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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:05): Welcome back, Aaron Renn, to the podcast. So happy to have you and David Stokes, our own expert on cities and counties and all things municipal. I appreciate you coming on, Aaron. There have been murmurings around St. Louis again on a topic that we have revisited for probably a hundred years: should the city of St. Louis be a separate county from St. Louis County?

Before we get to that, I want to ask you something because I was reading the news this morning, and I know that you’ve written about city county mergers before, like cities that are kind of dying and then either pulling in parts of their closest suburbs to sort of make everything look better, broaden their tax base, make their crime numbers look better. I was reading something you wrote a year or two ago about that, and you said that Louisville is a failed example of that. Is that right, basically?

Aaron Renn (01:01): Yeah, I’m a little skeptical of how these things have worked out in practice.

Susan Pendergrass (01:05): Yeah, in terms of losing the flavor and the coolness of the city. Literally this morning I saw an article about how Louisville is having a renaissance and these young professionals are all moving there because they didn’t tear down all their beautiful old Victorian homes, so you can still get one for close to a million dollars. They’ve got a cool art scene and a bourbon scene. So it sounds like maybe Louisville did not lose its personal flavor in the merger. I would be curious to know what you think of that.

Aaron Renn (01:33): Well, I like to put St. Louis in context. I’m glad you mentioned Louisville because many of these river cities have similar characteristics. I like to look at St. Louis as well as three cities in the Ohio Valley: Louisville, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh. All of them heavily German Catholic in their demographics. All of them are very geopolitically fragmented with many small tiny suburbs throughout. They all have very fragmented neighborhood systems as well, where everybody has a strong sense of neighborhood identity. Where you go to high school is a big social marker. They all have phenomenal collections of urban assets and great historic buildings. They all still have their own unique character in a country where that has sort of bled away.

Aaron Renn (02:31): And they also have curiously underperformed demographically and economically in terms of growth. They’re slow growth places. So one thing I always encourage people is to pan back the lens and don’t just look at St. Louis in isolation. Look at it in comparison or dialogue with some of these other places and see what you can learn from them.

Louisville is actually a quite troubled city in important ways. From a white collar employment perspective it’s doing well, from a blue collar perspective less so. It’s one of the 10 least educated major metros in the country. I don’t want to spend too much time on Louisville, but I want to talk about the city county merger, which is distinct from recombining the city and the county. This has been considered urban planning best practice for 30 or 40 years. There was a book written by David Rusk called Cities Without Suburbs. The idea is that cities that were able to expand their boundaries through either annexation or city county mergers were prospering, whilst cities that did not, like the Clevelands, the Cincinnatis, and the St. Louises, were struggling. So the idea is we need big box government.

Indianapolis, where I live now, had a city county merger in 1970. Louisville did a city county merger, I grew up near Louisville. Jacksonville, Florida, Lexington, Kentucky, and Nashville, Tennessee did as well. What I would say is a few things. Merger is not necessarily bad. For Indianapolis, merger did prevent the city from essentially going down the tubes in important ways. So it really was a win in important ways.

But it did not prevent the historic city from going into the exact same demographic decline as St. Louis. The historic city of Indianapolis has lost almost exactly the same share of its population since 1970 as St. Louis has. Secondly, these are very politically difficult to pull off. They take enormous effort. They often fail multiple times. Louisville had multiple failures.

The most precious resource is always management time and attention. Is this where you want to put all your political chips? And in order to get it passed politically, what happens invariably is that most entities are actually not consolidated. In Louisville, none of the existing incorporated suburban governments were in fact merged. In Indianapolis, the school districts weren’t merged.

This means you don’t necessarily get all of the benefits you think from consolidation, because many things are excluded. And then unlike a corporate merger, where there’s typically a lot of downsizing and cost rationalization, in city county mergers nobody ever loses their job and salaries and benefits might even be harmonized upward to the high watermark. So don’t expect it to save any money. Personally, city county merger might have some benefits for St. Louis. I’m not saying it would have no benefits, but in my opinion it’s not going to be a needle mover and most likely it would be extraordinarily politically difficult and uncertain to pull off.

Susan Pendergrass (06:00): Yeah, no question. It’s been very politically difficult. People don’t want to do it. However, we do have these little tiny school districts and police districts. We have, I don’t know, 28 911 systems. We have a lot of what looks like bureaucratic waste and red tape. To the extent that doesn’t get resolved in a merger, then what’s the point? But I do think, you know, we’ve been talking about the demographics of St. Louis. There were over 800,000 people in the city once. Now there are maybe 280,000 and declining, and we’re in the death spiral of more people dying than being born. We’ve been in that for a while. And I guess it brings up the question of what is St. Louis to do if we are in this death spiral? We’re not having the babies. We’re having fewer babies than we did 15 years ago. So school enrollment is only declining. What is the prescription in that situation?

I’ve been to Cincinnati quite a bit. They’re trying to get people downtown with sports stadiums. It doesn’t really work. Louisville has sports stadiums downtown. I don’t know if people really want to move down there. I don’t see it working in St. Louis. So what is a city in that situation to do?

Aaron Renn (07:18): It’s going to be challenging in a sense because your problems are a little over determined. St. Louis was once a regional capital city, much like a Dallas or an Atlanta or a Denver or a Minneapolis. And it lost a lot of those functions. Many of its headquarters have left. It used to have a lot of professional services firms like ad agencies that did business all over the country, not just for the local market. Now St. Louis, although it’s still bigger than Indianapolis, looks a lot more like an Indianapolis or a Columbus, Ohio, where you have fewer corporate headquarters and most of the service firms are just there to serve the local market. St. Louis has essentially shrunk a little bit in relative importance, and it’s hard to get that back.

The demographics are also quite difficult and create a situation where it’s hard to attract business when you have a shrinking labor force, weak demographic growth, and a weak ability to bring people in from the outside. So it’s a very complicated situation and I don’t think there’s any silver bullet for St. Louis.

Susan Pendergrass (08:39): That’s what I’m asking you for. You have the answers. What’s the silver bullet?

Aaron Renn (08:43): So here are the things I would look at if I were in St. Louis. One of the clear issues that affects all of these river cities is that their wonderful, unique local cultures come with a downside, which is an extreme parochialism that has two negative effects. One, it makes it difficult for the communities to cohesively work together, which I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. City-suburb divides tend to be bigger. In Indianapolis, regional leadership is mostly all on the same page about the big issues. Same with Columbus, Ohio. Secondly, it makes it very difficult to attract people from out of town because they come there and they can’t make friends, they can’t penetrate the social networks.

Susan Pendergrass (09:15): 100%, yes.

Aaron Renn (09:40): You hear it over and over again in places like St. Louis, Cleveland, even Minneapolis, Minnesota. There are some sayings there. If you want to make friends in Minnesota, go to kindergarten, because that’s when everybody makes their friends. Or Minnesotans will give you directions anywhere but their house. They’re never going to invite you over. St. Louis has that reputation. I don’t think it’s just a reputation. And I know you just had Ness Sandoval on.

Susan Pendergrass (09:53): Yeah.

Aaron Renn (10:08): He’s talking about you need to get better on migration. Migration isn’t going to improve if migrants are not going to be able to join the social networks here. And that’s not even just international migration, that’s domestic migrants. So I think that’s a huge issue for the city. Cultural issues are hard to solve, but maybe less intractable than infrastructure.

The other thing is looking at Pittsburgh as a sort of model. Pittsburgh hasn’t solved really most of its problems by any means, but it has been able to regenerate in the city a sort of high value economy around Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. It’s done quite well. Many Silicon Valley firms have set up shop there. What’s happened in Pittsburgh, although it’s still a demographic decline story, is there’s been a demographic transition in the city. Pittsburgh went from one of the least educated cities in America to now one of the youngest and most educated. Part of it is old people moved and died off and young educated people replaced them. So the total number of people in the city was declining, but there was a churn happening underneath. And the same thing is already happening in St. Louis.

Susan Pendergrass (11:13): How did they do that?

Aaron Renn (11:33): College degree attainment in the city is now well north of 40%. So the people who live in the city of St. Louis are very educated. That demographic churn has raised educational attainment and thus incomes in the city a lot. Now Pittsburgh was different because it was an almost entirely white city. There’s a racial divide in St. Louis and gentrification concerns become more salient. But St. Louis is now an educated city. This is not an old post-industrial blue collar city. The city of St. Louis itself is very educated. And also being very small, it doesn’t necessarily need a massive change to move the needle. In Indianapolis we have a population of over 900,000. Moving that behemoth takes a lot. St. Louis now being smaller has a situation where there could be a big impact from lower numbers of things. So I think a knowledge economy built around Washington University and your medical centers has some possibilities, somewhat similar to Pittsburgh.

Susan Pendergrass (12:45): So much medical.

Aaron Renn (12:58): Carnegie Mellon’s engineering and computer science areas will be a little different. I might also look at Vanderbilt, what’s going on there? What are some peer schools you could watch to see what’s going on? But I think there are actually some reasons to think that the city of St. Louis, believe it or not, could be sort of turning a corner. It has now demographically renewed itself to a higher educational attainment state. Being small, it probably doesn’t have that much further to fall, and you can start building from there. Obviously there are governance challenges, but looking at the Pittsburgh model, studying similar complexes around peer schools, and addressing the culture issues is where I’d look.

David Stokes (13:33): Hopeful.

Susan Pendergrass (13:47): So as a spokesperson for St. Louis, what do you see for the future?

David Stokes (13:52): Well, I would be curious to get Aaron’s thoughts on that size question, about how the city of St. Louis has in fact gotten so small. It’s about 10% of the metro area. How does that affect the pros or cons of any type of a merger? These would not be a merger of equals. St. Louis County would almost subsume St. Louis City into it. How do you think that would affect things for better or worse?

Aaron Renn (14:28): Well, that was the critique of the Louisville merger by two academics at the University of Louisville. I mentioned the book Cities Without Suburbs. They wrote an academic paper called Suburbs Without a City, which basically said if the merger passed in Louisville, it would essentially mean the suburbs take over the city, not the city taking over the suburbs, because the old city of Louisville only had about 260,000 people and the suburbs would numerically dominate. The same thing would certainly happen in St. Louis. If there were a merger, suburban St. Louis County would control the city in essence.

Another consideration, and this is a Cincinnati issue, I interviewed about 15 years ago the mayor of Cincinnati, John Cranley. Here’s what he said, and I think this is an important point. He said, 30 years ago, city county merger was the thing because cities were in decline and you wanted to tap that suburban tax base to fund the city. But now it’s reversed. Now the cities are coming back and it’s the inner suburbs that are actually going down the tubes. And so in Cincinnati today, we have all the corporate headquarters, we have the universities and the medical centers, and we don’t have to share our tax revenue with anybody. If we were merged with the county government, we’d have to prop up all these failing suburbs. And so I think you’re in a similar situation in St. Louis, where the high value activity, not all of it is in the city of St. Louis because of Clayton and so on, but the St. Louis County suburbs are mostly places that are themselves on negative trajectories. Merging the city, which may be on the cusp of being able to bottom out and turn around, with all of these still declining inner suburban areas, might actually be an albatross around the city’s neck.

Susan Pendergrass (15:16): What would that mean?

David Stokes (16:37): I just think one of the differences between St. Louis and Cincinnati, and I don’t know the property tax base of Cincinnati, is that so much of the city of St. Louis is tax exempt right now. Between Washington University, Saint Louis University, and all the government entities, there’s just so much of it. I say that as somebody who supports property tax changes to make them pay something towards it. But I just don’t think the Cincinnati argument applies to the city of St. Louis right now. That property tax exemption part is a huge factor because the most growing, thriving part of it is the entire giant Barnes-WashU-Cortex complex, and the amount of property taxes they pay is miniscule.

Susan Pendergrass (16:38): Hmm.

Aaron Renn (17:26): Well, some of that is a planning issue. And I think the reality is, when you have a complex like that, are all these people going to move to St. Charles? Maybe not. I’ll tell you, I live in the suburb of Indianapolis named Carmel, and a lot of the hospitals and things have been opening facilities here. When these nonprofit hospitals come up here, we will not approve zoning changes for those hospitals unless they agree to make payments in lieu of taxes. You want to come up here and you want a zoning change, you’re going to have to pay. We were actually quite prescient in that one of the local hospital chains opened a for-profit hospital. As part of the approval deal, we said, if you ever convert to nonprofit status, you will continue paying property taxes. And we did that.

So I think there probably is leverage from the city over some of these entities. You don’t have a lot of leverage over a corporation deciding where to put their office, but that’s not a tax exempt situation. The stuff at Cortex is probably not going to leave if you make them pay a little money the next time they come to you for a zoning approval. I think you need to start looking at how to get more money out of these entities that are nonprofits in name only. These universities and hospitals are effectively gigantic hedge funds. Their executives are extremely well compensated and billions of dollars are flowing through there. Undoubtedly the better solution there is to figure out how to tax them rather than figure out how to tax the soon-to-be-dead mall in the suburb over the border.

David Stokes (19:24): Well, yeah, and that’s sort of the trade off, unfortunately, is that they do pay earnings tax. The employees, many of them very highly compensated, pay the earnings tax. And that’s what makes the city more dependent on local income taxes, not less, because they’re either tax exempt or in the case of Cortex, have tax abatements that make them essentially tax exempt.

Susan Pendergrass (19:25): We do have earnings taxes, right? So the folks who work there have to pay an earnings tax.

Aaron Renn (19:53): Yeah. Again, I don’t know exactly the fiscal architecture there. But I would say you don’t want to do a merger simply to do a tax dollar grab. The lesson of Indianapolis is we did that. We grabbed suburban tax dollars and we used it to rebuild our downtown successfully. But here we are 50 years later, and now we have enormous tracts of decayed suburbia that are an enormous problem. Our entire core county is now in a sense the inner city. We have big challenges because we were not able to invest in ways that allow those suburban areas to retain their allure over the long term.

And I’m not saying that’s impossible, but any short term juice you get, cities always rise and fall. Core cities have proven more resilient and more able to regenerate themselves than suburbs. Part of it is because state governments cannot afford to let their state’s largest city or major urban center go down the tubes.

Susan Pendergrass (21:06): Yeah.

Aaron Renn (21:16): Missouri cannot let St. Louis and Kansas City implode. Michigan cannot just write off Detroit and say who cares. But these suburban areas have proven a lot tougher to save. We don’t have a good model. We’ve spent decades thinking about how to rebuild cities and build districts. There are certain things you can pull off in a city around conventions, civic events, gathering spaces, museums, and government that are very hard to translate to suburban settings. So there’s not a great playbook, especially in declining markets, for renewing suburbs. The playbook for suburban renewal, if you want to call it that, is places like Carmel, Indiana, which are growing and affluent, and therefore can build large mixed use centers, new urbanist developments, trails, and parks. The suburbs of St. Louis County are probably tremendously deficient in infrastructure as we would understand it today.

So again, there may actually be some benefits in having St. Louis City rejoin the county in a sense, because then the county functions are spread and amortized across a larger population.

Susan Pendergrass (22:45): It would immediately improve our murder rate because we would be mixing it in.

Aaron Renn (22:48): Yeah, there is some of that. The murder rate is an artifact of the size of the city more than anything. There are places in Chicago with higher murder rates. A former colleague of mine at the Manhattan Institute, Rafael Mangual, did an analysis of Chicago. He said there are areas on the South Side of Chicago that are larger and have more people than St. Louis with far higher murder rates than St. Louis.

Susan Pendergrass (22:56): We get called out because of the small denominator.

Aaron Renn (23:17): And so there is that. The other thing is Chicago is a good example. New York City was essentially a city county merger. In 1898, the five counties that are the five boroughs of New York were consolidated into one city. Philadelphia was also a city county consolidation from the 19th century. But what happens when you create a very large city of say a million people or more is you really have to scale up your government. You have to have a government that operates at that scale.

What happened with Indianapolis was we merged city and county government, but we didn’t really have a government that could effectively manage this new larger territory. It never built out the infrastructure in the suburbs. In New York, the Bronx has subways, great parks, everything built out with proper infrastructure, because it was part of New York and New York had to expand governance to become a city of eight million. Chicago got big in the 19th century and built a city government that could run a city of three million people. And some of the stuff that gets critiqued there, for example, is a lot of city services were organized by ward or city council district. There are 50 city council districts and every city councilor is sort of a little mini mayor of their district. The alderman essentially has veto power over any zoning changes. It’s called aldermanic privilege. So there are a lot of constraints there.

