We’ve written a lot at the Show-Me Institute lately about A–F letter grades for public schools. The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) will soon begin assigning these grades to all schools and districts under an executive order from Governor Kehoe. Legislation to codify the order may follow, depending on how the 2026 session unfolds.

A central component of these letter grades is student growth. Growth measures how much students learn over the course of a year, based on state assessments. To estimate growth, the state uses a statistical model to generate a “predicted” level of progress for each student. Schools and districts are then evaluated based on how their students perform relative to those predictions. In simple terms, high-growth schools are those where students consistently outperform expectations. You can read more about the Missouri Growth Model here.

I’ve studied academic growth extensively and believe it is the most accurate indicator of school effectiveness we have. No other measure comes close.

New evidence in support of this view comes from a study by researchers at MIT. The study compares test-score growth to a popular alternative for evaluating school quality: schoolwide surveys. The authors assess how well growth-based and survey-based measures predict important student outcomes, including high school graduation, graduating with distinction, and college enrollment and persistence.

The MIT study was conducted in New York City, where the district administers surveys to students, families, teachers, and staff. The surveys are designed to capture school climate across several domains: rigorous instruction, teacher collaboration, supportive environments, and trust. School surveys are intuitively appealing, especially for those who are skeptical of standardized tests. But how do they stack up to growth when it comes to identifying schools that produce strong outcomes for students?

The answer: not very well. The surveys are a little better at predicting high school graduation, but much worse at predicting more meaningful and differentiated outcomes including graduating high school with an advanced diploma, enrolling in college, and persistence in college. The authors conclude: “From the point of view of parents seeking to boost their children’s odds of going to college, test information is most valuable.”

The research evidence on the value of student growth as an indicator of school quality is overwhelming. This is just the newest study to add to the list. School surveys are nice, but when it comes to identifying effective schools, objectively measured growth is far superior.

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Soltas takes a close look at New York City’s 421-a tax incentive, a voluntary program meant to coax developers into adding affordable units to new construction. His conclusion? The marginal cost of delivering just one of those “affordable” units is about $1.6 million. Not per building—per unit.

To put that in perspective, housing vouchers or programs like the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) can often serve a family for a fraction of that price. In fact, Soltas finds that the 421-a program is about six times more expensive than either LIHTC or Section 8 on a per-unit basis.

Supporters of these policies often say the premium is worth it because it moves low-income households into higher-income neighborhoods, opening up long-term opportunities. But even that goal comes with trade-offs. We can’t pretend money is infinite. When we choose to spend $1.6 million to house one family in a high-rent ZIP code, we are choosing not to house five or ten families elsewhere. Every dollar we overpay in one neighborhood is a dollar not spent reducing waitlists, repairing existing housing stock, or investing in other services.

The more we subsidize these costly outcomes, the more we distort the market—and not in subtle ways. Developers are rational. When inclusionary mandates make a project unprofitable, they don’t build. When they can get tax breaks for minimal public benefit, they take the deal. Soltas’s paper even shows that developer “windfalls” aren’t the biggest issue—it’s the simple fact that it costs far more to make units “affordable” in already expensive neighborhoods.

What this all points to is a deeper issue in housing policy: the unwillingness of lawmakers to prioritize. Inclusionary housing tries to solve everything at once—cost, segregation, opportunity—but ends up creating a system where we pay top dollar for minimal benefit. It’s the public policy equivalent of spending a fortune on a single winning lottery ticket while others go hungry.

We don’t have to take that path. There are more cost-effective ways to support housing affordability that don’t rely on distorting incentives or showering subsidies on high-income developments. Targeted vouchers, flexible zoning reforms, and letting supply meet demand are all better places to start.

Policymakers should stop asking, “How can we mandate more affordable housing?” and start asking, “What’s the most effective way to help the most people with the dollars we have?”

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Over 65 years ago, Milton Friedman suggested that while the government should pay for every child to be educated, the government shouldn’t necessarily run the schools. Breaking the public school monopoly by allowing parents to choose their children’s school should lead to parents selecting the most effective schools. Low-performing schools would have to either improve or close.

Similarly, Dr. Pathak’s research has focused on finding smarter ways to allocate education resources. He has studied market design and how parents choose schools when they have to provide their top choices to a system that matches students to schools. Looking at students in Boston, he discovered that some students (and presumably their parents) are simply more sophisticated choosers than others, which makes them better at securing spots in the most-desired schools (even if sometimes the schools picked by the sophisticated choosers weren’t the best fit for them). This discovery led to a revision in the matching algorithm of the enrollment system so that it is now more difficult to game.

Dr. Pathak pursued similar work in New York City and in New Orleans. Overall, he found that improving the choice system can lead to better matching of students and schools. This better matching can, but doesn’t always, lead to improved outcomes for the students. Pathak has also contributed significantly to the growing body of evidence that urban charter schools can generate large achievement gains for low-income students of color.

