Jay P. Greene is a senior research fellow in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation. At Heritage, Jay conducts and disseminates research on the key issues facing education today, including the cultural, civic, and economic implications of how education systems are designed and implemented.

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In their 1982 book, Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820 – 1980, authors David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot explain how public, common schools spread across the nation. For the most part, the development of our nation’s public education system was driven by Protestant reformers who saw public education as a missionary crusade. Public education, in their eyes, was never just about teaching students to read or write. It was about creating a virtuous and moral society.

Greene suggests a number of reasons for this shift, including school consolidation and centralized management. Ultimately, the problem is that schools have become more disconnected from the communities in which they reside. As a result, school leaders are re-branding morals and values as SEL to make character education more palatable. In doing so, Greene argues, they remove the reason for why students should even develop positive character in the first place.

According to Greene, schools will do a better job of teaching values, morals, character, or SEL (whatever you want to call it) when those values are rooted in the values or faith traditions of the community. For this to happen, parents must have more agency in their child’s education. This can happen through increased local control of public schools or through school choice.  

We all want our children to be moral; we are just not so sure we want some distant bureaucrat to determine what that means.

To dig deeper, check out Greene’s full paper here.  

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Unfortunately, there is a terrible myth going around about teachers. This myth is pervasive and has been around for decades. It is the belief that teachers are badly underpaid.

Jay Greene, Distinguished Professor of Education Policy at the University of Arkansas, wrote about it in his influential 2005 book, “Education Myths: What Special-Interest Groups Want You to Believe about Our Schools and Why It Isn’t So.” Greene argued that when we compare a teacher’s hourly rate to those of other professionals, the pay is quite comparable. He also noted that we must consider other employment benefits, such as health care and retirement, which are typically more generous in education than the private sector.

Despite these arguments, the myth of grossly underpaid teachers has persisted. Recently, an Education Next poll asked respondents if they thought teacher pay should increase, decrease, or stay the same. Overwhelmingly, respondents said we should “increase” (47%) or “greatly increase” (14%) teacher pay. That in and of itself isn’t telling; if it were feasible, most of us would happily pay teachers more. The telling part is what happens when survey participants are given actual teacher salaries. When people are told how much teachers are paid, support for pay raises drops.

Most people greatly underestimate how much teaches actually paid. In the survey, the average guess for the national average teacher salary was $40,587. That is $17,672 less than the actual average of $58,258. It is also less than the average here in Missouri, where the average total teacher salary in 2016 was $49,060. In Saint Louis City and County, the average climbs to $58,701 (author calculations).

 About two years ago I had to battle this teacher pay myth in my own home. My son came home from school saying teachers didn’t make very much money, at least that’s what his teacher said. I said, “I bet she makes more than me.” So, we looked it up (both of our salaries are public information). As it turns out, his teacher made several thousand more than I do.

The problem with the teacher pay myth is that it undermines a very noble and valuable profession. As Harvard education professor, Marty West suggests, “To the extent that the public has a falsely low impression of [how] much teachers earn, that only makes it harder for us to attract talented individuals into the teaching profession.”

 If we keep perpetuating the notion that teaching is a thankless job and teachers are underpaid, we shouldn’t be surprised when we have teacher shortages. Instead, let’s be honest—teaching is a great profession and the pay isn’t bad!

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Since then, we have continued to advocate for these policies.  Though we have had some small successes, the policies of today are very similar to the policies of 2011. Charter schools are still very limited and still confined to Saint Louis and Kansas City, we do not have a private school choice program, and students have relatively few options. But support for choice is growing.  We regularly hear wonderful stories of students thriving in charter schools or benefitting from inter-district choice. And we are starting to see other voices advocating for broader school choice policies.

For example, Steve Spellman, a financial services professional, recently penned an op-ed that appeared in the Columbia Missourian.  In his piece, Spellman spoke about how parents will often move or illegally change their address so their children can attend the public school of their choice.  He argued for many of the same policies that McShane and I wrote about back in 2011 and 2012. It is exciting to see Spellman and others picking up the mantle of school choice.    