But if it’s just one mayor and one city council trying to think about a huge city of 77 neighborhoods and three million people, they can’t keep that much in their head. All they can think about is downtown. And that’s what happened in Indianapolis. The mayor and city council can really only think about downtown. We should have built out structures in townships throughout the city so that you had leadership focused on that area and money focused on that area. That’s what made the suburbs work really well. A suburb like Carmel is basically township sized. We have 100,000 people, big enough to do things, but not so big that our mayor and council can’t keep the whole city in their head and plan and manage the whole city.

So if you merge with the county government, you’re going to have to create an entirely new government structure that allows you to essentially manage every sub area of the whole thing and bring it all up to a standard of services. That’s the other thing they often did in Louisville and Nashville. They merge, but they have a two tier service system where there’s an urban services district for the old city which gets more services, and then the others get less. They didn’t do that in New York. There’s one standard of service in New York, one in Philadelphia, one in Chicago. So if you can’t commit to a single standard of service, you’re basically creating a bogus merger in my opinion. If you’re going to do a merger, you need to obliterate every government and entity in St. Louis County and city, merge them all into one with one standard. That’s not going to happen.

Susan Pendergrass (26:35): That’s not going to happen. What do you think, David?

David Stokes (26:37): Yeah, that’s not going to happen.

Aaron Renn (26:43): So you end up with a lot of problems. Louisville didn’t merge any fire departments. Imagine a city that doesn’t have a consolidated fire department. Imagine a city without a single police department. That was actually Indianapolis. When we merged, the Indianapolis Police Department still patrolled the old city, but the new parts of the city that were consolidated in from the county were still controlled by the sheriff.

Susan Pendergrass (27:13): That is 100% what would happen in St. Louis. Everyone would retain their school system and their police department and their fire department. I lived for a long time in Fairfax County, Virginia, which is a single county government. It’s massive, 150,000 students in their school system. It seems to function with a single police department and fire department. But I don’t think you can backwards engineer that into a place that for hundreds of years has been operating as it has been operating.

Aaron Renn (27:43): Lexington, Kentucky worked pretty well because one, the schools were already consolidated, as in the South it’s typically county school districts. Secondly, there were no other government entities, no township governments, no other incorporated municipalities. So it merged everything. And they were sort of able to solve the urban services district issue because the outer areas of Fayette County were horse farms. They actually put in a kind of green belt rule, you can’t develop out there, because they wanted to protect these scenic landscapes. So there was actually a good reason to treat that differently, because it was a very unique American landscape. Lexington, I think, was pretty successful.

Susan Pendergrass (28:15): They are. I appreciate it when I drive across Route 64.

Aaron Renn (28:39): Lexington was pretty successful and wasn’t especially controversial when they did it, in part because there weren’t all these entrenched interests like there are in other places. If you look at places that did the mergers, they weren’t the Cincinnatis and Pittsburghs. They’ve been talking about consolidation in Pittsburgh forever. It was very hard. And Louisville did it, but it was one of the least consolidated so-called consolidated governments. What the Louisville merger functionally did was dissolve the city of Louisville and reorganize county government. The county government now has a mayor and a council instead of the old fiscal court with the judge executive and all that.

Susan Pendergrass (29:21): That’s kind of what would happen in St. Louis, right?

Aaron Renn (29:36): That’s essentially what they did. They basically dissolved the city and the county government was reorganized, but nothing was merged.

Susan Pendergrass (29:43): Did you have a question?

David Stokes (29:45): I want to get back to the fire district point. We’re talking about why this would be so hard. There’s actually a law in St. Louis that only applies in St. Louis County that makes it impossible to consolidate fire districts. Even if a modest mid-sized suburb annexes an unincorporated part of town, they’re not allowed to provide fire services to that new annexed area, or they can, but they have to pay so much to the old unincorporated fire district that it makes it impossible to do so. That’s just one example of how even if you wanted a full scale merger, it would just be impossible to actually carry through.

Susan Pendergrass (30:34): Why do you think people float this idea, David? Why does it come back every couple of years?

David Stokes (30:38): You know, it’s the old line. I remember a study I read about Pittsburgh and St. Louis many years ago. The question was, are the St. Louis and Pittsburgh areas really inefficient with all the fragmented government? And the conclusion was, well, you would never design a metro area like this, but they’ve both made it work over the last century better than you would think. The conclusion was that St. Louis and Pittsburgh aren’t actually as inefficient as you might assume when you run the numbers.

I think people have trouble accepting that. People look at so many small municipalities, many of them dysfunctional, many of them until recent times funded themselves primarily with traffic tickets, which is a terrible way to fund local government, and that’s not even an exaggeration. And there’s just this fundamental belief that if you can just plan it better you’ll create a better place. I just think it fails.

One of the reasons it would fail, going back to what Aaron led this conversation off with, is that if St. Louis County and St. Louis City joined together, they’re not actually going to lay any government employees off to save any money. St. Louis City government is not going to fire city employees. It’s never going to happen. So you’re not going to save any money and it’s all just going to collapse.

Aaron Renn (32:12): Yeah, New York City and large governments are not more efficient.

I look at it and say, look, I think merger is a solution for failed states, if you want to call them that, in the St. Louis suburbs. Take some micro-suburb that’s a complete scam or is bankrupt and merge it in with its neighbor. Do some consolidation like that, that probably needs to be led by state government, almost like a receivership sort of thing. That’s just kind of good government as you work through it. But I just don’t think the benefits you would gain from trying to do a complete governmental merger of St. Louis City with St. Louis County would outweigh the opportunity cost of how much time and effort you spend on it, when you could be spending that on other things that I think will actually move the needle more.

The downsides are arguably as high as the upsides. There’s no guarantee it’s even net positive in this environment. The time to have merged was when Indianapolis did it in 1970, not in 2026. Nashville did it in the 60s. Jacksonville did it a long time ago.

And then I think it doesn’t fix the fundamental issues around the culture. You’ve got to take a hard look at that and say, it’s maybe very difficult to change. The idea that people who aren’t from here have to be able to move here and get connected and feel like they belong in the city. There’s a couple we know who lived in St. Louis. The wife taught in St. Louis public schools. They’re big urban people. The husband was from St. Louis, and they moved here to Carmel, Indiana.

Susan Pendergrass (33:47): Tell me more about that.

Aaron Renn (34:10): Basically they said, man, people are just so much friendlier here. They make better eye contact, they engage more. It’s just so much more welcoming than it was in St. Louis, even though they were actually in a sense connected because the husband was from there.

So when even people who lived in St. Louis and liked it notice a difference when they leave, that is a killer when you’re already struggling demographically. I had a guy who owned a business in Cleveland who said to me one time, I learned the hard way never to recruit anyone from out of town to work for my company unless that person or their spouse is from Cleveland, because otherwise they will never stay. When that’s where you are as a place, that is just rough. I think that is one of the killers for these river cities.

Susan Pendergrass (35:16): Yeah, what’s the fix for that? I don’t know what the fix is.

Aaron Renn (35:38): I think the optimistic case for St. Louis, and I actually tweeted this a year or two ago, is that St. Louis City educational attainment is really high now. In a sense, it’s a small, highly educated city that is probably going to continue growing more educated. So I think the Pittsburgh option looks viable in St. Louis.

Susan Pendergrass (36:00): And certainly great medical care. I know that the average age is getting older in St. Louis. I think within 10 years, one in four people will be over the age of 65. But we also have an Alzheimer’s research center and access to medical care, which as you get older gets more important. I do think there’s an opportunity to lean in to the medical services that are available, as the country as a whole gets older. I think St. Louis looks more attractive for that reason. So I think you’re right that with universities and medical centers, there’s an opportunity.

Aaron Renn (36:35): Yeah, I think if America’s demographics keep on this trend, a lot of other places are going to get to where St. Louis is. And the thing to be careful of is that when you’re in a declining market, that often prompts centralization of activity and population. What happened with Japan is that once Japan’s population started falling, everybody started moving to Tokyo. It’s Tokyo and a handful of other cities where everything is concentrated, and they literally have ghost towns there.

I don’t think it’s any accident that Indianapolis’ growth really took off once the Rust Belt era and deindustrialization hit the state. Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio have grown in large measure through drawing people out of the rest of the state as those states declined. Huge numbers of people move from Cleveland to Columbus every year.

Missouri is a little different than that. One of your challenges is that St. Louis does not draw people from rural Missouri. When I looked at the data, it’s not like there’s a massive flow into St. Louis from the rest of the state. So you don’t have that siphon bringing people in.

Susan Pendergrass (37:55): There are public safety issues around that, but yes.

Aaron Renn (38:00): And the issue we have is that we’ve now eaten our seed corn. There’s not going to be next generations of children in the towns I grew up in in rural Indiana to move to Indianapolis anymore. The cohort sizes are going to be smaller. So that pump, even Tokyo is declining now in population. That siphon is draining the water table. We can only rely on that so long.

But I think this is the risk for St. Louis in that kind of environment. People with opportunity might avoid or flee St. Louis and go to Austin, Texas or Nashville. They go to the handful of places in America that are really still growing. That’s a threat even for Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio. In a declining market, it’s very hard to get people to want to come to a shrinking city because the opportunity space is shrinking. St. Louis’s opportunity space has been shrinking because you’re losing corporate headquarters and your working age population is declining. That dynamic is really going to be a challenge. But within that, the city of St. Louis might end up doing okay. Again, being small actually helps it here.

Susan Pendergrass (39:25): Any closing thoughts on that, David?

David Stokes (39:27): Just that the part of Missouri that is definitely still growing, and that probably is attracting those young rural people who are moving to a city, is going into southwest Missouri, the Springfield-Branson area. That’s absolutely the growing part of the state. And even Kansas City is growing certainly more than St. Louis is.

Aaron Renn (39:48): Yeah, it’s not a culturally cohesive state. Springfield and that area are definitely growing, and growing despite the fact that they have nowhere close to the urban assets of a St. Louis. It’s interesting to watch, and we’ll just have to see what happens.

Susan Pendergrass (40:05): It is. I think about it a lot. I’ve been talking about this in terms of school enrollment for years and years, where you could see the biggest kindergarten cohort was after the Great Recession of 2009. You know that that’s the biggest kindergarten cohort for the last 15, 16, 17 years. We do nothing but build schools and hire teachers. We are slow to catch on to these things happening. But I think your perspective is certainly very interesting. On the question of the merger, it’s not worth the cost for whatever benefits there might be. But it still gets talked about, so I appreciate you coming and giving us your thoughts on it. Maybe we’ll have to have you back to talk about it again.

David Stokes (41:02): And Aaron, I want you to come back. I want to find out how we get more roundabouts in Missouri. I love roundabouts. I go to Carmel it seems like once a year for these gigantic youth sports tournaments up at Westfield, just a little bit north of you. My kids’ sports take me there. And I love the roundabouts. You cannot get enough of them.

Aaron Renn (41:09): I’d love to talk about that. My favorite topic.

Aaron Renn (41:24): Yeah, it’s great. We hardly ever have to stop. There are barely any stoplights or stop signs left in our city. It’s amazing. We’re one of the few growing places in America where traffic is better today than it was 20 years ago.

Susan Pendergrass (41:32): They’re awesome.

David Stokes (41:45): People don’t realize how good that is for air quality and everything. You just keep moving along, not stop and start. We need 100 times more roundabouts in this area.

Susan Pendergrass (41:55): Are you pretending that people stop at stop signs in St. Louis? Because let’s be honest, people don’t stop at stop signs.

David Stokes (42:00): Well, they roll them, but it’s still wrong when they roll them. Maybe all the people blowing red lights on Kings Highway at 50 miles an hour are just being environmentally conscious. I need to give them more of the benefit of the doubt, I guess.

Susan Pendergrass (42:12): That’s exactly right. All right, thanks so much. I really appreciate it.

Aaron Renn (42:19): Thank you.

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The post The St. Louis City-County Merger with Aaron Renn and David Stokes appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

St. Louis Demographics and the Future of the Region with Ness Sandoval

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 13:53:03 +0000

Susan Pendergrass speaks with J.S. Onésimo “Ness” Sandoval, demographer and professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Saint Louis University, about what the data says about the future of the St. Louis region. They discuss record low birth rates and what they mean for school enrollment, why St. Louis is among the top regions in the country for deaths outnumbering births, how the region compares to Pittsburgh and Cleveland, and why suburbs like Chesterfield and St. Charles are aging faster than most people realize. They also discuss the role of housing supply, school choice, crime, and domestic migration in whether St. Louis can attract and retain young families, and more.

https://showmeinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Test-Score-Growth-Is-the-Best-Metric-We-Have-for-Understanding-School-Performance.mp3

Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00): Well, certainly not the first time we’ve spoken, Dr. Sandoval. At St. Louis University, you are such a fascinating demographer of the region, and I’ve been following your work as new census data has been released. You’ve been writing about it and creating what I think are really cool mapping tools that folks can look at to see how the St. Louis region is impacted. Thanks for coming on to talk about that. But first I want to sort of expand our view, because pretty sure that I read within the last week that the number of babies born in the United States was at an all-time low. Is that right?

Ness Sandoval (00:35): Yeah, so every year the United States will probably be breaking records. The data coming out for 2025 is a record low, and the data coming out for 2026 is even lower. The first few months of 2026, the provisional data that’s out shows even fewer. And this is what we expected. We call this a demographic shock, because in 2026, whenever you create an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear, rational people do not have children until they understand that their job is safe, there’s not a recession coming, and we’re not at war. When you create this sense of fear, young people do the rational thing and don’t have children. We saw this in 2020 with COVID. We saw this in 2008 with the Great Recession. Anytime there is uncertainty, young people will postpone births. And that’s what we’re seeing. This started in November. We started to see the decline in births, and it’s continued from November, December, January, February. And so this is what we’re going to see.

Susan Pendergrass (01:51): So next year is going to be lower. And when you look at the state of Missouri, I’ve been saying this ad nauseum for years that our K-12 school enrollment is declining and will decline because of that sort of peak in 2008, just before the Great Recession. So our biggest kindergarten class was around 2012, and our kindergarten classes have by and large declined ever since. And so those kids are moving through the system. You can project that we will just have fewer and fewer kids enrolled in our K-12 system in the state of Missouri.

Ness Sandoval (02:06): No, we peaked in 2008.

Susan Pendergrass (02:11): By and large declined ever since 2012. And so those kids are moving through the system. So you can project that we will just have fewer and fewer kids enrolled in our K-12 system in the state of Missouri.

Ness Sandoval (02:24): Yeah, this is true, and we have a pretty good chart. We make these for every city. We’re replacing very large cohorts of children who were born. I have a son who was born in 2007, just before the recession. That cohort that graduated in St. Louis was 40,000 students. The baby birth cohort is now 27,000 students. So that’s just in that one year a 13,000 decline. And it’s going to decline every year for the next 15 to 18 years, because we don’t know what the bottom is yet. It has not reached the bottom.

Susan Pendergrass (03:01): Right. People say where are the kids going? I’m like, they’re not going anywhere. They weren’t born. The St. Louis region, like Clayton is declining, Ladue was, I mean, all of these school districts, I think almost everyone in the county has fewer kids today than they had 10 years ago.

Ness Sandoval (03:07): They weren’t born. Yes, and it’s not just St. Louis County. St. Charles County is experiencing this. There are some parts that are growing, in the Wentzville area, O’Fallon, but if you look at the old St. Charles areas, they’re experiencing decline. Families with children are declining in those areas. We had made an interactive map that I think shocked a lot of people, of seniors outnumbering youth. People could not comprehend this. Like, my gosh, this is not 2000 where youth were dominating these neighborhoods. I live out here in Chesterfield. The entire Route 64 corridor is senior citizens dominating the youth in Chesterfield. People are shocked. More seniors lived in Chesterfield than youth in 2010, and that’s only grown since. This is happening throughout West County.

Susan Pendergrass (04:14): Wow. And your maps actually go down to the zip code, right? You have very granular data.

Ness Sandoval (04:27): Across into Illinois, yes. The only way you can turn this around is young people from across the United States deciding that they want to make St. Louis their home, have a family there, create a business there. This is what I promote. We have to get younger. We really should have a preferential option for families with children. And that’s a hard message for a lot of people because they’re like, wait a minute, we grew from 1970 to 2020. And I’m like, but all of that growth was driven by babies born. Over 1.8 million babies were born. And I tell people, just do the math. 27,000 babies per year times 50. That’s the back of the envelope for what’s coming over the next 50 years. Unfortunately, that’s not what’s going to come. It’s going to be a lot lower than that. People are starting to get it. We’re not going to have 1.8 million babies born over the next 50 years.

