numbers is the reasoning behind the first comment to the post. “Ted44” argues that we should send foreign college students back to their countries of origin, so they can start their innovative businesses and employ thousands of people in those places rather than in the United States, because if they stay here they’ll be competing with Americans for “limited resources.”

Knowledge and industriousness are limited resources too, which immigrants can provide in abundance.

The post Amazing Statistics appeared first on Show-Me Institute.