Unfortunately, Dr. Friedman didn’t have a chance to study school choice systems after they were implemented. But his efforts have allowed others to pick up the torch, and results suggest that his hypotheses had merit. I look forward to learning more from Dr. Pathak.

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Researchers at MIT and George Mason University estimate that delayed and canceled flights imposed on passengers an aggregate delay of 28,500 years in 2007. The cost of these delays, and of risk-averting behavior like traveling early to destinations, was estimated at $15.3 billion, a startling number that accounts for the opportunity cost of time but doesn’t measure the consequences of missing critical appointments like weddings or job interviews.

While Sexton refers specifically to airline cancellations, his larger point is about the time costs to passengers. This study mirrors recent observations from SaveKCI’s blogger Kevin Koster:

Yesterday, I had to make a day trip to Denver. As I tweeted yesterday morning, it literally took me only 8-minutes from the time I locked my car in the KCI garage until I was through security and standing at the gate ready to board. By comparison that afternoon in Denver, it took me 45 minutes from the time I was dropped at the curb until I was at the gate – and I was told the security lines were unusually short.

More impressive though was our return to KC. It took me less time to get from the gate to my home than it did in Denver to get from the gate to a waiting cab outside. To the business traveler time is money – on average $150/hr. We should be selling KCI’s “private jet speed” convenience to businesses in other markets, rather than considering destroying it.

Airport administrators want to move to airport models used elsewhere in the country to maximize revenue. Kansas Citians like Kansas City International Airport because it allows them to be efficient with their time. For many in the region, this time cost is the most important.

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The headline? The near future of all air service is looking grim. Airlines continue to consolidate service at their largest hubs, consolidate with each other, and will continue further reductions at small community airports.

Columbia has felt this decline over the past several months, and the final Frontier Airlines flight from Columbia took off for Orlando, Fla., on Monday. Columbia is not alone. Data in the MIT study shows that Missouri airports, along with almost every other airport in the country, have lost service over the past five years.

This data shows us that the fate of air travel is not dependent on how shiny your airport is. Airlines have shifted away from capacity expansion because it was not a profitable strategy. They will continue to seek ways to maximize profits; unfortunately, small- and medium-sized airports are disproportionally affected in the process.

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I spent hours studying content that it was assumed an econ PhD student would already know and regularly received help from classmates. The most help, however, came from a former hedge fund analyst and professors at MIT. While I completed my math for economic analysis course, I also watched MIT lectures on linear algebra. I visited Khan Academy regularly to learn how to use the chain rule or product rule when finding derivatives. The videos were more effective in teaching me than my professor, because I could pause the videos, re-watch them, and practice as they played. I am sure the professor would have been quite frustrated if I demanded that he repeat what he said as much as I replayed those videos.

Recently, one of the founders of Coursera, a free online program that delivers free, high-quality college level courses to people around the world, gave a TED Talk on the ability of technology to reinvent how we deliver education (see also Salman Khan’s TED Talk).

High-quality education programs are increasingly being provided for free. There is a real opportunity for schools, especially K-12 schools, to see tremendous benefits from these programs. Imagine a high school student taking introduction to finance, while the student at the computer next to him or her takes Greek and Roman mythology. The technology is available, so what is stopping us from utilizing the power of technology to change how we educate students? Tradition and government regulation.

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Miron’s area of expertise is the economics of libertarianism, with particular emphasis on the economics of illegal drugs. He has served on the faculty at the University of Michigan and as a visiting professor at the Sloan School of Management, M.I.T. and the Department of Economics, Harvard University. From 1992-1998, he was chairman of the Department of Economics at Boston University. He is the author of Drug War Crimes: The Consequences of Prohibition and The Economics of Seasonal Cycles, in addition to numerous op-eds and journal articles. He has been the recipient of an Olin Fellowship from the National Bureau of Economic Research, an Earhart Foundation Fellowship, and a Sloan Foundation Faculty Research Fellowship. Miron received a B.A., magna cum laude, from Swarthmore College in 1979 and a Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T. in 1984.

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Here’s how the Extra class works: If you pass a test on electronics and radio regulations that covers more advanced material than the test for the Technician and General classes, you get to communicate over portions of the radio spectrum that are off-limits to people who hold only Technician and General licenses. Nothing about those parts of the spectrum makes them need special regulation; they’ve simply been set aside as the province of elite radio amateurs.

Some amateur radio enthusiasts defend the system, saying that the Extra class encourages operators to gain expertise, and that everyone in society benefits from the resulting propagation of knowledge. This argument is similar to the rationale for the DARPA Network Challenge, which was supposed to contribute to our understanding of communications and problem-solving.