Susan Pendergrass (05:33): Yeah, and I think about things like individual school systems building new elementary schools when there have got to be a lot of buildings that are empty. And also, won’t there be more competition for public resources between children and older people?

Ness Sandoval (05:49): Yeah. At my previous job at Northwestern, we did a project on this in one of the suburbs because we were studying seniors. There was a debate about how to spend public money. Was it for transit for seniors or transit for children? This was 2006, and this was the debate happening in Chicago. How do you provide paratransit for senior citizens when that number is increasing? We’re just having this discussion because St. Louis is leading. We’re in the top three of regions. Pittsburgh leads the country, Cleveland is second, and St. Louis is third, tied with Tampa. More people dying than babies born. We simply don’t have the number of babies born for the size of our population. And it’s because we’re a very old region. We’re the ninth oldest region in the country.

Susan Pendergrass (06:58): Yeah, I mean, we used to have 800,000 people in the city of St. Louis, right? And now we’re 280,000 or something.

Ness Sandoval (07:05): Yeah, and I was just looking at the numbers. It is very possible within two years that Kansas City will have more babies born in absolute numbers than the St. Louis metro region. That’s how few babies. I’m talking about the region. Indianapolis is about 700 babies behind St. Louis. Nashville is about 800 babies behind. All of these smaller regions are having lots of babies, and young people are moving there. Your future depends on the number of children born. And when you look at population projections, I kind of know what this looks like. When you fall below Kansas City in number of births, at some point Kansas City will be larger than St. Louis. We can project this out. We’re talking absolute births, not birth rates. We had lots of babies born 10 years ago. We were fine 10 years ago.

Susan Pendergrass (08:09): Yeah, wow.

Ness Sandoval (08:29): We can go back and talk about what happened since 2010.

Susan Pendergrass (08:35): Yeah, please. I’m curious what did happen. I know you call it the death spiral when there’s more deaths than births, but how did we get into this?

Ness Sandoval (08:41): So I moved here for the Great Recession. I moved in 2008 to start my job at SLU. And there was hope when I got here. There was some positive momentum happening. I think the region took it for granted that it didn’t have to do anything. We just have to be St. Louis. We don’t have to do anything. Unfortunately, Nashville came on the scene. Then you started to see regions change. Regions thinking we need to get young. And St. Louis absolutely did nothing. Since I’ve lived here, there’s been a lot of resistance to economic development in the region. Nashville, I think it was the popularity of being young, being pro-development. I went to Nashville to actually look at it, like why are young people there? And I went to Vanderbilt. And I saw this really interesting integration between the city and Vanderbilt University. That does not exist here in St. Louis. Making it a vibrant, cohesive, urban experience.

Susan Pendergrass (09:47): Yeah. Right. Now you step off campus at SLU and you’re in an area you don’t want to walk at night.

Ness Sandoval (10:00): Yeah, and even if it was WashU, right. And then you can talk about the Loop. It never recovered from COVID, traffic is down. I think the region has really struggled to attract young people to stay here and live here.

Susan Pendergrass (10:13): Well, we’ve been looking into the issue of crime in St. Louis quite a bit, and I know it’s down and everyone’s celebrating that fact, but I’m not sure when you survey people and ask how they feel walking alone at night, that it’s changed all that much. Even if the number of murders are down, I don’t know that people feel safer walking alone at night, and that’s got to have an impact on whether you want to stay in St. Louis after you have kids.

Ness Sandoval (10:47): Yeah. I think in the city you move out to the suburbs. The challenge is they work and you live for affordability. So many suburbs are against new development, even though they can develop. We see these debates in Chesterfield, that debate in Creve Coeur, several debates out in St. Charles. They don’t even talk about Jefferson County, because they’re celebrating voting down housing. My point is if you don’t want to build housing, Indianapolis is going to build it. Columbus is going to build it. Nashville is building it. We are no longer in the top 50 in new housing permits in the country. We’re 58th.

Susan Pendergrass (11:34): Why though? Is it because there’s not demand, or is supply being constrained?

Ness Sandoval (11:42): Supply is being constrained. Part of it is, when I speak to people, they say it’s going to hurt my home values. People want supply down. But you understand there’s a consequence to this. And home values are always good in St. Louis. But again, we always say there’s a city that we can look to that’s our future, and that’s Pittsburgh. If you really study Pittsburgh and look at it, you’re like, wow, there’s a lot of things we can learn as a city, and say this is not what we want to be. Pittsburgh leads the country in discounted rates on home sales. When people offer their price, most people do not get the price that they want. It’s a significant discount because the demand’s not there. We are about 20 years behind Pittsburgh.

Susan Pendergrass (12:25): Wow. I think a lot, in what I do, about the educational offerings in the region. Before we were recording we were talking about Texas. Texas, number one, doesn’t have an income tax, and also you can pick your child’s school from the get-go. They have hundreds, if not thousands of charter schools. And now they have a private school choice program that I think 250,000 families apply to. And Missouri has an extremely limited private school choice program, maybe 6,000 or 7,000 kids in the state, and not even the ability within St. Louis County to go outside of these tiny little districts. You can’t even go from Clayton to Brentwood. People really feel strongly about this and fight the idea of opening up the county and letting kids go within the county to any school district, and then the legislature fights it every year. And I’m like, we are just becoming less and less competitive.

Ness Sandoval (13:36): I don’t think people understand. I do a lot of work with schools now. We’re going to lose at a minimum 100,000 children under 15 by 2045. This loss is built into the system based on 27,000 births right now. The numbers are starting to show up in kindergarten. We have a smaller kindergarten class, a smaller first grade class coming in. And so a lot of schools are like, wait a minute, what’s going on? This is just starting. You have another 20 years, because we have these large cohorts that were still born after the Great Recession that are going to be replaced by smaller cohorts coming in. And there is no significant migration of children coming into the region.

Susan Pendergrass (14:28): So there are going to be difficult staffing decisions, and people don’t want to hear it. Like, we cannot continue to hire more teachers.

Ness Sandoval (14:32): You have to close schools. You have to close schools, have to merge schools. I’m doing some work in Parkway. People should not be surprised. Parkway is having meetings this month about what Parkway looks like going forward, and people are discussing consolidation. Rockwood is talking about a 15% decline in 10 years. Go out another 10 years, Rockwood will be talking about school consolidation. St. Charles will be talking about school consolidation in the old St. Charles area, the city of St. Charles. This is coming. Everybody focuses on the city and says the city needs to close schools. But you will see a discussion, I think, between Clayton and Brentwood.

Susan Pendergrass (15:06): For sure. Clayton had 2,500 kids. Now they’ve got closer to 2,000. I mean, that’s teachers, that’s buildings. And I know in Indianapolis, I’ve talked to a superintendent in that area. All parents can pick a public school. And he was like, I had some under-enrolled elementary schools and it was great for me because I put a language immersion program in one to bring parents in. I think the resistance to this idea is all about not wanting kids who aren’t paying property taxes, but I think it’s going to flip. Then you’ll be like, we’ve got to fill these seats. We’re paying the same teacher for 18 seats that we could pay for 22 kids. At some point they’re going to have to start laying off teachers. So I think there are some very difficult decisions ahead that you can see now, and there are things that could be done now, like at least not filling open positions.

Ness Sandoval (16:16): I think universities are seeing this, because many of them are relying on tuition and those dollars are not coming in. A smart university has to make cuts because it doesn’t get any better next year or the following year. There will be fewer students coming in. So universities that want to survive are making necessary cuts to survive.

Ness Sandoval (16:45): Again, we don’t know what the bottom of the birth decline looks like. We just happen to live in a state and a region that has seen a significant decline in children. I keep saying we’re modeling the future for people, either as a good or bad thing. They’re like, we want to be like St. Louis, or we don’t want to do what they did.

Ness Sandoval (17:13): I think a lot of people are starting to understand this. It’s like, we’re letting our children go, and we’re not doing a very good job of trying to keep them here. When you had 1.8 million births, you had enough to let children leave your region, leave the state. You don’t have that luxury anymore. Our models show the region should have anywhere between 1.3 million to a million births coming in over the next 50 years. We hope it’s not a million births, because that means you have an 800,000 decline in your population under 50. Or it’s 1.3 million births, which is only a 500,000 decline. But that’s coming.

Susan Pendergrass (17:43): How does immigration factor into it? Because I remember the last time we talked, you said that St. Louis is not very immigration friendly. And of course, the current national environment is not very immigration friendly.

Ness Sandoval (18:03): Missouri and St. Louis cannot rely on immigration to save it. It’s not a state that immigrants are going to come to in large numbers. They’re going to go to Florida. Miami leads the country. Even though domestic migration has people leaving, international migrants are going there as their top destination. They’re going to Philadelphia, they’re going to New York. We get immigrants who come here, but it’s a very small number, like 6,000 a year. We’re not even in the top tier as a top 25 metropolitan region. And Missouri is not either. So Missouri has to rely on domestic migration.

The data will show that probably for the decade, there will be more people dying than babies born in Missouri. Missouri will start to have from a natural perspective more people dying than babies born. And 91 counties across the whole state will have more people dying than babies born. So Missouri will become dependent for growth on domestic migration.

Susan Pendergrass (19:29): Or do we just accept that we’re not going to grow anymore? What’s the impact of that?

Ness Sandoval (19:33): Again, it’s going to be specific. I do think the Springfield area is going to grow, the Branson area, there’s growth. Part of this is retirement, I think. Kansas City is growing.

Susan Pendergrass (19:42): Why Kansas City more than St. Louis? What’s attracting younger people to Kansas City that is not happening here?

Ness Sandoval (19:49): Kansas City is a younger region. St. Louis is a fairly old region. Kansas City is a lot younger and it has a large Latino population, and that’s the largest growing population in the country, birth-rate wise. Latinos are now the second largest population in Kansas City. They surpassed the Black population, which I think even shocked me, because we thought we knew this was coming, but we thought this was going to be post-2030. The fact that it already happened shows just how many Latinos are moving there. And then you have an exodus of Black residents leaving Kansas City as well as St. Louis. I always tell people, when you have young Black families leave or young Black adults leave, those children ultimately leave too. And so that’s part of the story.

Ness Sandoval (20:48): When young people leave, the children that traditionally were born to those young people are now being born in Charlotte, Atlanta, Houston. The number one challenge for St. Louis and the state is the decline in births. If that doesn’t change, then you’re going to see that decline start to show up in five to ten years in our schools.

Ness Sandoval (21:17): And the private schools will simply go out of business because that’s dictated by the private market. Or they’ll do what many of the Catholic schools are doing. They think, we’re going to have middle school now, or we’re going to be K through 12. But then what about the parochial schools? There’s no growth. They’re just taking children out of other schools and putting them in their school system.

Ness Sandoval (21:45): And so again, I go back to Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is about how do we manage population decline? The city is growing a little bit, but 100% of the growth in terms of the losses is in the suburbs. And that’s going to happen in St. Louis. When this loss starts to show up in the demographic accounting, most of the loss is going to be outside of the city of St. Louis. It’s going to be in the Chesterfield areas. It’s going to be in St. Charles.

Susan Pendergrass (22:18): So what could be done from a policy perspective? Chesterfield is trying to have this arts and entertainment district. They put in Topgolf and the concert venues. They’re trying to attract younger people there. Is it working?

Ness Sandoval (22:34): It’s not working. I mean, they have the same slight increase. I just posted this yesterday. People are shocked. The growth is in non-family households in Chesterfield. If you look at the new development, I call it downtown West Chesterfield. These are million-dollar homes, very expensive. Very few families with kids are there. These are empty nesters or dual-income, no-kids households. It’s very expensive for young families to get into Chesterfield today, when your entry-level home that was $170,000 in 1980 is $600,000 today. These are the challenges.

Susan Pendergrass (23:23): So build more starter homes?

Ness Sandoval (23:32): You need more entry-level homes. I’m not even going to use the word affordable. You need attainable homes for two incomes. And they can be built. But what I’ve heard is that a lot of cities do not want these homes. They want the $600,000 to $700,000 homes because of taxes. And so there is this tension there.

Ness Sandoval (23:56): Parkway and Rockwood are going to look very different in 30 years. They were very attractive amenities for young families with children. But I look at the data, and my kids are in Parkway. These schools are under-enrolled. You go and objectively look at the classrooms, you’re like, there should be 30 kids in these rooms and there’s 15. It’s great for me as a parent. I’m glad there’s only 15 kids for my fourth grader. One of the classes in Parkway Central, in the middle school, in his math class, there are eight students. I love it as a parent, but as someone who looks at the data, this is not sustainable.

Susan Pendergrass (24:45): Yeah, lots of one-on-one. Yeah. I’m just trying to figure out what would cause a renaissance in St. Louis. It doesn’t feel super safe. It has some great amenities and a great food scene and now MLS soccer. What would it take? Well, number one, you do have the school system problem where the St. Louis public school system is kind of a dumpster fire. So people want to move out if they have small children.

Ness Sandoval (25:32): Yeah, the decision to move out is made within the first three years once the baby’s born. We can see that in the data. When we moved from Chicago, because we lived in the city of Chicago, we wanted to live in the city of St. Louis. I think most people who move from Philadelphia or Boston are living in the city. We thought the city of St. Louis would be offering the same amenities. Because of the Great Recession, I came a year before my family, and we soon realized the city of St. Louis was not the city of Chicago in terms of amenities. And so we ended up in St. Charles. And I think most people make that same decision.

Susan Pendergrass (26:25): Yeah, my husband and I moved right into the city.

Ness Sandoval (26:27): We see it in the data. People are moving into the city from Philadelphia, from Boston, from Houston. But then, like me, if you have children and you’re not going to pay for private school, because that’s a tax in many ways, they’re going to exit out. And then with the Catholic schools closing in the city, there are going to be fewer options.

Susan Pendergrass (26:50): Yeah. But the public transportation is no good. I mean, there are things.

Ness Sandoval (26:57): And it’s interesting. We did see a kind of experiment during COVID. When COVID happened, the Catholic schools in the county opened up. A lot of families wanted their children in face-to-face instruction. So they left the city. They did not stay. So we had kind of a quasi-experimental design there. Education was very important.

Ness Sandoval (27:26): A lot of people left the city because of that and never came back. And that started before COVID. But I think this idea of school choice is something where parents want it. We have enough anecdotal evidence. When Normandy closed, the school system closed, families moved to Normandy to get their kids into Francis Howell. There’s enough evidence to show that families want to make these decisions. The question would be, would Parkway accept all of the students that would want to be in Parkway?

Susan Pendergrass (27:56): Yeah, the law would have to say that they would have to. You couldn’t let them pick and choose.

Ness Sandoval (28:15): Yeah. And so the question is, you have a lot of people who would love to be in Parkway. I gave a talk at Marquette and I was shocked because a good percentage of the students there were saying those public school students, but the parents had left to get out to West County for their children. So the question is, do you just let the private market dictate this? Those who can leave the city will ultimately leave the city and get out to West County.

Susan Pendergrass (28:50): There’s movement out. And I think in terms of domestic migration, to get parents to move in, you can go to our northern border, Iowa. The state pays for private school tuition. Oklahoma to the south, the state pays for private school tuition. Kansas, you can go to any public school in the state. It’s 100% open enrollment. Arkansas is one of the strongest for school choice, both public and private. I think we’re going to be surrounded by it and just have our arms folded across our chest. Because Parkway doesn’t want all those kids coming, or Rockwood doesn’t want all those kids coming. Parents are simply going to move across the border to a state where they can pick any public or private school. I’ve talked to some parents who have reached out to say, I’m thinking about moving to the region, is it true I can’t pick a school? And I’m like, it is true. You cannot pick a school. And I think they’re like, forget it. I’m not going to make this big decision on where to buy a house. I think if we don’t do things that are family friendly, and if we don’t get crime under control in some way, or have a 911 system where when you call somebody responds, I think it’s interesting that St. Louis will become this example for the nation of what a dying city looks like.

Ness Sandoval (30:08): We have three examples today: Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and St. Louis. Tampa is kind of unique because it is a destination for retirees. The Wall Street Journal has an article today on Cleveland, the renaissance of downtown Cleveland. And Detroit too, it’s a renaissance.

