A recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal lays out what has been on the minds of many (or at least mine) for some time. The traditional education establishment that was in charge of all things K-12 in the last century is crumbling. In the last decade, millions of children have exited their assigned public schools in exchange for a scholarship that is a fraction of what was spent on them by the education blob. It is becoming clear—parents want to be able to choose from a range of options when it comes to the education of their children.

Decades of surveys find that more than 70 percent of voters are in favor of open enrollment, charter schools, and education scholarship accounts. Similar surveys find that only about four in ten parents would choose to send their children to their assigned district school if they could choose from among a list of options. Public sentiment could hardly be stronger or more consistent.

This isn’t a fad or a temporary political moment, as teachers’ unions might have hoped. Having school choice is a sticky, pervasive expectation of raising children in the twenty-first century. And because union leadership has lost the battle of convincing parents that the establishment knows best when it comes to how to educate their children, they’ve turned to their last-ditch option—lawsuits.

Missouri is no exception in the teacher union legal battle. The Missouri National Education Association (NEA) is now suing to stop the MOScholars program. MOScholars gives parents around $7,000 in scholarship dollars to spend on alternative education options such as private school, a micro school, or homeschool, to name a few. By comparison, the average Missouri school district spent over $18,000 per student last year. Yet there are waiting lists for families willing to take less than half that amount to send their children to a school of their choice.

Over $15 billion was spent on Missouri’s 850,000 public school students last year. Yet the union representing the teachers in those schools is spending union resources to prevent $50 million (roughly one third of one percent) of the state’s education dollars from going to families who want out. It feels like the Missouri NEA is afraid the tide is turning. It feels like desperation.

The post Teachers’ Unions Get Desperate appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

On the surface, school board elections seem like they should serve an accountability role. The logic is straightforward: if school policies veer too far left or right, or if schools underperform, voters can replace the board. School board members, knowing they can be removed, enact representative and sensible policies to avoid this fate.

However, in practice, it doesn’t work this way.

One reason is that school board elections are usually held off-cycle, when voter turnout is low. This gives outsized influence to organized interest groups—namely teachers’ unions—even though they represent a small fraction of the population. There is clear evidence that teachers’ unions have great sway in school board elections. The result is that election outcomes reflect the will of a small segment of the population with high personal stakes.

This recently released study from the Annenberg Institute reinforces my skepticism about the value of democratic accountability. The authors analyzed data from over 50,000 school board elections across 16 states, including Missouri. They find that school board elections are often non-competitive. Over a third of elections are uncontested and, as in other elections (e.g., state and federal legislative elections), when incumbents run, they usually win (more than 80 percent of the time). Most school board turnover isn’t due to electoral defeat, but incumbents simply choosing not to run again.

The influence of interest groups like teachers’ unions likely contributes to these findings. Potential competitors for school board seats know that if they run against a union’s preferred candidate, they’ll lose. In the authors’ words, “if competitive races characterized by retrospective voting are indeed essential to the health of local democracy and public education, our results paint a grim picture.” (p. 4; note that “retrospective voting” is a political science term that means voters make decisions based on the past performance of the party or candidate in power.)

So, democratic accountability in education is not what we want it to be. Can it be fixed? I’m not optimistic, but one change that would help would be to move school board elections onto the same cycle as general elections. This would increase voter turnout and reduce the influence of interest groups, though the interest groups would fight such a change. It would also help if we had more transparent reporting about school performance. There is no denying that local voters are apathetic about schools, but maybe if voters in low-performing districts better understood school performance, they would be more inclined to act.

Even if changes like these help, democratic accountability is unlikely to become a powerful lever for change. This strengthens the case for investing in alternative approaches: market-based accountability, and even top-down accountability from the state.