Last year a school choice bill made it further than ever—passing out of the Missouri House—and received a hearing in the Senate.  I suspect support for school choice will continue to grow in the coming years. As one of our professors from the University of Arkansas, Jay Greene, recently wrote, “the great political virtue of school choice is that it generates its own constituents…” When people have school choice, they want to keep it. We aren't there yet, but the drumbeat for increased educational options is getting louder.

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On Thursday, the Missouri Legislature passed Senate Bill 493. Described as the “transfer fix,” the bill contains many provisions. One is the ability of students to use public dollars to attend a nonsectarian private school. If you believe the hype, I should be celebrating. After all, I am a proponent of private school choice. Sadly, I have been wrestling with whether this is even a victory for the school choice crowd.

Don’t get me wrong. I am glad that the legislature moved in a bipartisan manner to get this bill passed. Unlike the education establishment, I am willing to compromise and there are many needed aspects in this bill. Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel as if the students who need educational options got the short end of the stick with this deal.

Am I being too cynical? Should I be celebrating? To answer this question, I asked several school choice policy experts this question:

Is this a win for school choice or does it do more harm than good?

Here were their responses:

Mike McShane – Research Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute

The number of hoops parents and schools are required to jump through in order to participate will most likely prevent students from ever accessing a private education. This is Potemkin private school choice.

Patrick Wolf – Professor and 21^st Century Chair in School Choice at the University of Arkansas

I wouldn’t expect more than a handful of families to navigate all of those huge roadblocks to exercise private school choice, especially since religious schools are excluded from the program. When families have a broad set of private school choices, nearly 80 percent of them choose private schools with a religious ethos. That is their preference. This is essentially a private school choice program without the private school choice part.

Jonathan Butcher – Education Director at the Goldwater Institute

I don’t think it does more harm than good, but I’m not sure it will accomplish anything. At least not right away.

Matt Ladner – Senior Advisor of Policy and Research for the Foundation for Excellence in Education

The academic catastrophe going on in Kansas City and Saint Louis have been well understood for decades. On the private side of things, this legislation brings to mind an inspector on the Titanic making conditional offers of an approved life vest three years in the future.

Jason Bedrick, policy analyst at the Cato Institute, and Jay Greene, head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, both pointed to the exclusion of religious schools and the testing requirement as very negative aspects of the bill.

“It’s especially painful when a ‘school choice’ program is designed in such a way that its passage is, to say the least, no cause for celebration,” Bedrick wrote.

Greene cautioned that this legislation might stifle future pushes to create school choice programs in Missouri.

A fix to some of the transfer issues was needed and on balance, the bill is mostly positive. But given these comments, I think my initial reaction was correct – this is not a school choice bill. It addresses some issues, but it does not expand options for students.

Summary of the private option:

Students in unaccredited schools within unaccredited districts are free to transfer. They must first apply to an accredited school within their district. If there are no spaces, they are able to transfer to another district or, upon voter approval, a private school. The private school must be located within the unaccredited district, nonsectarian, accredited, administer state tests, and meet a few other criteria. There is no transportation for transfer students.

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On Feb. 24, the Mississippi Clarion-Ledger published an editorial supporting the establishment of education savings accounts (ESA) in the Magnolia state. The Mississippi ESA proposal closely resembles a proposal currently before the Missouri Legislature in that it would provide support to students with special needs. Essentially, it would allow students with special needs to receive financial assistance from the state. The students could then use that money to tailor their education to fit their needs.

The Clarion-Ledger wrote:

The Parents’ Campaign and others who oppose the proposal — called the Equal Opportunity for All Students with Special Needs Act — claim it’s a voucher program that would strip money from local districts.

But parents of special-needs children and others who support it say it’s a lifeline and a last-resort measure that will give them the ability to do what the state apparently cannot: Educate their children.