Susan Pendergrass (30:29): Wow. What about Detroit now? So St. Louis hasn’t figured out our renaissance yet.

Ness Sandoval (30:49): And to be honest with you, I think it will be hard. I’m not pro anything, but I find this whole debate about the city and county interesting. I’m not from here, so I don’t have this history of growing up here. But I think objectively, when I look at the budget of the city of St. Louis and compare it to Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh is a little bit bigger. It’s got 25,000 more people. But their budget is significantly smaller than St. Louis City’s budget. Part of me wonders, because the city is both a city and a county, it doesn’t have enough people or revenue to operate as both. And this is what’s helping Pittsburgh out. This is what’s helping Cleveland out, because that county revenue is spread among more taxpayers. In St. Louis City, the county functions are spread among a dwindling number of taxpayers. The city probably cannot be a county anymore. There’s just too few taxpayers to provide both city services and county services.

Ness Sandoval (32:08): I looked at these budgets and I’m like, my gosh, why is St. Louis’s budget so much more? I’m talking not a little bit more, a lot more than Pittsburgh’s budget. Pittsburgh is having trouble. And I don’t see the long-term fiscal situation turning around for the city because it’s got to provide all of these services. The tax base is going to decline. The next three years are probably going to see population loss in the city. The numbers just came out in March, but we’ll get the numbers in May. It’ll probably lead the country again in population decline for large cities.

Susan Pendergrass (32:58): Are we still a top 20 city? We’re number one in population decline, but what about in population size?

Ness Sandoval (33:01): We’re number one in decline. Last year, St. Louis City was number one. We’re declining. We’re not in the top 20 yet, but we’re very close. If we go back to 2020, we’re smaller than we were in 2020. The only reason we’re not number one in decline is because we had so many immigrants that offset our domestic migration loss. But this will be an interesting 2030 census, because it’ll be the first time the region will go into a census with more people dying than babies born. In the last census, we had about 75,000 natural growth. We’re looking at about 25,000 to 30,000 natural decline going into this census without any domestic migration. I tell people that this story is just starting. We have 74 years of the century left.

Ness Sandoval (34:18): I’m just trying to get people to move from the mindset that this is 2010 St. Louis. You don’t have 36,000 births anymore. You have 27,000 and it’s declining, one of the fastest declines in the country. Because of it, we’re aging very fast, and so we have to shift. The region has to make a choice that we start to organize our economy around senior citizens. There’s lots of money to be made from senior citizens, but we will never be viewed as Nashville or Austin as a place for young people.

Susan Pendergrass (34:52): Absolutely. That Route 64 corridor is just going to be all retirement homes.

Ness Sandoval (35:04): We won’t be talking about single family homes anymore. We’ll be talking about senior housing. We’ll be talking about a workforce that’s going to work with seniors instead of a workforce for children. And there is money to be made in that economy. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing. But again, we can look at other parts of the country where this transition has happened. Local government spending is being consumed by senior citizens, the healthcare of senior citizens, the paratransit of seniors. Seniors will lose their ability to drive. That cost typically gets covered by local governments. And so you will not be providing buses for children. You’ll be providing paratransit to get seniors to their doctors. Churches will have to think about being accessible to seniors. I go to Church of the Ascension and they are not prepared. At Easter, one of the Masses, one-third of this section was senior citizens in wheelchairs. The churches are simply not prepared for a parish that’s going to be 50% of the population at 70 years old and older. Restaurants have to think about this.

Susan Pendergrass (36:30): Wow, that’s crazy. Well, interesting stuff. I hope you’ll come back and talk about this more. And certainly I’m very interested in reading everything that you write about what St. Louis can do. We need to figure out a renaissance.

Ness Sandoval (36:51): We’ve got to get younger. The kids are giving us a try. They’re coming to school, they’re coming here because they have hopes. We just have not responded the way we need to. A lot of companies are starting to recognize this. I talked to the mayor and said, you need to be a more proactive voice on this. But the region, this is not a city of St. Louis issue. This is a St. Charles issue, a Jefferson County issue, a Chesterfield issue. Most of the people live outside of St. Louis city. The loss we’re projecting is going to come from the suburbs. And that’s what’s happening in Pittsburgh, that’s what’s happening in Cleveland. 100% of the demographic loss is in the suburbs.

Susan Pendergrass (37:21): Yeah. Wow, that’s crazy. Well, fascinating. Thank you so much for explaining it. I don’t want to be depressed about it, but it’s not super optimistic. We’ll find a silver lining. Thanks, Dr. Sandoval.

Ness Sandoval (37:59): All right, thank you very much.

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The post St. Louis Demographics and the Future of the Region with Ness Sandoval appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Test-Score Growth Is the Best Metric We Have for Understanding School Performance

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 20:08:43 +0000

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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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More Evidence on Grade Inflation in Our Schools

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 22:10:52 +0000

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QNS, a local news outlet covering Queens, New York, released an interesting article about a local high school under investigation by New York City Public Schools. Teachers at the school claim they are forced to pass failing students. Such blatant grade-inflation policies are uncommon, but I suspect softer versions of the policy are rampant in our public schools nationwide, including here in Missouri.

The quotes in the article speak for themselves, so I’ll just copy and paste them here without commentary:

“Students regularly fail tests and other assignments, teachers [said], but still receive passing grades.”

“‘Students have mentioned that it’s not fair that they’re trying and then they see classmates show up half the time and have nearly an equivalent grade,’ the teacher said. ‘They get frustrated, which will then demotivate them from doing work because they think it’s an unfair policy.’”

“Last year’s mastery grading policy stated . . . that any grades a student receives that are not 100 would not be included in their [final] grade.”

“While teachers maintain the ability to draft their own syllabi, they said that many teachers have been forced to adjust their expectations over time due to the current school administration. ‘I was guided in trying to avoid failing students,’ [one] teacher said.”

“The teacher . . . said that if they did not reach a certain percentage of students passing the class—80%—they would be called into a meeting with the administration to discuss how they could improve the grades of students.”

“One teacher said out of around 100 students, they haven’t seen over 20 of them all school year. If they must pass 80% of the students, that means anyone who shows up to class must pass in order to achieve that goal, regardless of whether the students do any work.”

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I know I just copied and pasted this whole assignment. It seems lazy, but in my defense, this is A-level effort in many of our schools.

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The Six Words Driving the Education Debate in 2026 With Mike McShane

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 15:12:34 +0000

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Mike McShane, director of national research at EdChoice and contributor to the Informed Choice Substack, to discuss his piece, “The Six Words Driving the Education Debate in 2026.” They explore why the school choice conversation has shifted from whether it should exist to what it should look like, how debates over “transparency” and “accountability” are shaping political strategy, and why participation in choice programs changes over time. They also discuss the influence of “rage bait” on public perception, the emerging risks of AI-generated “slop” in schools, and how the “supply side” of education, from micro schools to new learning providers, may determine whether expanded choice truly meets families’ needs, and more.

Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00)
Great. Mike McShane, EdChoice, always great to have you on the podcast. I read your Substack, Informed Choice. I know you do not write them all, but you write a lot of them, and I think they are super interesting. A month or so ago, there was a lot of “what’s out, what’s in,” closing down 2025 and starting 2026. I really liked your post about six words for 2026, but…

Mike McShane (00:03)
Always great to be with you. Thanks for having me. I tried to.

Susan Pendergrass (00:28)
I want to talk about that, but generally speaking, I have been having this feeling, and I think we have even talked about this on the podcast, that something has changed in K–12 education in the United States. Something seems different than it did. You track the number of kids in private school choice programs, which took forever to get to a million, and now it is like a million and a half, right? It just seems to have been growing so fast.

Mike McShane (00:52)
Yeah. I think there has definitely been a shift. I have noticed that, with the start of the year and legislative sessions starting across the country, I am talking to journalists and other folks, and it seems like the normal conversation I would have had in the past was, “Are we going to have these programs, is there going to be choice, or what?” Now it is, “What is the shape of it going to be?”

So much of choice now is being taken as a given. I think we are even seeing that within public school districts. Even in states that might not have private school choice or robust charter schools, they are at least saying, “Parents are going to need to have choice, and maybe we can keep the genie in the bottle by just having it within public school districts, or in between public school districts.” But the idea that we are going to go back to residentially assigned public schools…

Susan Pendergrass (01:41)
Like Kansas.

Mike McShane (01:50)
…with the odd aberration here and there, it just seems like that shift has happened. Now it is a question of what it is going to look like, and it is going to look different in different states. It is not a “whether,” it is a “how.”

Susan Pendergrass (02:03)
That’s right, because we have a whole bunch of second-generation choosers, right? We have parents of young kids whose parents chose it, so they are not, like you said, going to go backwards.

Another interesting outcome you have talked about over the years is that the Catholic school movement is growing again, right? Like in Florida, we are seeing a resurgence in Catholic schools, and in Iowa, because parents did not necessarily not want to send their kids to Catholic schools. Some got mad about the scandals…

Mike McShane (02:05)
Yeah, for sure. Iowa, Florida, and probably other places when data comes out, for sure.

Susan Pendergrass (02:32)
…or they did not want to pay tuition, and now they can. And certainly this survey you all have done for so long, on where parents would send their kids to school versus where they do send their kids to school, maybe we are going to see some sort of convergence where parents can actually send their kids to the school they want.

A couple of the words you said are going to be big in education in 2026, “participants,” is that right? Participants.

Mike McShane (02:34)
Yeah. Totally, absolutely. “Participants” is one of them.

Susan Pendergrass (03:02)
And “supply side.” What do you mean by “participants”?

Mike McShane (03:06)
“Participants” is, there is this big debate now, and in the piece I started with very general words that are part of the broader conversation, and then I got very narrow into school choice research words. “Participants” is kind of a school choice research word, but not entirely. I think it is going to be part of broader debates about choice in general.

There is a big question out there, who uses these programs? Who is going to participate? There are competing theories. Skeptics say it is going to be all rich kids, or kids who are already in private schools. Stronger advocates say it will be low-income kids, or kids desperate for more options.

The answer is probably somewhere in the middle, and it will probably be different in different places at different times. Some of the emerging research suggests that when universal private school choice programs first start, for reasons that are perfectly predictable, students who are already in private schools are the first movers.

Susan Pendergrass (04:01)
Sure.

Mike McShane (04:28)
That is probably because private schools find out about these programs and have an audience. They can say, “Hey, you all know how you are paying to go here? Now you do not have to do that anymore.” And then over time, the circle expands outward.

Susan Pendergrass (04:33)
They pass out a piece of paper in every backpack, yeah. “You should get this.”

Mike McShane (04:48)
More and more, those families have neighbors, cousins, and people they play YMCA basketball with. The word gets out over time. A lot of traditional channels for educating people do not work as well. It is not like everyone watches the nightly news or reads the local newspaper.

Susan Pendergrass (05:08)
“Put it on your website.” That’s a Missouri legislative mainstay, put it on your website.

Mike McShane (05:14)
So a lot of this comes out via word of mouth or discussions. You could look at the same state and see participation change over time.

Because these programs are rolling out in different states at different times, there is not going to be one national answer to who is participating. It could be the first year in Mississippi, but the second year in Alabama, and the makeup of students will be different. Because of the nationalized nature of coverage, people will keep pushing for “the one answer,” but there isn’t one. Though, to be fair, some people will say there is. I do not think that will be true.

Susan Pendergrass (06:07)
Yeah, I get a ton of questions around the rural issue. Either it is going to be the demise of our rural school system because we are all going to close, or rural families do not need it, which are opposites. It is opposites, right?

Mike McShane (06:09)
Yeah. It cannot be both. And yet a frequent criticism is that it will be both of them.

Susan Pendergrass (06:25)
But I get that a lot. “There are no private schools for them to go to,” and “it is going to cause rural schools to close.”

Certainly in Missouri, even our MOScholars program is quite small, and we do not really have charter schools outside of two districts, two very far away places. So I think for a lot of folks in Missouri, it is mysterious, who would do this, and why would anyone want it? And of course, “All the poor kids are going to go to the wealthy school districts.” Still a lot of talk about property taxes. It is almost like 2005 in Missouri, a lot of that going on.

But the reality is, in long-running programs, and now I am thinking open enrollment, anywhere you let parents pick, you get a lot of rural participation. They have the fewest choices, right? And you get a lot of urban participation, and some suburban participation. Like you said, I do not think you can…

Mike McShane (06:55)
Yeah, right.

Susan Pendergrass (07:20)
I have had so many parents over the years say, “We do not need that here because all our schools are good.” And I am like, I promise you there is a child who got on the bus with a stomach ache this morning because they did not want to go to school, for whatever reason. They think the teachers do not like them, or they are being bullied, whatever it is. I promise you there are families who would leave if they could easily do it.

Mike McShane (07:30)
Yeah, for sure. Totally.

One thing that is going to be interesting, as we watch this play out, with questions about who is participating and who is leaving public schools, is that there are broader trends of public school enrollment decreasing. You hear in some states, “My gosh, all these public schools are closing because of choice programs.” But the state next door that does not have a choice program, their public schools are closing too, because there are just fewer kids than there were before.

So that is another thing we have to disentangle, the broader population trends. I was just seeing something earlier about how congressional seats and electoral college seats are going to change because of population shifts.

Susan Pendergrass (08:17)
It’s huge.

Mike McShane (08:26)
You look at states like New York and California losing large numbers of people, Florida and Texas increasing numbers of people. These are people in general, because that is how it all happens. We have to start with that baseline and then layer these other things on top, because I feel like school choice is going to get blamed for this, even in places where it does not exist.

Susan Pendergrass (08:36)
Yeah. I cannot tell you how many times I have talked about this and shocked people. Every school district in St. Louis County, for example, has declining enrollment by large numbers. Clayton’s declining enrollment, Ladue declining enrollment, all declining enrollment. People are like, “Where are they going?” And I say, “They were not born.” They simply were not born.

We had our biggest kindergarten cohort in 2013. That moved through to senior year of high school like two years ago. It is just demographics. They just were not born.

Mike McShane (09:00)
Right? Yeah.

Susan Pendergrass (09:20)
We have net out-migration of some groups of people, people with bachelor’s degrees, but for sure, it is demographics. These kids were not born.

There is going to be this push and pull between five-to-seventeen-year-olds and retirees, basically, because we are getting more old people and fewer young people. Do we build a school or a nursing home? I think it is going to be a thing.

And we still have school districts getting bonds, 30-year bonds, to build schools and buy buses. I do not know if that is the right answer. At least the charter school sector, and probably similarly the private school sector, figured out how to not be in the real estate business, how to lease a building, or do different types of arrangements. They are going to benefit from this, while the public school system is still building schools. The kids are not being born, but we will see how that plays out.

Another thing you mentioned, one of your words I have been thinking about a lot, two of them, is “transparency.” I have wondered, can I start calling accountability transparency? Because accountability is kind of negative, but transparency, of course.

And you talk about “rage bait.” Sorry, I am rolling these into one, but with early media stories around some of these private school choice programs, like Arizona, people really jumped on what parents were spending their money on. As though they cannot be trusted to spend this money, in the way the public school system can be trusted with billions, I mean trillions, of dollars. Parents cannot be trusted with this $8,000, they will simply…

Mike McShane (10:52)
Totally. This is the irony. The irony is kind of like the discussion earlier, how there are no places in rural America, and everyone will leave rural schools to go to these non-existent places. Both cannot be true at the same time.

We cannot say these programs are not transparent and then talk about all the individual purchases families are making. That has to be transparent for you to be able to make those arguments. It is kind of a shell game people are playing when they talk about transparency.

When you say, “Here are ways in which ESA programs are not transparent,” your research is a perfect example of the opposite. Transaction-level data, you have published papers that offer transaction-level data on every purchase in the ESA program.

Susan Pendergrass (11:59)
Trust me, there are hundreds of thousands of records.

Mike McShane (12:00)
Right, hundreds of thousands of records that are available for anybody to look at.

I think this is actually good. We need to have discussions about what should be included in these programs and what should not. It is an education savings account, not just a savings account, so we have to draw the borders around what is an educational purchase and what is not.

We live in a big, vibrant democracy, so we need to have these discussions. Should you be able to buy a trampoline, or a Lego set, or whatever? Let’s talk about it. That’s fine. Maybe we decide in some cases it is allowed, and in some cases it is not.

This is part of transparency and accountability. You are democratically accountable, we need to participate in this.