The post Does Democratic Accountability Work in Public Education? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The reason that the president of a teachers union is joining forces with the bipartisan SALT caucus is that taxpayers are more willing to raise state tax rates if they can at least deduct what they pay to the state from their federal taxes. If they can’t deduct state taxes, then they prefer to keep them at a minimum, thank you very much. Same goes for local property taxes. And why does the teachers union want higher state and local taxes? So that more resources can be directed at teacher pay and teacher pensions. The education establishment is taking time to throw support at having everyone pay more out of their pockets to support and grow the education establishment.

Teacher pay, teacher recruitment, and teacher retention are also on the list of legislative priorities for the Missouri State Board of Education. The board would like to see legislatively mandated minimum starting salaries of $35,000 for teachers by 2024. In addition, $50 million in federal stimulus funds have been directed at recruitment and retention.

It’s true that having a high-quality teacher in every classroom is one of the few things that can have a positive impact on academic achievement. But do we get there by protesting for higher state taxes for everyone? Do we get there by paying every teacher more, regardless of their effectiveness? Do we get there by perpetuating a costly and outdated system of retirement that often pays teachers for more years of retirement than working years?

Stuck In the middle of all this are the 65 percent of Missouri students who were not at grade level on the state math assessment last year. Also in the middle are students with disabilities who did not receive any services when their schools shut down, along with the parents who desperately want tutoring for children who have fallen behind these last two years. It’s a sad state of affairs when public education starts to look like a battle between those who support teachers and those who support families.

The post Is SALT Really a Priority for Schools Right Now? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Building on the success of his coding club, he decided to start a micro-school in his own home in Mesa, Arizona. He wanted students as engaged in their normal schoolwork as they were in his coding club. He convinced six of his friends to “enroll” their children and used online resources and a pedagogical model that focused on student engagement and project-based learning to create a nurturing school environment. He loved it. The kids loved it. Their parents loved it. And he realized he was on to something.

That small group of families in his home became the basis for the Prenda Microschools (if you want the whole story, I spoke with Smith on my podcast Cool Schools earlier this summer). There are now more than 400 such schools, each enrolling between 5 and 10 students in someone’s home, in a public library, or a host of other spaces. Prenda was already growing before the pandemic, but social distancing requirements and lackluster responses by local school districts drove up demand.

This growth put Prenda in the crosshairs of the educational establishment. In a bombshell report in the Wall Street Journal, leaked documents show the opposition research that the National Education Association (NEA) has completed on Prenda and Smith himself, and it is wild. The NEA admits that micro-schools are popular, that kids learn well in them, that they solve some of the problems that homeschoolers face, and that some of Arizona’s school choice programs “alleviate some equity issues” as lower-income families can participate.

Perhaps more troubling, the dossier also features Mr. Kelly’s address and a picture of his home.

Let’s be clear. While Prenda is growing, and exciting, it still only enrolls around 3,000 students. In Arizona alone, there are almost 1.1 million public school students. That means that the NEA created opposition research on a school network that enrolls less than one third of one percent of Arizona’s students. Its enrollment is a rounding error in the education system, and yet the NEA went through all of this effort to develop a plan to snuff Prenda out, admitting in the process that it is popular because it is good.

I would love to say that I’m surprised by this development, but I’m not. This has been the standard operating procedure for teachers unions for decades. They brook no dissent. They fight hammer and tongs against every potential option that they do not control. And good people like Kelly Smith get caught in the crossfire.

More to the point, does the NEA in Missouri keep dossiers on private school leaders? On charter school educators? Does the union keep pictures of their houses on file?  Might be worth asking sometime.

The post Teachers Unions Set Their Sights on Micro-schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Politicians are willing to directly contradict themselves to go along with this nonsense and get the support of teachers’ unions. But here’s the problem with that rhetoric—most people disagree. EdChoice has been conducting a nationally representative survey on schooling in America since 2013. Here’s what respondents think about school choice.