School districts doing a good job educating special-needs children have little to fear. Nary is the parent who will withdraw a child from an excellent educational setting.

In Florida, which passed a statewide choice program for special-needs students in 2001, just six percent of eligible students use the program, according to the Florida-based Foundation for Excellence in Education.

We support public schools, but we cannot support the systemic failure of certain students over the course of several decades without any signal from MDE that something will change.

As I have written before, “the beauty of ESAs is that they are versatile.” They put children and their families in the driver’s seat regarding their education. The Clarion-Ledger editorial board recognizes this fact.

Arizona was the first state to create an ESA program and parents have been very satisfied. Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Iowa may be the next states to adopt an ESA program. Will Missouri join that list? It would certainly help if papers such as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch or the Kansas City Star came to the same conclusion as the Clarion-Ledger — that ESAs are good for kids.

(H/T Matt Ladner and Jay Greene.)

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Jay Greene has an interesting piece on his blog about school choice and accountability testing. He writes:

There is a legitimate diversity of views on what constitutes a good education. We should be no more willing to impose the “right” kind of education on people than we would impose the “right” religion or the “right” political preference. Reasonable people disagree about what constitutes the good life and the government in a free society should not be in the business of severely restricting that range of disagreement.

Some argue that charter schools or private schools should not receive state funds unless they teach the state’s prescribed curriculum and administer the state-prescribed accountability tests. To this, Greene responds:

So, the state only pays for its own vision of a good education but you have to pay extra if you want to pursue something else. This is roughly comparable to the status of Dhimmis (non-Muslims in an Islamic state) who are allowed to practice a different religion as long as they pay an extra tax. Doesn’t feel compatible with a free society, does it?

In Missouri, opponents of school choice programs often state this very argument. In a recent position paper, the Cooperating School Districts of Greater St. Louis wrote that charter schools should have the “same accreditation process and accountability requirements of all public schools.” The same has been said about private schools in a school choice program.

These opponents of choice must not realize that we can have a “legitimate diversity of views on what constitutes a good education.”

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of speaking with a group of parents at New City School, a private school in the Central West End neighborhood of Saint Louis. I asked them what they looked for in a school and why they chose New City. Of the seven parents, not one listed performance on standardized exams as their top reason and only one indicated it was in their top three considerations. The most cited reason for picking New City was the school’s commitment to diversity.

In their recent report, “More than Scores: An Analysis of Why and How Parents Choose Private Schools,” the folks at the Friedman Foundation found the same thing that I’m hearing from parents — they are interested in much more than just test scores.

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Officials from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) are finding out that it might not be easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission, at least not when it comes to the Common Core State Standards. DESE adopted the standards without public knowledge and last night, officials from DESE attempted to justify their decision with a one-sided presentation. Many concerned citizens and parents, however, were not interested in listening to DESE’s Common Core gospel.

At the meeting I attended at the Lindbergh School District, citizens showed up with questions; DESE officials showed up with scripts and videos. The plan was to divide the crowd into small groups so we could discuss the standards. They even provided a form for us to write down what we like about the standards and what we dislike. That plan may have worked at other meetings, but the folks at Lindbergh demanded to be heard.

The DESE officials seemed shocked when patrons who wanted to be heard continually interrupted the presentation.

One lady sitting near me said, “Can’t you deviate from your script?”

Another shouted, “This goes against teaching.” She was implying that the officials should have been willing to take questions, like a good teacher would during a lesson.

After the crowd’s continual pestering, and the crowd’s refusal to separate into small groups, the DESE officials began fielding questions. Of course, they were not answering the questions, just listening to them.

The concerns were myriad, ranging from questions about data collection to issues of local control.