But I am still blown away by the number of people who claim these programs are not transparent, when what we know about what parents are doing is more granular and more detailed than any public school district, any charter school network, almost any institution you are going to see. You just do not get transaction-level data on anything.

We can debate whether those are good purchases or not good purchases, but to say they are not being transparent is wild to me.

Susan Pendergrass (13:09)
No, I mean, my kids all went to public school. They certainly went to amusement parks. They certainly watched a lot of movies. They would not want anyone scrutinizing every, you know, you have 30 teachers buying 30 whiteboards. Decisions were made that were not the best.

I did not see anything in the transaction-level data that made me think, “This is outrageous.” And who am I to say woodworking is not an okay thing for your child to learn? Swimming lessons, I had to swim. I do not know.

I do not want to get into that conversation because I assume the best intentions for parents. I cannot understand why a parent would invest the time and effort to get into these programs to simply buy themselves a trampoline, and not really care if their kids are reading or not. I do not understand that, but that is what…

Mike McShane (14:04)
Right.

Susan Pendergrass (14:15)
…they are throwing mud at the wall to try to discredit. Clearly, it is what parents want.

I am baffled that, when you look at politics in the United States right now, those on the left just refuse to accept this fact. It is a fact. Parents want to choose their school.

There are certainly Democrats for education reform, and plenty of people working hard from the left, but the general approach feels very last century. The teachers’ union saying, “Nobody wants this, we have to stop it at all costs. We have to put a halt to this and put more money into the public school your address sends you to. We need to fund those fully first before we can ever let kids out.” That is such a failed argument to me.

Mike McShane (15:18)
Look, this is why “accountability” and “transparency” are two of the words for 2026. Opponents to choice have figured out they cannot just go out hammer-and-tongs against it, or directly say, “We are against choice.” People do not learn lessons in politics, but they learn that one.

I was looking at the gubernatorial candidate just to Missouri’s north in Iowa. It was interesting. There was an interview with the Democratic candidate for governor, Rob Sand. He would not come out and condemn the ESA program outright. The interviewer perceptively drilled down and asked, “Are you saying you are not opposed to this program, you just want changes?” He never said yes to that. He has never said, “I am for this program.” If you read between the lines, he is saying, “I am not for this program, but I cannot come out and say it.”

His pivot was immediately, “I am just talking about accountability and transparency.” He wants private schools to follow every single one of the same rules that public schools do, and expects them to somehow do better.

Part of it is, these are folks working in red states who need to make arguments that appeal to conservatives. Accountability appeals to conservatives. Fiscal responsibility appeals to conservatives, not wanting to waste tax dollars. So it is smart strategy. People need to see what it is.

If this is a blue state, these exact same people are making arguments that appeal to progressives. But you are in a red state, so they are trying to make arguments that appeal to you. If you think about it for a little bit longer, what they are saying does not hold a lot of water.

Susan Pendergrass (17:41)
Yeah, and with this federal tax credit program, even though every state has to decide whether or not they are going to take the money, it is going to be a weird shifting of resources. If I live in a state that says, “We are not going to take the money,” that is fine. I can give my $1,700 to a scholarship group in any state. I will just send my $1,700 to another state.

Some states, like Virginia, the governor, one of the last things he did when he left was opt in. Now the new governor is going to have to make this weird choice. Do I want to go against it? If you looked at any poll of parents, any poll, you would know they want to be able to choose where their kids go to school. Do you really want to be the person that withdraws?

Mike McShane (18:21)
Yeah, when she seems to be in a perfect position to just say, “Oh, the last guy did this on the way out, so I guess we are going to do it.” Once they do it for a year and everybody is fine with it, it is just, “Oh well, whatever.”

Susan Pendergrass (18:33)
I do not know. I did not do it.

I think it is going to be really interesting because, again, the way we started this, there is a groundswell. I do not think you are going to turn it back. If you stay on the side of saying it is better when kids can only go to their assigned public school, you are in quicksand. You are going to bury yourself.

Mike McShane (19:03)
Yeah. The only thing I would say, and it was another one of my six words, is “rage bait.” It is always lingering in the background for me. I am seeing it more and more, all day, every day, stuff that shows up in your feed deliberately to upset you, terrify you, whatever.

Rage bait is unpredictable. You never know what is going to catch fire and cause a big shift. There is obviously potential for rage bait content, as we mentioned, we have crossed one and a half million, hundreds of thousands of people in various states, with lots of flexibility in what they can buy. People making bad decisions, people stealing things, it is totally possible that happens. Something egregious could happen.

With a large enough population, even very improbable events can happen. One fear I do have is that something rage-bait-y happens and people lose their minds over it.

But this is the key, if one parent in Arizona does something crazy, that does not mean the other 1,499,999 parents around the country should not have the right or opportunity to do this. We have to be able to say, “This is rage bait, this is not actually what is happening.”

Susan Pendergrass (20:51)
Yeah, we have talked about this. Those of us who have pressed for school choice for so long have said, “We will do anything you want, take our arm. We will put all our data out there, we will be as transparent as possible.” And your colleague, Marty Lueken, had a Substack about this recently, like, “We will take half the money. We do not need all the money, half the money will be…”

Mike McShane (21:08)
For sure.

Susan Pendergrass (21:19)
…150 percent transparent. We will jump through all these hoops just to get this thing that everybody wants, and it is from that transparency that we are going to get those stories. We are going to pay for that.

Mike McShane (21:29)
Yeah. It is important for people to be more attuned to the rage bait they are getting. People ask, “Have you seen this thing that happened in this place?” And I am like, okay, yeah, even if it did, what do you extrapolate?

A teacher in Sacramento did something crazy. There are north of a hundred thousand schools across America. There are north of three million public school teachers. At any given moment, someone is doing something dumb. I do not know what to extrapolate from that. It could just be one crazy person.

This is not just education. Across public policy, you point to one person in the military doing something terrible to delegitimize the military in general. Do not fall for this.

To be fair, sometimes we in the school choice movement, or education reform, have done rage bait of our own. People have used social media to point out, “My gosh, look at this assignment that a second-grade teacher in Poughkeepsie did, this is why we need school choice.” People have done that.

The measure with which you measure will be measured back to you. If you live by the sword, die by the sword.

Susan Pendergrass (22:54)
John Oliver did a story on charter schools. Remember, it was the guy in Florida that was letting a charter school be a nightclub at night? There is no way that is representative of charter schools.

Mike McShane (22:58)
Yeah, I remember that.

Susan Pendergrass (23:10)
That was an example I found shocking, but it is not representative. And you are right, they will find those stories.

Mike McShane (23:13)
Yeah, totally. We should all use less rage bait. We should not use rage bait to say just because one teacher in one place did something dumb, that is an indictment of public education in general. Nor should we allow the same thing to be done in reverse, which is, because one family did something crazy, we should not have choice at all.

Susan Pendergrass (23:49)
That leads to another one of your words, “slop.” There is so much talk about AI in schools and what to do about it. Is one person going to figure this out for every school everywhere, or are we all going to figure it out individually?

Mike McShane (24:03)
Yeah, I played out the scenario I am worried about. I do not know if it will happen in 2026, but it might.

We have heard a lot about AI in schools, students cheating, which is real and worrisome. But the specific scenario I have not heard as many people talking about is the prevalence of AI video, and the ability to create videos of things that did not happen.

How many, if you have a student in a classroom, after taking a picture or a short, unrelated video of their teacher, they can put it through a series of prompts, “Hey, have this teacher do,” and then insert whatever horrible thing, say something horrible, do something horrible.

Susan Pendergrass (24:34)
Yeah.

Mike McShane (24:53)
And if you are not savvy, and I will be the first to say I think I am a savvy consumer of the internet, I have been fooled or very close to fooled. AI videos of animals doing things, dogs protecting people from bears, or that one recently that went around with a bald eagle that had ice on its beak that someone knocked off, whatever.

Susan Pendergrass (24:58)
It is like a parlor game, right? No dogs are going off diving boards, just to clarify. The rabbits on the trampoline, these are not happening. But you are right.

Mike McShane (25:20)
People who are not as savvy, the thing I spelled out was, someone does that, and then suddenly the next PTA meeting is flooded with people because this viral thing went around. The superintendent or principal has to say, “This did not happen, it is not real.”

If you do not have the media literacy, it is like one person’s word versus another. “We saw it happen, it is on video.” “No, it did not happen, it is AI.” How we adjudicate those things, and how it could be weaponized by teenagers, or by bad actors, all of that stuff will happen. Whenever a new model is released, everyone tries to break it immediately, they are much more creative than I ever was.

I am worried for teachers, worried for schools, worried for school board meetings. It could be anything. It could be taking video at a football game and saying something happened that did not. Even if it all works out eventually, the time and energy wasted dealing with it…

Now, again, I am hoping more and more schools, this could be a real kick in the rear end to get phones out of schools and say, “We are not going to have phones in schools, because people are going to be making AI videos of their teachers.” That is one of a thousand reasons we should not have phones in schools.

But it is not the only place kids are interacting with one another, or with teachers. So we have to be really skeptical when we see that video of that teacher, or that student, or that principal doing something. Take a deep breath and ask, “Is this video real? Does this pass the smell test? Does this sound like something a teacher would actually do?” I am increasingly worried about that. There are many other things people worry about that I do not really worry about, but AI video in the context of schools, bad news bears.

Susan Pendergrass (27:53)
Yeah, I think we are going to have to start adjusting our thinking to only believing things that happen in front of our face, things we can touch. The prevalence of, you know, Amazon ads now, they are… I mean, I went to get my haircut and somebody was holding up a picture, and she was like, “Okay, well, that is not a real person.” We are going to have to default to disbelief if it is on a phone or on a screen. If it is happening in front of you, you can touch it, you can believe it. But the rest of it, I think we are going to become extra skeptical, because I do not believe much stuff anymore.

Mike McShane (28:22)
Totally. Are schools going to need CCTV cameras everywhere? Are we going to be oddly surveilled in a lot of different ways, just for CYA? “If people are going to be making up fake videos, we need the real video of what is going on.” I do not know how that is going to go, but…

That was the “rage bait” one, my plea to people, please do not fall victim to rage bait. It is pinging parts of our brains that we should not. I get wrapped up in it too. “My God, I cannot believe that is happening.” Then you take 10 seconds and you are like, “Wait, why am I fired up about this road rage incident in South Carolina?” Someone cut somebody off on the highway. Who cares? I am not there. It is not my deal.

I think this “slop” stuff is also something we are going to have to be really cautious about and thoughtful about, because it could cause lots of problems.

Susan Pendergrass (29:35)
Yeah, but then people are like, “I am not going to allow AI, I am going to check it.” I think AI, we are going to have to accept, right? We have to live with it.

Mike McShane (29:41)
Yeah, we are going to have to realize this is just part of it. There will be so many great things that come out of it, the creativity it will unleash.

In our own Substack, a bunch of the graphics we do are AI generated. I could not, I laugh, I have young kids, they are better drawers, I am horrible at it, but I can do this stuff with a couple of prompts in ChatGPT. “Hey, make me…” and they can be funny. You can do someone in the style of a famous painter and suddenly it is a Renaissance painting of me.

That is incredible productivity. The fact that I do not have to have a graphic designer, I can basically do it myself and put out essentially a small newspaper with some contributors and a bit of AI. That is an insane productivity increase, and it is incredible, but we have to be cautious of the downsides.

Susan Pendergrass (30:48)
Finally, your last word, “supply side.” In Missouri, folks will say, “Well, we do not need private school choice in our rural areas, there are no private schools,” as though the supply of private schools is fixed. It is treated like a natural result of how much interest there is, the kind of people who live in the community, and what is there is there, without thinking that if parents suddenly had $7,000 or $8,000 to spend, maybe somebody would open a new school.

Or not even a new school. Maybe somebody would open a visual arts business, or a soccer academy, tutoring, dyslexia therapy, whatever it is they think parents want or need. You would be free to be an entrepreneur in that space. That piece is largely overlooked, because it is like, “We have this many private schools with this many seats, so we can only have this many scholarships.” It is like, no, that is not fixed. Do you think we are going to see a lot of changes in that area?

Mike McShane (32:00)
Yeah, because another dimension where people think things are fixed is not only the number and locations, but the shape of what schools look like. “We are not going to have a private school in this small area because we cannot have a brick-and-mortar building with 30 rooms and 250 kids.” That is not what we are talking about.

If you can get 10 kids together at $8,000 apiece…

Susan Pendergrass (32:26)
There are no buildings.

Mike McShane (32:36)
…you can do a lot of interesting stuff. Especially if you can get space donated, leverage resources in the community, maybe some online stuff, and a local teacher. You could put together a heck of an education on $80,000 or $100,000.

It is happening. What makes it challenging to talk about is that it is happening across different dimensions. At the same time we are talking about Catholic schools growing and starting new schools in a traditional sense, two blocks away in some rented bungalow people are creating a Montessori micro school.

Because these things get spoken about in national terms and in a thousand-word news story, we struggle to discuss multiple dimensions. Existing schools are growing, new schools are emerging, and those new schools are going to look different. Some will grow, some will shrink, all these things can be happening at once.

Our job as researchers and observers is to do a lot of descriptive work, describe what is happening. There has been a push in earlier generations of school choice research toward causal results, horse-race comparisons, “Are they better than public schools?” “Is this type of private school better than that type?” But the only reason we were able to do that in 1998 is because, for a hundred years before, people did descriptive work to know, how many schools, what are they doing? Then you can talk about who is doing better, because you have to decide what they are doing, where they are, who is attending, are there differences.

It is almost like we are starting over.

Susan Pendergrass (34:39)
Yeah.

Mike McShane (35:01)
…doing that basic descriptive work. What is actually happening? What are people doing?

Susan Pendergrass (35:08)
Yeah, I know somebody who started a school in a barn on their property, and the parents came and converted the empty barn to a school. I know somebody who started a mobile school, basically in a big van, so that the school came to their house one day a week. And I know someone who started one in a high-rise in Queens. It is only limited by people’s imagination, basically, right?

And a like-minded group of parents. There are more people homeschooling now than used to be, so you could do this individually, but there are many more opportunities to do it. Parents, what emerged from the pandemic, at least, is they want their kids home maybe two days or three days. That is popular, and people are finding that two days out of the house creates unique opportunities in that space.

I think it is limited by people’s imagination, and some curriculum standards, and perhaps some accountability. But if you can meet those, I think we are seeing this idea.

I am not trying to be anti-traditional public school, but I butted up against this when my kids were little. “We are the only ones who know how to do this, so you have to accept our way of doing it because it is tried and tested and comes out of our schools of education at the universities.” This is the one and only way you have to teach the number line in third grade. “This is how it has to be, we cannot vary it because we are the great equalizer of civic society in the United States.”

Your boss, Rob Enlow, really shut me down on this. It has not panned out. We only read and do math less well each year.

I cannot imagine that letting all these flowers bloom is going to have a worse result. If we fast forward 20 years and look at median earnings and educational attainment rates, and we let this thrive, I think the outcome would improve. I do not see how it goes down.

Mike McShane (37:23)
That is the thing. You mentioned the interesting times we are living in now. So many of the “parade of horribles” choice opponents talked about forever, polarization, balkanization, people retreating to silos, it is like, hey guys, that already happened without choice. You cannot blame choice, because choice did not exist yet for that to happen.

Lots of people pushing each other in the streets went to public schools. Statistically, these are public school graduates having large problems with one another.

The conservative in me says things can always get worse. The fundamental progressive view is things can always get better, and the fundamental conservative view is things could always get worse. That strand in me says, yes, things could get worse. But across a lot of these dimensions, academic outcomes, civic outcomes, there is a lot of room for growth, and not nearly as much bottom end to fall out. So the risks associated with giving people more choices are not nearly as severe as proponents of the traditional public schooling system make it out to be.

Susan Pendergrass (38:58)
Yeah. Well, in Missouri, 40 percent of our fourth graders are below the basic level in reading, which means they cannot read at all. They cannot read. They are illiterate.

Would 40 percent of parents, if given the money to spend on their child’s education, have a nine-year-old and say, “Turns out they cannot read. I tried and tried, we just did not get there. They just cannot read.” I do not think so.

I know this is not the perfect solution, that accountability through parental choice is the answer. I am not saying that. But I do not think that if parents were truly put in charge, four out of 10 would just say, “Gosh darn it, this kid is never going to read, there is probably a lot of opportunity in the service industry.” I do not think so. I think that would be a much better check on the system.

Interesting stuff. Thanks so much for joining us. I really appreciate it, always.