Even though there was a brief decline in approval a few years ago, the takeaway remains—the general population of the United States favors school choice. And it’s ridiculous to think that Missourians are somehow not aligned with everyone else. ESAs seem to be appealing, given that 77 percent of the general population view them favorably. Here’s the description given to EdChoice survey respondents:

An “education savings account” in K-12 education – often called an ESA – establishes for parents a government-authorized savings account with restricted, but multiple uses for educational purposes. Parents can then use these funds to pay for: school tuition, tutoring, online education programs, therapies for students with special needs, textbooks or other instructional materials, or future college expenses.

Maybe the favorability numbers for this type of program are due to the broad description of how ESA funds can be spent by parents. But make no mistake—Missouri parents can’t take advantage of any of these opportunities because Missouri has no ESAs. The Missouri legislature wasn’t even willing to fund the one ESA program it had established for students with special needs.

I’m optimistic that the disconnect between rhetoric and reality can only last for so long. Teachers’ unions may have a lot of power over politicians, but parents can be a powerful group too when they want something. Missouri parents are no exception.

The post Don’t Be Fooled appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As this pithily-titled piece from the Brookings Institution argues, moving elections on-cycle will both drive up turnout and minimize the effect of organized interest groups. As the author writes:

By exploiting the occasional episode in which a change in state law forced localities to move their elections “on cycle,” [UC Berkeley Political Scientist Sarah] Anzia is able to provide some pretty rigorous causal evidence that off-cycle elections decrease voter turnout and equip organized interests (e.g. teachers unions) to obtain more favorable policy outcomes. Anzia’s findings mesh nicely with other work done by University of Pennsylvania Political Scientist, Marc Meredith, who found that when school boards are given the authority to choose election dates for raising revenue (e.g. bond elections) boards will “manipulate” the timing of elections in predictable ways to ensure an electorate that is most favorable to increased school spending.

That is why I was so surprised when the Missouri School Boards Association announced that it “strongly opposed” the bill. Why would that be? Why would the organization that represents school boards want to drive down turnout in the elections that elect them? I guess they’ll have to answer that one.

A common argument for keeping elections off-cycle is that it somehow keeps politics out of education. That is simply wrong. Schools are a huge state and municipal expenditure and are tasked with imparting skills and knowledge onto the next generation of citizens. Every day, we hand over our state’s most precious resource, its children, to schools. We live in a diverse state where different people have different views about what that education should look like. Any system that we devise to try and manage that will be political.

If education is going to be political, the best thing that we can do is try and make sure that as many of our fellow citizens as possible have the opportunity to make their views known. Moving elections on-cycle allows that to happen.

The post Moving School Board Elections On-Cycle is Good for Democracy appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Reviewing the literature on collective bargaining recently reminded me of this little bit of baseball history. The Missouri National Education Association (MNEA), one of Missouri’s teachers’ unions, published a pamphlet arguing that successful collective bargaining requires an “exclusive representative” who negotiates a contract on behalf of all employees, whether or not all employees want to join the union. I pointed out in a recent post that a teachers’ association need not represent all of the teachers in a school district in order to effectively represent its members. The Koufax-Drysdale holdout illustrates this point.

It would have been absurd for Koufax and Drysdale to force the rest of the team into their mini-union. More importantly, forcing everyone to accept representation from the same negotiator would be wrong. If another member of the Dodgers’ pitching staff would have refused representation from Koufax and Drysdale, it would have been his choice to make.

MNEA could learn a thing or two from the Koufax-Drysdale holdout. Rather than forcing every teacher in a school district to accept representation from their organization and negotiating a contract on behalf of all teachers, MNEA could seek to represent teachers in a members-only capacity. Members-only representation is where a union only represents its own members and neither forces nonmembers to pay fees nor forces them to accept a contract the union negotiates. Members-only agreements allow workers the freedom to choose whether or not to be represented by a union. They also give unions the freedom to withhold services from nonmembers.

The Koufax-Drysdale holdout is just one example suggesting that there are alternative ways for groups of employees to bargain with their employers. These alternatives can be as effective as exclusive representation—and they can be done in a way that fosters individual freedom.