I don’t buy the argument in either case. When the government offers an incentive for learning, the people who already have the information or would have learned it anyway step up to claim the prize. This was clearly the result of the DARPA Network Challenge. The federal government offered a $40,000 prize to whoever could find 10 red balloons released around the country, and scholars at M.I.T. — who were already deeply interested in networks — organized a network, found the balloons, and won the contest. We spent $40,000 of taxpayer money (plus however much it cost to administer the contest) to discover that people at M.I.T. are smart.

So it is with the amateur radio licenses. The most motivated operators brush up on their trigonometry and take the test, while others settle for the General class and its fewer privileges. People who weren’t interested in electronics don’t suddenly become scientists when they hear about the Extra class. And even if some operators do learn facts that they wouldn’t have were it not for the exam, there are less coercive ways to achieve that goal. For instance, public libraries or community colleges could offer free classes about radio communications.

The state of Missouri doesn’t grant amateur radio licenses. But Missouri licenses many other activities, and should beware to avoid the FCC’s manner of regulating. Two pieces of advice: First, don’t issue licenses that have no bearing on the general welfare. Second, once you’ve established a licensing requirement, don’t create a license class for people who have learned more or otherwise gone the extra mile. It’s not the state’s job to give them a pat on the back, or to reward accomplishments with special privileges.

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When it comes to elections, everyone wants the same thing: high voter turn-out and a well-informed electorate. Unfortunately, those two goals often work against each other. Voters search for shorthand cues — such as political party identification, incumbency, gender, and ethnicity — that might indicate which choice would best fit their own political inclinations and voting preferences. The charter proposal currently before Franklin County voters would designate the newly created offices of county council and county executive as nonpartisan positions, meaning that candidates would not run as Democrats or Republicans. Party affiliation is an efficient mechanism by which candidates reveal information about themselves to voters. Party labels aid typical voters in deciding which candidate better fits their preferences. Although the proposed charter includes many positive aspects, civic leaders need to ensure that voters can still make use of shorthand cues to increase their ability to cast informed votes, rather than taking those cues away.

Historically, supporters of nonpartisan elections touted them as a means of fighting corruption by urban political machines — a situation that does not apply to Franklin County. The next common argument is that local issues do not fall along partisan lines, as is the case in Jefferson City or Washington, D.C., so partisan elections would be irrelevant. While that may be generally true for smaller towns and suburbs, it is not always the case for counties — particularly larger ones, like Franklin. Counties are not cities, and should not be governed as such. Counties contain competing interests, and must deal with issues, such as zoning and taxation levels, that sometimes fall along traditional partisan lines. In those cases, party identification can guide voters to make a more informed choice.

The Kansas City City Council is the most prominent nonpartisan elected body in Missouri, yet the substantial majority of its members are quite partisan by any practical definition. Almost half of them have previously served as state representatives, and many of the others are currently active in partisan organizations. A former Kansas City mayor just ran for Congress in a partisan race. Nonpartisan elections have not taken party activism out of Kansas City politics.

A final common argument in favor of nonpartisan elections is not so much an argument as it is a hope. Some seem to believe that eliminating party identification will lead voters to make more informed decisions because they no longer have a partisan shortcut. This is wishful thinking at best, because there is no evidence to suggest that this happens. There might be an extremely small number of people for whom the lack of a party label acts as an incentive for them to research their decisions more carefully, but the vast majority of voters will simply look for other cues to decide their votes — particularly incumbency, but also gender, family name, and party recommendations.

This last item — party recommendations — is key. The most informed voters are also, almost always, the most political voters. It is only common sense that these two qualities coincide. Even without partisan elections for Franklin County’s new offices, factions will still develop — and the existing party structure will still support one faction over another. For instance, from 1913 to 1973, Minnesota’s legislative elections were nonpartisan. During that period, the legislature quickly developed conservative and liberal caucuses, political parties still endorsed particular candidates, and researchers at MIT and Princeton found, “A large segment of the electorate consistently voted for one party across offices even in the absence of party labels.”

In “Teams Without Uniforms: The Nonpartisan Ballot in State and Local Elections,” a study for Political Research Quarterly, three political scientists concluded that nonpartisan elections led to decreased voter turnout and increased the advantages of incumbency. They also failed to find evidence that nonpartisan elections lead to a more informed electorate, stating, “there is little reason to believe that nonpartisanship promotes an effective policy linkage between citizens and their elected leaders.”

The decision to mandate nonpartisan elections as part of Franklin County’s charter proposal is troubling. Voters there deserve the same candidate information they receive for other elections. Nonpartisan elections in an area as large as Franklin County will not lead voters to cast more informed ballots for county races — particularly when it comes to the county executive. Despite the many worthwhile parts of the proposed county charter, nonpartisan elections will not lead to better government in Franklin County.

David Stokes is a policy analyst for the Show-Me Institute, a Missouri-based think tank.

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