Mike McShane (39:42)
Yep. Yeah. I agree with you. Agreed, 100 percent.

Susan Pendergrass (39:59)
So great to talk to you. What is your Substack called?

Mike McShane (40:02)
Informed Choice, so people can check that out. Informed Choice on Substack. Subscribe, it would be great.

Susan Pendergrass (40:05)
Yeah, it is really interesting. Great. Thanks so much.

Mike McShane (40:10)
Thanks for having me.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post The Six Words Driving the Education Debate in 2026 With Mike McShane appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

From Milton Friedman to Modern School Choice with Robert Enlow

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 19:51:56 +0000

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Robert C. Enlow, president and CEO of EdChoice, about the expansion of school choice and the organization’s work advancing parental freedom in education. They discuss Milton Friedman’s original vision, how states like Florida, Arizona, and Indiana have moved toward universal choice, Missouri’s legal fight over its scholarship program, and how parental demand is reshaping education markets, and more.

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction to Ed Choice and Leadership
01:00 Milton Friedman’s Legacy in Education
02:26 The State of School Choice in America
04:57 Challenges in Missouri’s Education System
07:38 The Importance of Universal School Choice
09:39 The Role of Leadership in Education Reform
11:49 Parental Advocacy and the Future of School Choice
14:15 Market Demand and Private School Growth
16:59 The Evolution of Educational Options
19:49 Redefining Quality in Education
22:18 Civic Values and Shared Experiences in Education
26:05 The Debate on Public vs. Private Education
29:47 Legal Challenges and Advocacy for School Choice

Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00)
So I am actually very excited that you have joined our podcast, Robert Enlow. You are CEO or executive director of EdChoice—which one? President and CEO. How long have you been president and CEO of that organization?

Robert Enlow (00:08)
I’m president and CEO of EdChoice.

Well, that’s a great question, Susan. And thanks for having me, and thanks to Show-Me for all they do. I believe I’ve been president and CEO since 2009, but I joined the organization in 1996. We opened our doors on September 23, 1996, and I was the first guy walking in the door.

Susan Pendergrass (00:31)
And it was originally called the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation.

Robert Enlow (00:34)
Correct, the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation, obviously established after Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman and his wife, Rose. During the last decade of their lives, I got to know them—particularly in the last five years of his life. As a young kid coming from England who had these wild-eyed liberal ideas in some ways, it took me a little while for him and Rose to get to understand me and warm up to me, but they did, and it was an amazing experience getting to watch them work.

Susan Pendergrass (00:40)
And you knew them both. What do you think he would think of what’s going on right now in K–12 education?

Robert Enlow (01:04)
You know, I will tell you what he would say to me every single time we passed a bill in another state. He would say, “Robert, we’re on the right track, but you’ve got a lot more to do.” I think he would be happy that we got to universality of people. I think he would be really pleased with the fact that we’re now at a universe of eligibility. I think he’d be less pleased that we’re still controlling the marketplace and controlling the spigot of funds. So I think he would be saying we’re not getting to a true universal marketplace unless you think about supply and information and funding just as much as you think of everyone choosing. Like in a state like Texas, everyone’s excited—oh my God, everyone gets to choose. Well, not really. It’s a billion-dollar appropriation. That means only maybe 90,000 kids get to choose out of 6 million. So when you think about who can really choose, we’ve got to think about the money. And the same thing is true in Missouri with its $50 million—$75 million tax rate and $50 million appropriation still limits the number of fan futures. Yeah.

Susan Pendergrass (02:02)
Like nobody. Tiny, tiny. But we do have an Arizona and a Florida now. I think, you know, I remember a very long time ago working with you on an Arizona voucher that got vetoed by the governor, but now Arizona is essentially universal school choice, and Florida. What I’m seeing most recently that I really love is with their universal school choice and more than half of parents choosing something, the public schools are getting in the game. The public schools are like, okay, spend your scholarship dollars with us, because we’ve been at this a long time. And they’re not seeing it as this us versus them. It’s like, we are all working together to educate our kids. And maybe, you know, we all have a place in this.

Robert Enlow (02:30)
That’s right. So people ask me all the time, Susan, they’re like, well, when will you work with the opponents of school choice, or when will you work with public schools? I’m like, we’ll work with public schools when there truly is a level playing field for all families to be able to choose. Now we actually see there are three aspects to that that we care about, right? All families can choose, right? They can choose all the options, and they can choose with all available dollars. We see five states that have that criteria now: Florida, Arizona, West Virginia, and now New Hampshire. Arkansas—Arkansas. So Arkansas, yeah, Arkansas, Arizona, the A’s; W’s—West Virginia; Florida; and New Hampshire. And what’s really interesting about that, if you look over time—we do this thing called the EdChoice Share, which is what we really care about: how many people are choosing all the options that they want. Florida and Arizona are the top two. And it’s really amazing to see what’s happened in Florida.

Susan Pendergrass (03:16)
Arkansas.

Robert Enlow (03:39)
—people, of families going to traditional assigned public schools. Now, even in that, they are choosing by buying a house, right? So that’s gone from 86.2% in 2001–2002 to now, today, just 51.8%. About half. Isn’t that crazy?

Susan Pendergrass (03:46)
Sure, sure, sure. About half. And I will tell you from my experience in Missouri, that sort of reality—where almost every kid just goes to their assigned public school, whatever’s on the utility bill, that’s where you go to school and you have no other options—is still assumed to be almost universal. In fact, it is in Missouri, because we only have charter schools as punishment. We have that tiny little scholarship program. You can go to a full-time virtual, which isn’t for everyone. So essentially, you see the address on the utility bill is where you go to school. And I just think that it’s been really hard to sort of break through that mindset and let folks know, like in Florida, only half of parents are doing that. And probably, like you said, a sizable percentage of that half decided where to live based on what school their kids would go to. So they are, in a sense, exercising some choice. And I just wonder, when you have two states in the same nation that are so completely divergent, where does that lead us to? So Missouri’s kind of surrounded.

Robert Enlow (04:57)
Well, it’s—yeah, so Missouri is surrounded, and where it leads you to is a couple of things. It leads you to a metric of in-migration. In Indiana, one of the things I get asked a lot is, you know, what’s the success metric for your state? And I say the number of people migrating to our state because they have educational options. Right. So we are a state of educational options on your border, almost, and everyone can choose. Right. And it’s a big deal, and it’s why we’ve had more and more families. You’re ranked in our study 28th out of 51. And you really have not seen a change. Well, I mean, you still have 80.3% in traditional schools, but what you’ve done is you’ve allowed magnet schools to grow and you’ve had some charter school—your charter school growth has been—let’s take a look. You’ve actually had a decent—

Susan Pendergrass (05:32)
That seems high, to be honest. Yeah, but I can tell you our charter schools are punishments. They’re only in Kansas City and St. Louis, only in non-accredited districts. So right now there might be a charter school in the works in a fully accredited district—in Columbia 93—and people in Columbia 93 are freaking out about a charter school opening. This is how sort of, like, behind the curve we are. They’re freaking out that a charter school might open, and they’re arguing we don’t need it. And I will say—I want to get to the lawsuit against our scholarship program. We have a very strong, what I sort of call the—

Robert Enlow (05:52)
Yeah, that’s great.

Susan Pendergrass (06:16)
—educational establishment in Jefferson City. That is the teacher union leadership, the Association of School Boards, and the Association of Superintendents. Because we have 520 districts, there’s a lot of superintendents and a lot of school boards, and they will show up to a hearing to make sure that parents don’t get to choose where their kids go to school.

Robert Enlow (06:35)
Yeah, so this is one of the reasons why, in 2016, when the Milton Friedman Foundation changed its name to EdChoice, we focused on universality. Because I think we realized that the fights for school choice—where they’re fighting to make sure that children can escape from bad schools—is the wrong message. The message is that all families need to have some freedom to choose what works best for them. And that should be across all income levels. Why are we okay with giving billionaires access to gated, segregated public schools, but freak out when we give them the options to choose private schools? Moreover, you can’t continue to ask Republican legislators to vote for something that they’re going to get killed for in their district. Right. And so one of the key points of universality has been being able to say, we need you to support choice so that constituents of yours can get an opportunity. So in your state, one of the challenges has been: how do we get eligibility to where it’s supposed to be universal? And you’ve done your—yeah.

Susan Pendergrass (07:38)
Funding, funding. I mean, we had tiny funding up until this $50 million. The only scholarship dollars we had were fundraised from individual and corporate donors. So getting that money together has been a real challenge, and I think we got to $15 to $20 million finally. And ironically—I don’t know, you may not know this because it’s very in the weeds—but when that ESA program, when that scholarship program passed, we agreed—the legislature agreed—that any district that lost a student to the scholarship program could continue to count them for five years. So this year they’re asking for $30 million to cover the kids who took the scholarship. Thirty million dollars is going to go to public schools for the kids who took the scholarships, but they don’t want the scholarship program to get $50 million. And I just think the irony kills me.

Robert Enlow (08:25)
Well, hold on—just, I think—so this hold-harmless thing, let me just ask a question. I think Show-Me then should put in a bill like this: if they want to be held harmless when a student leaves, then anytime a child moves from one public school to another public school, they should hold that other public school to account. Public schools are getting—they’re the ones where families are moving the most, right? So aren’t other public schools in Missouri taking more money from other public schools than any kind of choice or charter program?

Susan Pendergrass (08:42)
That’s right. Yeah, and God forbid that we’re sending kids to Indiana for your in-migration, right? Like, when kids leave, somehow we should—and we do have these crazy hold-harmless policies that you guys have analyzed—but I feel like it’s starting to feel like we have sort of two different worlds. If you raise your kids in Florida or Arizona or Arkansas, when they get to be four or five years old, then good news: you get to sit down and look at your options and look at your kid and look at where you work, what might fit your schedule, and you can pick from a number of things. If you live in Missouri, you cannot. And I just think that’s gonna start to diverge.

Robert Enlow (09:25)
So here’s what I’m going to say about that. I agree with you. And there is a divergence happening, particularly in the states in America that have broad choices—and I don’t just mean private school; I mean charter and all of that. But once you get a taste of choice—we have really believed this over time—once you start to get a taste of choice, and if you make it broad enough and open enough, parents begin to start utilizing that option; they learn over time. And so it didn’t happen overnight that Florida went from 90% to 51%. It happened over 20 years as choice grew and became more eligible. So, you know, key point is you in Missouri now have a program. It now has some public funds attached to it. And the goal is to get that utilized as much and as broadly as possible in every district. I say this all the time: one of the reasons why Indiana’s Choice Program is so defensible is—we love our charter schools—but charter schools, I think, are in 30 districts and 30 legislative districts. Private schools are in every single legislative district in the state, and all of them take choice dollars. And so you have a built-in constituency of support. We now have 110,000 families using choice out of our million kids. And so it’s amazing, the growth. It didn’t start off that way. It started off with 3,500. Right. And so you see the growth of choice over time. And as long as your legislatures are willing to move forward, then you’re going to continue to see that change. And no amount of union hacking and no amount of school board association—because they’re ultimately disconnected with what the parents want. And that’s particularly true after COVID, because there’s a ton of micro schools and a ton of—Milton Friedman used to say, you know you’re ready for a free market when there’s the presence of an underground market. And there’s a huge underground market for education happening all over Missouri right now in the form of micro schools and pods. Parents are wanting to move. And as the legislature starts giving them access to public funds, you’ll see growth over time.

Susan Pendergrass (11:22)
And we’ve got some parent advocacy groups that have appeared on the scene, like Activate Missouri. And I know, like in Florida, there were some very loud parent groups that influenced elections because they wanted school choice. And I do believe that parents are going to be the ones that sort of drive the change in Missouri. But you guys in Indiana also had very strong leadership. You had Governor Mitch Daniels—like, you had very strong leadership. We’ve had a bit of a vacuum in that regard in Missouri. Our new governor supports the idea of school choice. I’m not sure that he’s willing to put his political capital on the line for it in the way that you guys—

Robert Enlow (11:57)
Yeah, so there’s a lot of feeling out there now—oh my God, if I get a governor, it’ll be a savior, right? And look, governors are super important and they are critical for getting it over the line. Mitch Daniels was critical to take this movement in the country to the next step. Prior to Mitch Daniels, we’d sort of seen the failure of a voucher program in Florida—Jeb Bush’s voucher program—and so we’d gone to this tax-credit scholarship model, right? And Mitch said, no, we’re going to do something big, statewide and large. And when he did that, he sort of opened the floodgates for a bunch of states. So that was really important. Governor Pence was supportive. But the governors after that haven’t been, like, massively out in front driving stuff. They’ve not not signed it when it comes to their table, but they haven’t been out there leading the way. Having a Speaker of the House like Representative Todd Huston—by the way, it’s amazing. So having leadership roles is critically important. I can’t say enough for someone like Speaker Huston. So, you know, it’s important to have a governor, but it’s super important to have leadership in the House and Senate.

Susan Pendergrass (13:05)
Yeah, you must, because I know you have the third-grade non-retention for kids who are behind in reading. I know that you guys are out in front on the—really the first really meaty—federal waiver request that the Secretary of Education has been asking for states to send in their waiver requests. And Indiana’s is certainly the most robust. You’re going back to letter grades for your schools. I mean, you’re not just doing choice. You guys are seemingly moving on a lot of fronts in education in a way that will make it very attractive to families. And I try to make this point all the time in Missouri: families are gonna leave and businesses are gonna leave because we have all of these second-generation choosers, right? So kids who chose their school are having kids, and they expect to choose their school.

Robert Enlow (13:47)
Look, the idea of customer choice is embedded into anyone who’s under 30, right? And so when they begin to realize that’s going to be true in education, they’re going to be like, why am I getting this one-size-fits-all system that doesn’t actually fit either my values or my safety or what I think of academic quality—or what if I want something more hybrid? I mean, the reality is that families under 30 now—they’re not having kids; we have a baby bust here—but those under 30 are definitely saying, “I want more choice and customization.”

Susan Pendergrass (14:15)
Yeah, and as you know, you have multiple kids, I have multiple kids—they’re not even all the same. So what works for one might not work for all of them within a family. Now, another argument that we get in Missouri, in terms of the need for private school choice, is we don’t have enough—you know, we don’t have very many private schools, and most rural districts don’t have any. And we are seeing some research emerge that the private school market responds in these scholarship programs, right?

Robert Enlow (14:38)
I love hearing this, Susan, and I’m sorry if I am frustrated by that question. I don’t think you ever, ever ask—no one in the world ever asked—and I know this is not comparing education with this product—but no one in the world ever asked Lay’s Potato Chips how many bags of Fritos they need. They figure that out based on customer and market demand. This idea that somehow private schools don’t exist—of course they exist to market demand.

Susan Pendergrass (14:45)
Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah.

Robert Enlow (15:06)
When it comes and when it’s free and when it’s open. Let me give you an example. In Indiana, when we first started our program in 2010, it was like, “There’s not enough private school spaces. There’s not enough private school spaces.” Okay, so we did a survey of all the private schools. We got all the private schools to get together on how many spaces they had. They had 22,000 available spaces. We went through district and grade. Great. And then when we expanded it in 2013, the governor says, “We need to know how many spaces there are going to be.” All right, we’ll do another survey—since no one believes that markets respond, right? Well, we did a whole other survey. How many spaces do you think there were? Twenty-two thousand. Exactly. My point is—like 20 or 22,000, right? This concept of “Oh, we don’t know if there’s enough supply.” Look, markets will respond so long as markets are free to respond. So one of the biggest challenges right now going forward is—look, try to—

Susan Pendergrass (15:41)
I don’t—

Robert Enlow (16:01)
School choice—or private school choice, or educational choice—can do one of three things: fill seats in existing schools, build new seats in existing schools, or build new schools, right? Now, the way we’ve run private schooling in America is we’re only doing one and two. We’re filling seats in existing. And just remember, private schools in the last 25 years lost 10% market share total, right? So there’s a ton of spaces. There’s a ton of spaces in private schools all over America, right? So if you think you lost 10% of—

Susan Pendergrass (16:20)
That’s right. Closed. A lot of schools closed. Ahem.