I asked two questions:

1. How is this not an unfunded mandate? It will cost districts money to implement the new standards and to purchase all of the technology needed for the tests. If the legislature did this without providing additional funds, it might be a violation of the Hancock Amendment. What is the difference if DESE requires additional spending, but does not provide additional resources for school districts?
2. There is so much double-speak. On one hand, you say these are just standards, they do not tell teachers how to teach. Then in the next sentence, you say that this is changing what teachers are doing in the classroom. How can it be both?

Though I liked my questions, I think the best came from a gentleman in the back of the room. He asked, “Why are you surprised by this response?” He was asking what many were thinking. As a school board member from a district in Franklin County shouted, “We’ve seen these videos.” In fact, many of the people at the meeting had read the information on the script and they had watched the videos on the website.

What the parents wanted was to be heard, not to have the Common Core force-fed to them.

Missourians deserve a fair discussion; they deserve a true debate of the issues. Instead, DESE officials have made up their mind. That is apparent in the statement that Missouri State Board of Education member Mike Ponder made: “I know that people can have a difference of opinion on the matter, but the idea behind the Common Core is here to stay.” In other words, we are doing this whether you like it or not.

If Missourians want a true dialogue on this issue, it will have to come from the people.

To learn more about the Common Core, I encourage you to visit:

* Why we need school choice (An essay detailing my personal story. It links math instruction, Common Core, and school choice).

* What is so common about the Common Core (Blog)

* DESE should consider district level waivers (Blog)

* Missouri should avoid implementation of the Common Core (Testimony)

* Constructive Criticism for Common Core Constructivism Deniers (on Jay P. Greene’s Blog)

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As the chart below shows, inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending has increased almost 40 percent since 1992, but student achievement has essentially been flat.

The Friedman study addresses one of the reasons spending has increased so dramatically: the number of individuals that schools employ, and not just teachers. From 1950 to 2009, the total number of students in U.S. schools increased by 96 percent. During the same time period, the percentage of teachers increased 252 percent and the number of administrators increased by 702 percent!

State figures do not go back as far as the national ones, but we do have accurate data from 1992 to 2009. During that time period, Missouri saw an increase of 8.9 percent in the student population. Consequently, there was a 29.2 percent increase in the number of teachers and a 34.5 percent increase in the number of administrators and non-teaching staff. This all occurred during a period of time when the number of school districts declined in Missouri from 4,891 in 1952 to less than 580 now. One would presume that that would lead to a decrease in the number of administrators required, though it is possible many of those consolidated districts had only one teacher and zero administrators.

What have we received from our increased spending and this “administrative bloat,” as Jay Greene calls it? Essentially nothing; student achievement scores remain flat.

Some are calling for raising Missouri’s tobacco taxes to increase spending for education. Of course the claims that those funds will actually accumulate are somewhat dubious, but setting that aside, we must realize that the problem with our education system is not simply a lack of money or a lack of teachers. The problem is a lack of innovation.

We need fundamental change, and that can only happen when we begin to empower schools to innovate and equip parents to choose.

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Recently, Matt Ladner wrote a series of blog posts about Baumol’s disease in public education. Ladner is certainly not the first to point out this problem. Jay Greene even touched on the topic this week in The Wall Street Journal.

I have seen the numbers nationally, but I wanted to bring it home for Missourians. So I constructed my own graph that demonstrates the Baumol phenomenon in Missouri’s public schools.

The graph was constructed using the Digest of Education Statistics Table 194 and results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). NAEP data are only available after 1992 and the tests are typically taken every other year.  The Digest of Education Statistics data stop in 2008-09. Thus, the graph presents the results from 1992 to 2008. When there were gaps between years, I linearly imported the figures.

Since 1992, Missouri has seen nearly a 40 percent increase in per-pupil spending. Yet we have seen little in terms of increases in academic achievement. This is the very picture of Baumol’s disease: increasing cost with very little improvement in output.

Is there a cure for Baumol’s disease? I think so and I will highlight a few in my next blog post. For now, I will leave you with a thought. If a real disease was running rampant in our schools, there would be immediate action. Yet we have a real economic disease that is plaguing our schools and little is being done. We cannot continue operating an educational system that is plagued with Baumol’s disease.