The post What Teachers’ Unions Could Learn from Koufax and Drysdale appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The graphic below represents how teachers’ unions influence local school districts.

The first path of influence is through national and state political activity. At both levels, teachers’ unions make contributions to candidates that are likely to represent their platforms. The NEA, for example, takes strong positions on national education issues such as Common Core and school choice.

Unions also back issues at the state level—the Missouri NEA is reported to have donated $20,000 to campaign against Amendment 3, an initiative to end teacher tenure in Missouri, while it’s PAC, the Committee in Support of Public Educators, raised almost $90,000. Although there is money spent on the opposite side, monetary contributions are not the only way teachers’ unions influence policy.

Involvement in school board elections is the second route of influence. In Missouri, teachers’ unions have the right to collectively bargain with school administrations. These agreements include a range of items such as workplace rules, teachers’ compensation, and personnel decisions. According to union guru Myron Lieberman, collective bargaining was initially seen as a check on the power of school boards, who are democratically elected by residents within a school district.

However, a study by Stanford Political Scientist Terry Moe showed that within the 253 school districts examined unions supported school board candidates in 92 percent of the districts,”made phone calls in 97 percent, campaigned door-to-door in 68 percent, and provided mailings and publicity in 94 percent.”

If Moe’s study holds true in Missouri, then teachers’ unions have influenced school board elections, helping to elect candidates with similar views—nine Missouri school boards have passed resolutions against Amendment 3.

Through these two paths, the teachers’ union cycle perpetually strengthens itself. By limiting the power of parents, influencing the hand of local school district officials, and mobilizing state and national efforts to keep the status quo, the teachers’ union is able to protect the people the system was designed to serve—teachers.

Protecting the interests of teachers is not necessarily a bad thing. The problem is that within the teachers’ union cycle the interests of teachers often outweigh the needs of students.

The post The Teachers’ Union Cycle appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In 2007, the Missouri Supreme Court decided that teachers have the right to organize and bargain collectively. Since then, approximately 30 school districts in the state have entered into a formal collective bargaining agreement (we have posted those documents here). Last year, the Columbia School District became the latest to enter into a collective bargaining agreement when the district and the Columbia Missouri National Education Association (CMNEA) bargained a one-year contract. Now, they are back at the negotiating table.

The Columbia Daily Tribune reports that the main bargaining point right now is “making up one year of frozen pay increases.” A few years ago, the district was unable to afford pay raises and instead “froze” teachers’ pay for two years. Thus, any teacher who is currently in the district and was there during the freeze is two steps behind on the salary schedule. Experienced teachers the district hired, however, were able to bring in all of their experience. This has resulted in different levels of pay for two teachers with the same level of experience.

As an illustration, look at the graph above. This chart displays the salary schedule for a teacher with a master’s degree in Columbia and other surrounding school districts for the 2012-13 school year (N. Callaway, S. Boone, Moniteau schedules are from 2013-14). As you can see, after the first couple of years, Columbia teachers should earn significantly more than other area teachers. However, the 67 percent of teachers, according to the CMNEA, who were impacted by the freeze are two steps behind where they should be (dashed line). Even with the “freeze,” the frozen teachers are still earning more than most of their neighboring peers.

According to the Columbia Daily Tribune report, the CMNEA polled its members to determine if they wanted to boost all salaries or make up the frozen steps. The former would give raises to all teachers, while the latter would only impact the 67 percent of teachers who were impacted by the salary freeze. Interestingly, 80 percent of CMNEA members “asked the bargaining team to prioritize restoration of the steps” over adding money to the base.

It may seem strange for teachers who were not impacted by the freeze to vote to restore steps, but if you know your teacher research literature, this doesn’t really come as a shock. Cuky Perez, of Stanford University, conducted a behavioral experiment and found that female teachers were relatively averse to pay inequities. That is, they are not comfortable with co-workers earning different amounts. That may be a contributing reason we have these poorly designed salary schedules.

Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see how this shakes out in Columbia.

The post Collective Bargaining In Columbia, Mo. 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.

Flinders rose during public comments to restate her opposition to the 1:1 technology program, which would have the district buying 17,000 computer tablets. She was very critical of Superintendent Stephen Green and his unresponsiveness to her questions about the program. Of the initiative itself, she said:

There is no 1:1 implementation plan.

But don’t take my word for it. Ask to see the classroom diagrams for each school showing which classrooms currently have working wireless access points or working Eno boards, or working projectors, or enough electrical outlets, or proper furniture. For the classrooms that don’t have those things, ask administration to show you the cost and the timeline for getting these classrooms ready for 1:1. Ask to see proof that the district has enough bandwidth, and if there isn’t, how much will enough cost.

Ask to see the procedure for students getting computers. Is there a form? Do students sign for it? Do parents? What happens to students whose parents don’t or won’t sign for it? Ask for that written procedure. What’s the plan and procedures for the student who leaves the computer at home? What happens if a computer is stolen, or broken, or lost? Ask to see that procedure. Ask to see the plan to show students how to use and take care of their device.  Ask to see the insurance policy. Is there insurance? Are you requiring parents to pay a fee? Ask to see the process for gaining parental permission.

Ask to see the procedure at the school site for checking out computers to students. Who’s in charge of it at the school site? How will teachers print student work? Nine hundred students printing to one copier could be a problem, because there are no printers in the classrooms. Has the paper and copier budget been increased? Ask to see the building plan for accounting for computers.  Will both classified and certified staff members get these computers?  Where does it say that? Ask to see the plan and timeline for training staff and students on the hardware.

Board Chair Airick West asked Flinders what she would propose instead. She rattled off several suggestions for launching a much smaller — and less costly — pilot program involving perhaps just one school in the district. Remember, she  was given almost no time to prepare a response.

We previously wrote about the problems with the proposed technology program and we lauded Flinders’ opposition. The “plan” she criticizes was “developed” by school district administrators being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries and benefits. Yet it seems to be full of holes.

Flinders was “acting superintendent” because she seemed to be the only one providing thoughtful suggestions to the board or to be interested in really holding the superintendent and district staff to account.

The post Andrea Flinders, Kansas City’s Acting Superintendent appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

On Dec. 4, the California Teacher’s Union released a video titled “Tax the Rich: An Animated Fairy Tale.”

The cartoon, which smacks of indoctrination of children, attacks rich people as the villains of most of our society’s ills. The greedy rich decided they did not want to pay taxes. So they bought politicians, paid for private schools, and private security. They basically stole all of their money from the 99 percent.

It is natural to want some liability coverage, but there must be a way to get it without supporting an organization that seeks to indoctrinate children with anti-rich propaganda, opposes school choice, balks at performance pay, and protects low-performing teachers.

One option may be the Association of American Educators (AAE).

As one AAE member says, “The AAE does not go out and lobby the government for random political issues. What they do is they handle only education issues.”

The AAE also is generally supportive of many sensible education reform initiatives. Such as:

School Choice

“Parents must have the choice of where to educate their individual child. And as educators we must recognize the possibilities for advancement and positive growth in the profession through school choice.”

Performance Pay

“Teachers in a modern workforce do not necessarily need one-size-fits-all salary and benefits packages that do little to recognize teachers who go above and beyond in their schools. “

Tenure Reform

“Further, AAE is against the ‘last hired, first fired’ policy by which newer teachers, regardless of performance are let go first to meet lay-off requirements.”

As a former public school teacher, I know there are many liberty-loving individuals in the classroom and there are probably more organizations that support those values and teachers.

If you are a teacher who supports free-market ideals, I would love to hear from you. Or if you know of other organizations that Missouri teachers should know about, please let me know.

You can reach me at james.shuls@showmeinstitute.org or on Twitter @Shulsie

The post What is a Liberty-Loving Teacher to Do? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.