Robert Enlow (16:30)
—five million, right? Or whatever the number is. You have plenty of spaces out there in private currently. Now we need to grow those spaces and grow the different types of models. That’s going to require legislators to be a bit more willing to take some risk around the types of schools that they allow to be, quote-unquote, “accredited,” right? So you need to allow micro schools. You need to allow new entrants into the marketplace. And the more you do that, the faster it will grow. But there are slots out there. And what we’re really finding from the emerging research is that private schools are growing faster in rural areas—like in Florida—and they’re actually growing. I mean, Susan, you did this research for us about Florida and Arizona, so why don’t you tell us how fast they’re growing?

Susan Pendergrass (17:07)
Right. Well, they’re growing in Arizona. What I will say that comes out of that research is parents don’t really care what the label is on the bill. They are calling a lot of things “schools” now, right, that you might not have called schools before. And you guys survey parents—you do your monthly surveys. Schooling in America—what’s it called? What’s your monthly survey? Yeah. You’ve been doing it since COVID.

Robert Enlow (17:27)
It’s called Morning Consult—sorry, Schooling in America polling.

Susan Pendergrass (17:32)
And what I think is one of the most interesting findings is that consistently, now that COVID’s way in the rearview, parents want their kids to go to school two or three days a week. More parents want their kids home a couple days and in school a couple days than want five days in school or five days at home. People sort of want this—they like this sort of flexibility thing. And what I think we’re seeing is a growth in, like you said, micro schools, hybrid schools, homeschool co-ops where I am homeschooling a couple days, then a couple days my child is going somewhere to be part of group activities. And parents are doing online coding schools, and that’s a school to them, right? It’s an online situation where their kids are learning to code, and they’re calling it a school. So, yeah, the definition of what is a private school—the fact that it’s not a nonprofit provider, that it’s a private provider and they’re providing all sorts of different things—is really getting blurry. I think that that is a definite finding. And where that’s allowed to thrive, like Arizona, where you have this massive ESA program, and Florida—that’s where you’re seeing parents are only limited by what they can think up, right?

Robert Enlow (18:39)
So how much growth was there in Arizona and Florida? You saw it. Tell me how much there was.

Susan Pendergrass (18:44)
In the number of private schools? Well, I will say this: private school data is messy. And in most states, it looks like they’re declining. Florida and Arizona are two of the states where you can say for sure—outside the error ranges—they have more private schools now than they did 10 years ago. And that is the exception to the rest of the country. You can say for sure California and New York have fewer private schools than they did 10 years ago.

Robert Enlow (18:45)
Yeah. I love you, Reese Richard.

Susan Pendergrass (19:08)
And the nation as a whole has fewer private schools. But in Florida and Arizona, you’re seeing the opposite direction—and Ohio. So the market is responding, but it might not be, you know, a full-on brick-and-mortar cafeteria-gym-library private school. It might be something that doesn’t look exactly like that. And to a parent, it’s a school. And that’s what I think we’re seeing. And I know that in Florida, parents are combining scholarship programs to have their child see a paraprofessional and get some specialized equipment if they have a disability, and be part of a group activity. And I think that is one of the most exciting things that’s happening—these really interesting, expansive, curated experiences that parents are putting together.

Robert Enlow (19:49)
Yeah, you saw in one year a growth of 150—think—private schools or private options in Arizona in just one year. So it’s not like the market won’t respond.

Susan Pendergrass (19:56)
Yeah. And more of them are accessing online schools than they used to. Right—Stanford has a school, BYU has a school. If you can access these online schools, they don’t have to be in-state. That’s because the parents are deciding where the money goes. But in Missouri, Missouri has accredited Missouri virtual schools, and that’s where you have to enroll your child. But when you let the parents and word of mouth—say, you know, “Hey, I’ve got a great foreign language school”—word of mouth works. Then I think you definitely see a massive expansion of what parents are accessing through these programs. And I can only imagine, based on Milton Friedman’s—what, 1955? 57? 55—premise on this, that achievement should go up. I mean, I know that this isn’t the thing that we are focused on, but it should.

Robert Enlow (20:36)
Yep, 1955.

Susan Pendergrass (20:46)
I’ve always said, like, if 25% of Missouri eighth graders are proficient in math, I don’t think 75% of Missouri parents, if they were given control over it, would just accept the fact that their kid didn’t learn math.

Robert Enlow (20:56)
So one of the challenges I think we have with that is: what do we determine to be quality, and how do we measure that, right? I’m one of the few that think that the standards movements of the 1980s did more harm to K–12 education than good.

Susan Pendergrass (21:02)
Yeah, that’s a big question. Tell me why.

Robert Enlow (21:14)
Because I think the standardization to such a point—which then meant you had to have state tests aligned to that standardization, which then meant you had to create very rigid scope and sequencing for teachers—it really did, in a way, de-professionalize the teaching industry and make it a widget industry. And so, as a result, I think we’ve lost this ability to educate, and we’ve created this desire to—

Susan Pendergrass (21:17)
—teach to it.

Robert Enlow (21:43)
—to inculcate in terms of how to get them to do a test. I’m not a big fan of state tests. I think they get gamed all the time and changed all the time. I’m not a huge fan of state standards. I think you can have standards, but align them to something else. We had the Iowa Test of Basic Skills growing up, and that was a fine test, and we could do the same. So we, for example, are believers in testing choice and think we should allow families to do that. So when you look at quality—

Susan Pendergrass (22:10)
You mean pick a test—allow them to pick a test? And how would you hold any schools accountable, or would you? Would you do the Ashley Berner or the British approach? What would you do?

Robert Enlow (22:13)
Yeah, they should all be taking tests if they want. I think—no, look, first of all, I think parents hold schools accountable. We’re learning that from Arizona, right? By the time they close a charter school in Arizona, there’s like 12 parents in it, right? So, I mean, parents know quality. But you’ve got to remember, parents are choosing for different reasons. I think about this all the time. I had a son who had special needs, and I didn’t want to send him to the local public school because it was going to be bad for him, in my opinion. He wasn’t going to be served. So I went and did a whole bunch of searching around, and I picked a school that was 15th on the I-STEP for third-grade results—that was Indiana—versus the other school that was seventh, right? Why did I do that? Well, I did it because I thought he’d have a safer environment, he’d have a more moral environment—an environment with my values—and it was cheap enough for me, and it was good enough. So, parents make decisions based on a whole host of factors, and I think it’s silly for us to think that they don’t. The other thing is: what do we mean by quality is a big deal. I am not a fan of saying quality is only a test score. I think quality is much more than that. I don’t know about your kids, Susan.

Susan Pendergrass (23:18)
That’s a great question. But do test scores matter?

Robert Enlow (23:43)
I’m not sure I’d say—they matter insofar as you inform parents how kids are doing relative to others. I think it’s important that families know that. I’m a big fan of the one thing I do like about the British system—just ranking all the schools. That’s what they do: they take a test and everyone gets put on a league table. I love that concept. Everyone gets on a league table, and you can say, “Oh, you’re going to a school that’s 100 out of 200. Well, you’re mid-table. Why aren’t you going to a school that’s 85 or 60,” or something like that? So I think it’s really important to just put it on a table, because I think keeping up with the Joneses is actually a valuable part of society. But think about—

Susan Pendergrass (24:01)
We do that at the Show-Me Institute. For Missouri schools, we do rank all the schools. But one more question—just to push back on that a little bit, but not exactly that. One thing that we’re seeing, or that I’ve seen in these scholarship programs, is that kids are potentially—we’re growing the number of kids who are not having shared experiences with their peers. And by that, I mean probably going to have a lot fewer kids playing the trumpet or playing the cello.

Robert Enlow (24:10)
No.

Susan Pendergrass (24:28)
Because when you go to middle school and you say, “I’m going to take band,” and then they’re like, “Let’s pick an instrument,” right? That is kind of hokey, but that was what a lot of us did. And now you have parents who are simply having their child go to guitar lessons or piano lessons because that’s what their kid wants to play. And you’re not going to have kids hauling their flute home on the bus. And that’s kind of a shared experience. Also, things like the weird PE classes I had to take, like square dancing or, I don’t know, bowling. You know, we’re going to lose some of that from a civic point of view. We’re going to lose lots of the shared experience, and kids are going to have these algorithm-driven or curated experiences. What do you think?

Robert Enlow (25:06)
Okay, comrade. Let me just say, okay, comrade. I can’t believe I just heard an apologist for school buses, right? I mean, everyone get on a bus with a snotty—listen, common cultural experiences happen by common cultural things, not by being in the same place at the same time. This idea that schools are the locus of all of our common cultural experiences is part of the problem we have in education. So in Arizona—

Susan Pendergrass (25:08)
Come on, come on, what do you think? You have to ride the school bus?

Robert Enlow (25:35)
Yeah. Yes, yes. There are tons and tons of common cultural experiences right now. The fastest-growing type of tutor is music and physical instruction, right? Are they not taking classes together? Are they not working together with other kids? They’re just not working with other kids in a common—in a socialist—environment of a school bus or in a school, right? This idea that acculturation and socialization happen only inside of a K–12 school building strikes me as very socialistic.

Susan Pendergrass (26:05)
I hear it. I hear it a lot from the—air quotes—other side. I hear that they are the great equalizing institution: traditional K–12 public schools.

Robert Enlow (26:13)
Okay, if that were the case—if that were the case—why is the data extremely clear in voucher programs and choice programs that the civic values of kids in choice programs who attend private schools are far greater than the civic values and virtues of those who attend traditional public schools? I say this all the time: if you go to the GLSEN survey—the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network survey of kids and their issues in dealing with being gay—Which school system is the worst on gay kids? They get dead. Based on the data that they bring out, public schools have significantly higher rates of abuse of gay kids. Right? How tolerant is that? Now, what ends up happening is they hear about it more in religious schools—they hear about being gay—but they’re not bullied. So you actually ask yourself this question: Do you want your gay kid bullied, or do you want them to hear about it more?

Susan Pendergrass (26:42)
I’m guessing you’re going to say traditional public schools.

Robert Enlow (27:06)
These are legitimate questions to ask. And by the way, we’re not doing well with this at all in any school system. But this idea of civic virtue coming from a homogenized institution strikes me as naive at best—particularly since, if you think those schools don’t teach values, you’re wrong. They absolutely teach values. And then they teach values based on their school assignment, which is based on where they live. And if you don’t think neighborhoods produce value and values, then you’re wrong. Anyone who knows me knows that I rail against suburbia all the time—it’s just part of who I am. Gated, segregated communities really bother me. It bothers me. These ideas of living in enclaves piss me off, because I don’t think that’s what America is supposed to be about. But that ends up what’s happening in schooling, right? And what private schooling and choice does is it breaks that apart. How are you getting more civic tolerance—how are you getting more integration—in private schooling than you are in public schools? Whenever I hear, “Public schools are the center and locus of our community shared experience,” I actually cringe and start worrying about what they’re teaching.

Susan Pendergrass (28:13)
Yeah, I also saw a comment the other day on a Signal chat I’m on that charter schools are part of the right-wing conservative agenda to kill public education, which just makes me crazy, because charter schools by and large serve poor kids of color, and there’s nothing to do with the—there’s no right-wing conservative agenda there. And I know a lot of parents who would very much disagree with that. But that is the perception that’s out there—that you guys, with your school choice and your vouchers—and I know that you guys did a whole market test on the word “voucher,” which I think is brilliant, because no matter what the program is, folks on the left call it a voucher scheme. There’s a “scheme,” and that it’s killing public education, and then we won’t have a civic-minded, you know, equal electorate, basically.

Robert Enlow (28:39)
Yep. Can we start to redefine—and I have to redefine—look, I am a huge believer in public education. I want an educated public. I want kids to be educated. I want those—because I think society is benefited. That is a very different thing from running a system of common schools that was built off the backs of a potentially bigoted idea in the 1840s, right? I think there’s a different conversation. I think government-run, district-run schools, while a reality, are different than public education. Kids are educated to the public interest if they go to a school or learning environment where they get educated. And so that’s why Milton Friedman’s original idea—separate the public financing of education from the government running a school.

Susan Pendergrass (29:47)
Well, it’s a brilliant idea, and I appreciate you coming to argue with me about it. That’s great. I could go on, but I’m going to let it go at that. I appreciate that you guys—I didn’t really get into it—but that you’re an intervenor in the Missouri case. Clearly you believe that more Missouri families should have access to this. The parents who are the defendants basically have a sibling that they would like to join the program that one of their kids is in. And I suspect that—

Robert Enlow (29:51)
I love arguing with you. You’re one of my dearest, oldest friends. There’s very few people like you, right?

Susan Pendergrass (30:17)
I think we’re going to be successful. We had one successful ruling so far where the program gets to continue.

Robert Enlow (30:22)
Yeah, we’re the intervenors. Choice Legal Advocates is the intervenor in Missouri National Education Association et al. versus State of Missouri. So we are intervening on behalf of parents. Currently, the district court denied a temporary injunction, so they allowed the program to continue. We’re excited by that. We’re strongly positive that we think it’s a good sign for us and that we should end up on the right side of this. You know, I’m just shocked that the unions continue to be on the wrong side of parents all the time.

Susan Pendergrass (30:49)
They sure do. All right. Well, I appreciate it, and I appreciate you taking the time to join us on the podcast.

Robert Enlow (30:54)
Thanks for having me, Susan.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

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KCUR Finally Confronts the Reality of Fare-Free Transit

Sat, 25 Oct 2025 01:27:06 +0000

On Monday, KCUR carried a piece by NPR’s Joel Rose exploring fare-free buses in New York City, using Kansas City’s own experiment as a case study. After presenting the policy’s advocates, Rose shifted gears:

Then there’s Kansas City. The regional transit authority eliminated fares in 2020, but it did not go exactly as local leaders had hoped.

“We just never found a sustainable funding source to replace the $10 million a year out of the fare box,” said Eric Bunch, a city councilman in Kansas City, Mo., and a board member of the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority.

Rose also included perspectives from urban transit researchers, who note that reducing fares is less critical than improving service speed, frequency, and reliability.

For KCUR’s audience, Rose’s framing may have come as a surprise. While the station occasionally raised funding concerns, it largely avoided discussing how fare elimination could affect service.

In late 2019, a KCUR piece quoted then-Councilwoman Kathryn Shields, who lead the council’s finance committee, as pointing out that no one was addressing how to offset losses at the farebox. Instead, KCUR’s early coverage framed zero fare as a breakthrough, not a policy gamble — quoting advocates and then-KCATA leader Robbie Makinen extensively while declining to examine the underlying “research” he invoked.

None of the KCUR reporting during the debate seriously contended with the service impact of zero fare. None sought out urban transit researchers, as Rose did. None considered the so-called research that Makinen cited in support of the policy. KCUR’s framing heavily favored advocates—including an exceedingly fawning piece on Makinen himself—and did not interrogate claimed benefits.

In May, 2021, KCUR quoted Makinen as saying, “When [zero fare] started, everyone said it wouldn’t work, I believe we’ve proved them wrong.” His confidence was premature.

Early in the debate, research, ridership surveys, and national reporting—some of which I cited in a January 2020 Kansas City Star column—already pointed to the risks of fare-free transit.

KCUR’s most direct acknowledgment of fare-free drawbacks came belatedly, in 2022, when it reprinted a story from The Beacon on unreliable service and long waits faced by bus riders. KCUR’s own reporters only asked, “Should Kansas City Keep Buses Free?” in 2023 when the damage was evident.

Back in that December 2019 piece, KCUR quoted then-Councilman Kevin McManus as saying, “When we take the fareboxes away, nobody wants to be on this council putting them back.” Six years later, six of the 13 council members who voted to remove fares in 2019 voted to reinstate them in 2025.

KCUR deserves credit for eventually publishing more substantive fare-free coverage. But had this level of scrutiny come earlier—before the rise in operator assaults, service cuts, and staffing concerns—the public conversation might have been far more informed. Policymakers might have avoided their embarrassing reversals. And the harmful impact to those who depend on public transit might have been reduced, or avoided altogether.

The post KCUR Finally Confronts the Reality of Fare-Free Transit appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Massachusetts Joins NYC and KC in Shifting Fees to Landlords

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 22:01:28 +0000

Massachusetts lawmakers recently approved a measure requiring landlords—not tenants—to cover apartment broker fees, which often equal one month’s rent. The move mirrors a new policy in New York City, where landlords are likewise barred from charging tenants unless the tenant directly hires the broker. Proponents claim the change will save renters money. But early evidence suggests it merely repackages the same cost—and may even drive rents higher.