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This seems like as good a reason as any to remind everyone about the Show-Me Institute’s School Choice Week event tomorrow. The Show-Me Institute is sponsoring a showing of The Cartel at the Tivoli Theater (6350 Delmar) in Saint Louis on Thursday, Jan. 27, at 6:30 p.m. (registration starts at 6:00).

The documentary (you can watch the trailer at the film’s website) examines the failures of New Jersey’s public school system, which spends more per student than that of any other state but is still home to a frighteningly large number of failing schools. Director Bob Bowdon traces how money is frequently diverted from classrooms, and flows instead to administrators, union coffers, and political patronage positions. Although Bowdon focuses on New Jersey, the problems he uncovers are often the same as those we find here in Missouri and across America.

The special screening will be followed by a panel discussion featuring two Missouri state representatives at the forefront of the education issue in our state: Rep. Scott Dieckhaus (R), the chairman of the House Committee on Elementary and Secondary Education, and Rep. Tishaura Jones (D), assistant minority floor leader and also a member of the House Committee on Elementary and Secondary Education. They will share their views on the issues that come before this important committee, and on which of those may find their way into legislation during the 2011 session.

The event is free, but if you would like to come, please RSVP to our public relations representative, William Kay.

The post The Case for School Choice appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

His figure does not take into account intangibles like lost productivity, college classes that must be taught at a lower level of comprehension, loss of human capital and some mechanization costs that are necessary to circumvent the lack of skill within the workforce (like installing cash registers that automatically dispense change).

The numbers tell a troubling story about the state of public education. The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education in Missouri alone had an allocation of $5.4 billion in 2010; some school districts spend as much as $22,000 per student. Clearly, not all of this money translates into higher educational outcomes. (See below for a map of school district spending per student created by Audrey Spalding.)

Achieving the Dream, a research group focused on improving community college students’ educations, reported that 60 percent of community college students took a developmental course, but that the number of students in need of these courses was undoubtedly higher. Community colleges tend to absorb the majority of remedial class costs, because they often serve as a bridge from high school to a four-year institution.

Community colleges in Missouri received $148,377,417 in appropriations for 2010. How much of this is devoted to remedial education? Michigan colleges devoted an estimate of between 6 to 33 percent of their budgets on remedial courses; if Missouri colleges are at all similar to that, this entails a substantial amount of money being devoted to teaching skills like reading, algebra, and trigonometry that should have been learned in high school.

In February of this year, the agenda for the Coordinating Board of Higher Education created a new Developmental Education Data and Policy Task Force (DEDPT) to quantify this problem in Missouri. Its stated purpose:

Too many freshmen (both traditional and nontraditional) are not adequately prepared for collegiate work.  As a result, substantial numbers of entering students are forced to take remedial coursework to address shortcomings in their preparation and to achieve mastery of the knowledge and skills needed to be successful college students. […]

The DEDPT was established to work with MDHE staff to understand better the variation in definitions used by different institutions and sectors and to make recommendations for uniform data definitions about developmental students and coursework. This work will better position Missouri to implement strategies to reduce the need for remediation and shorten time-to-degree.

The task force will bring clarity to the true scope of the inadequate preparation being imparted by the public schools in Missouri. This is a good first step, but beyond just mapping the problems, immediate steps can be taken to address these concerns and improve education before the college level. For example, a Show-Me Institute study showed that charter schools have been shown to increase competition and improve educational outcomes. At any rate, Missouri and states across the country are spending far too much money on education for such a large group of students to graduate without acquiring basic skills.

(Jay Greene spoke last month in Kansas City at a Show-Me Institute event about education reform. The audio of his speech is now available on the Show-Me Institute website.)

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Audio file — 1:25:50 — 78.5 MB (MP3)

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Show-Me Daily didn’t make the cut this past year, but maybe in 2009?

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