In New York, the Fairness in Apartment Rental Expenses (FARE) Act took effect on June 11. Within a week, average listed rents jumped 15 percent, from $4,750 to $5,500. Many landlords, faced with absorbing fees once paid by tenants, simply raised rents to cover the difference. Others introduced vague “management” or “technology” fees—charges that resemble the old broker fees in everything but name. At the same time, the number of apartment listings fell, suggesting some landlords were withholding inventory to preserve pricing power.

This cost-shifting dynamic isn’t unique to New York. In Kansas City, for instance, landlords must pay a $20-per-unit annual inspection fee—and are legally barred from passing it on to tenants. Yet few believe it doesn’t show up in the rent. As with most expenses in housing, the end user ultimately picks up the tab.

Even if renters are no longer writing separate checks to brokers or city departments, they’ll still bear the cost indirectly. Landlords operate in competitive markets and adjust pricing in response to total expenses, no matter how those costs are labeled. The illusion of savings may please voters, but it won’t lower rents.

Such policies also obscure the true cost of housing. When fees are baked into rent rather than itemized, it’s harder for renters to assess value. And as seen in New York, shifting fee obligations may reduce supply if landlords delay listings or forgo using brokers entirely, which limits choice for renters.

Some argue landlords are better positioned to negotiate broker fees, or that renters shouldn’t face steep upfront costs. That may be true in theory. But it assumes landlords won’t pass on those costs—an assumption contradicted by New York’s immediate market response.

If the goal is housing affordability, policymakers should focus on fundamentals: zoning reform, faster permitting, and reducing regulation to increase supply. Reassigning fees won’t create more apartments. But it can inflate rents.

Missourians—and Massachusetts residents—should be skeptical of promises to cut costs by simply shifting who pays them. As Kansas City and now New York have shown, policies that ignore how markets behave rarely deliver the relief they promise.

The post Massachusetts Joins NYC and KC in Shifting Fees to Landlords appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Missouri Should Rethink Fire Code Rules that Block Small Apartments

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 22:19:39 +0000

New research suggests Missouri cities could allow more apartment buildings—without compromising safety—by rethinking outdated fire code requirements.

The study by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Center for Building in North America found that small apartment buildings with one stairwell are just as safe as those with two. But Missouri’s biggest cities—Springfield, St. Louis and Kansas City—use building codes that require two stairways in buildings taller than three stories. That rule drives up construction costs and makes many projects financially unworkable.

These two-stair rules are based on the International Building Code, the widely adopted national standard. But they block a housing type common in Europe and now gaining traction in U.S. cities such as New York and Seattle.

The data challenge the logic of the two-stair mandate. In New York, none of the 4,440 single-stair apartment buildings built since 2012—each equipped with fire sprinklers—has been tied to a fire death caused by blocked exits. Seattle shows the same pattern: no increase in fatalities for single-stair buildings.

What’s changed? Modern safety systems such as sprinklers, smoke detectors, and fire-resistant stairwells have significantly improved safety in multi-unit buildings. The redundancy of a second staircase adds cost without increasing safety.

That trade-off matters. A second staircase means longer hallways, less usable space, and fewer units—especially in tight or oddly shaped lots. For developers trying to build mid-size, lower-cost housing, the extra stairwell often kills the project.

Critics may argue redundancy is good policy. But the evidence shows single-stair buildings, built to modern standards, are safe. Other states are already adapting. Washington and California have created carve-outs or pilot programs allowing single-stair buildings under certain conditions—typically height limits and requirements to use safety features like sprinklers.

Although Missouri is one of a handful of states without its own statewide codes, if our cities want to expand housing options without major subsidies or rezonings, removing outdated design rules is a practical place to start.

The post Missouri Should Rethink Fire Code Rules that Block Small Apartments appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Missouri Should Rethink Fire Code Rules that Block Small Apartments

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 20:32:26 +0000

New research suggests Missouri cities could allow more apartment buildings—without compromising safety—by rethinking outdated fire code requirements.

The post Missouri Should Rethink Fire Code Rules that Block Small Apartments appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Why America Can’t Build Enough Housing with Edward L. Glaeser

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 19:20:47 +0000

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Edward L.Glaeser, professor of economics at Harvard University and nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, about America’s housing crisis. They discuss why affordability is a supply problem, how zoning and land-use rules drive up costs, the decline of suburban building, and what states like Missouri can do to encourage growth and restore opportunity.

Timestamps

00:00 The Housing Crisis: Understanding the Supply Problem
02:19 The Role of Land Use Regulations
05:15 The Impact of Local Zoning on Housing Development
08:11 The Shift in Public Perception and NIMBYism
10:56 The Decline of Mobility and Its Consequences
14:03 Future of Housing: Urban vs. Suburban Development
16:25 Policy Solutions for Housing Affordability

Transcript

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Susan Pendergrass (00:00)
Always a pleasure to talk to Dr. Edward Glaeser of Harvard. And you have a new paper out that looks at how housing has changed.

I want to talk about that. I was just saying before we started recording that I had Brian Kaplan on and we talked about how it’s a supply problem, not a demand problem, but explain to me why, first of all, what’s going on now with housing in the United States and why places like Los Angeles continue to just not have enough housing so that people are living on the streets?

Edward Glaeser (00:32)
Okay, so big question. Of course, homelessness is partially about housing supply. It’s also about mental illness. It’s about fentanyl. It’s about other things as well. But there’s no question that the rent is too darn high, as the party bearing that name says, and that housing prices in America have gotten to be astonishingly high, not just in coastal enclaves like—

Susan Pendergrass (00:33)
Big question.

Edward Glaeser (00:56)
—Los Angeles, but also in places like Atlanta, like Phoenix, that used to be bastions of affordability for ordinary Americans, largely because they built enough. Those places are increasingly also turning into places where a great house in a great neighborhood just seems out of reach for middle-class Americans. Now, you can build further out, and they still are, but they’re building much less in the sort of moderate density,

Susan Pendergrass (01:14)
But why? Can’t they just keep building?

Edward Glaeser (01:22)
—medium-price areas that used to build a ton of housing in the 70s and 80s. They’re just not doing that anymore. And I want to just, you know, let’s get the economics of supply and demand across to the audience, right? Some of your audience may have taken Economics 101, in which case they may remember those graphs that show a supply curve and a demand curve. But basically all you need to remember is that when prices are high and the quantity of something is high, then it’s likely to be a demand problem.

If the price of something is way up and the quantity of it is way down, that’s a supply problem. Because if it were all about demand, the quantity should be up as well. That’s how we fundamentally know this is a supply problem, not a demand problem.

When you look at Atlanta, Phoenix, and Dallas, you see this change: they used to build like crazy, and now they don’t. At the national level, if we built between 2000 and 2020 at the same rate we did between 1980 and 2000, we’d have 15 million more homes. Housing would be far more affordable.

Susan Pendergrass (02:46)
Yes, so then why aren’t construction firms building the houses? I assume the profit margins are similar. Why not or more? What’s stopping them?

Edward Glaeser (02:56)
I have to take you back 20 years to my first work on this. We think land-use regulation is the great cause of how we’ve produced scarcity in a land of natural abundance.

We know this across metropolitan areas: those more heavily zoned have higher prices and less housing. Within metros, towns with larger minimum lot sizes get less building. That’s obvious: if you require two acres per home, you’ll get fewer homes.

The most economic way we know this is by comparing prices to marginal cost. If markets are relatively unfettered, consumer prices equal firms’ marginal costs. That’s Econ 101. Housing isn’t monopolized—there are thousands of developers. So prices should match costs.

But in New York City, for example, adding a condo unit just means adding a story. More than 20 years ago, Joe Gyourko, Raven Saks, and I found that construction costs were about half of condo prices. That implied a big barrier—what we called the “zoning tax.”

In suburban areas, we measured land value by comparing one-acre vs. two-acre properties. Coastal metros showed big gaps between construction costs and home prices. Again, zoning and land-use rules were to blame.

In pricier parts of Atlanta and Phoenix—Buckhead, Scottsdale—they’ve basically gone “full Los Angeles,” making construction very difficult.

Susan Pendergrass (06:14)
Okay.

Edward Glaeser (06:28)
Costs themselves also rose. Between 1900 and 1940, building costs were flat. Between 1940 and 1970, they dropped—thanks to master builders like William Levitt applying mass production. But after 1970, costs rose.

Why? Because zoning meant projects got smaller: 3,000-unit developments shrank to 30 units or 3 units. Builders got smaller too. In most industries, employees work in large establishments. In residential construction, most work in firms with fewer than 10 employees. An 8-person firm doesn’t have an R&D department.

So construction lost the innovation seen in other industries.

Susan Pendergrass (07:15)
Right.

Edward Glaeser (07:17)
And since 1970, patenting in construction has collapsed while patenting in manufacturing skyrocketed. Innovation disappeared, leaving mom-and-pop builders stuck with outdated methods.

Susan Pendergrass (07:44)
People say it’s supply chains or young people not going into the trades that makes housing expensive. But it doesn’t check out, given how expensive homes are. Out here in exurbs, big developments keep going up—but once people buy, they often oppose further building. They say, “I came here for rural space. Don’t let more people in.” Does that happen in Phoenix and Atlanta?

Edward Glaeser (08:29)
That happens everywhere. Once people have what they want, new building rarely benefits them. Change is scary, so they resist—even if development wouldn’t really harm them.

It’s tragic. America was supposed to be a land where outsiders could come find opportunity. Instead, we’ve become a nation of insiders pulling up the drawbridge. Mancur Olson’s Rise and Decline of Nations predicted this: collusive groups protect their own interests at the expense of others. Forty years later, it feels right.

Susan Pendergrass (10:13)
I saw an article about how mobility is way down—people aren’t moving within counties, states, or across states. Couples with kids used to move up from starter homes. Now they’re stuck because they can’t afford the next step.

Edward Glaeser (10:50)
Exactly. This isn’t a three-year trend—it’s a 30-year trend. It’s not about interest rates or supply chains. Productivity in construction has stagnated.

Economists talk about Baumol’s disease: stagnant industries see rising costs because labor gets bid up elsewhere. But most industries innovate. Construction hasn’t. We still build homes the same way we did decades ago.

Susan Pendergrass (11:59)
If anything, we’ve made it harder—with codes, inspections, permits. It’s so cumbersome, people avoid it.

Edward Glaeser (12:01)
Absolutely. Local zoning and federal rules also block modular, mass-produced housing. Japan does it with just nine zoning codes nationwide, making uniform mass production possible. Scandinavia too. We could have attractive, customizable mass-produced homes here.

Susan Pendergrass (13:17)
So where is this headed? Are suburbs in decline? Will people return to cities? Or just stay stuck?

Edward Glaeser (13:38)
Without policy change, there will be pain. Some urban cores are seeing more building, since cities often have groups that want development—employers, unions, banks. Suburbs are harder; homeowners dominate and resist.

Real change likely requires state governments. Asking suburbs to change on their own is futile. States can limit zoning abuse—some already do. At the federal level, modest steps like the Build More Housing Near Transit Act could help.

Susan Pendergrass (17:35)
In Missouri, we tried tax credits for low-income housing, but developers traded them without building. It seems more effective to just let middle- and upper-income housing get built—then people naturally move up and free up more affordable homes.

Edward Glaeser (18:45)
I strongly agree. Poor people typically drive used cars—they should also live in “used” houses. Filtering is natural. Creating two classes of housing—affordable vs. everything else—is unhealthy. Real affordability means anyone can rent or buy at a reasonable price, not just lottery winners of subsidies.

Susan Pendergrass (20:07)
Yes. Some places have nothing under a million dollars. That forces sprawl, but even sprawl is slowing.

Edward Glaeser (20:42)
And ironically, stopping suburban building hurts the environment. Preventing infill just pushes growth further out, creating more driving and emissions. California has the mildest climate, making it the lowest-carbon region—but decades of policy stopped construction there.

Susan Pendergrass (21:28)
It’s counterintuitive, but your work makes sense of it. Thank you for making it clear.

Edward Glaeser (21:58)
Thank you—and I’m always grateful to join your podcast and work with the Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass (22:01)
Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us.

Edward Glaeser (22:06)
Thank you.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Why America Can’t Build Enough Housing with Edward L. Glaeser appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The One Big Education Opportunity with Shaka Mitchell

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 21:01:19 +0000

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Shaka Mitchell, senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, about how a new federal scholarship tax credit, created through the One Big Beautiful Bill, could transform K–12 education across the country. They discuss what this means for Missouri families, the legal threats facing the MOScholars program, how education policy is shifting nationally, and more.

Timestamps

00:00 The Evolution of School Choice in Missouri
02:59 Charter Schools and Teacher Innovation
05:40 The Impact of Lawsuits on Educational Freedom
08:35 Federal Tax Credit Programs and Their Implications
11:19 The Future of School Choice and Parental Empowerment

Episode Transcript

(Download)

Susan Pendergrass (00:00):
Thank you so much for joining us on the Show-Me Institute podcast, Shaka Mitchell of AFC. But I think you wear a lot of hats. We’ll just do that hat for now. There have been a lot of changes in the last few years—certainly since the pandemic—regarding how kids end up at the school they attend, especially with parents now getting more opportunities to choose instead of just being assigned. I know you’ve been on the front lines of this, especially through your work with charter schools.

In Missouri, we’re sort of creeping into it. We have a scholarship program now that’s growing, and finally, like in so many other states, the legislature has decided to put some public funding toward it. And now it’s tied up with a lawsuit. Are you following what’s going on with Missouri’s scholarship program?

Shaka Mitchell (00:45):
Yeah, thanks Susan. Thanks for having me on. I sure am following it. I’ve been encouraged in recent years by the steps Missouri has taken to expand school choice. As you know, there had been a charter school law for years, but it was really limited—to Kansas City and St. Louis. That’s a lot of students, but still many others couldn’t access those schools.

Then you had the MOScholars program, which I bet we’ll talk about. On the one hand, there are some encouraging developments coming out of Missouri. And then, per usual, there are lawsuits. Because, in the words of the famous 20th-century philosopher Taylor Swift, haters gonna hate.

Susan Pendergrass (01:30):
That’s right.

Let’s go back to this charter school thing for a minute. Now, for the first time, a charter school can open anywhere in the state—but only if the school board is the sponsor. That happens all over the country, but in Missouri, no school board would even consider authorizing a charter school. Not running them, just authorizing them.

Now there’s one other county where they can open without the board as the sponsor. But there is such strong resistance to the idea of charter schools. Do you find that surprising in 2025?

Shaka Mitchell (02:06):
Yes and no. I’ve worked in charter schools and with several charter networks. I have lots of friends still working in that space. At the American Federation for Children, we’re school-type agnostic. We support parents’ ability to choose.

In some ways, it’s not surprising that school districts—which have in many places become jobs programs for adults—don’t want to disrupt the status quo. Budgets continue to increase, while enrollments decrease. So they’ve got fewer students per classroom, but more money per pupil.

They’ve got it pretty good in terms of job security. But I think what you’re getting at is important: there are great educators who want to do right by kids. And many of them are trapped within that system.

We’re seeing some start their own schools or move to other states or online programs. There’s a lot of innovation happening. But unfortunately, you mostly see the negative reaction from public school districts when it comes to innovation and choice.

Susan Pendergrass (03:42):
Yes, and what’s so tragic in Missouri is that we’ve shut the door on teachers as entrepreneurs. We have plenty of entrepreneurial teachers. Some of the strongest charter school networks were started by teachers who said, “I have a great idea, and I need to do this outside the regulations and bureaucracy.” Cutting off the teacher-as-entrepreneur option is tragic.

Shaka Mitchell (04:10):
Yeah, super tragic. One of my colleagues, Dr. Patrick Graff at AFC, has done work on teacher spending accounts—similar to ESAs.

It’s a great idea. Teachers often say their classrooms are under-resourced. Every parent knows it’s almost back-to-school season—we’re about to get a list of supplies.

Every time I get that list, I think, “Why haven’t we budgeted for enough glue or crayons?” Patrick’s idea is that teachers should have accounts to buy what they need. Surprise: teachers love it, and legislators do too.

But when you say, “Cool, it works for teachers—now let’s do it for parents,” suddenly it’s hair-on-fire. The education establishment just says no. It’s unfair.

Susan Pendergrass (05:19):
Yeah. Public funding for MOScholars in Missouri currently serves mostly low-income students and students with disabilities in Kansas City and St. Louis. That’s where the program started. It’s expanded a bit—but only through tax-credit fundraising, and the organizations have to ask for donations.

Now the lawsuit is basically saying those kids have to go back to their old schools. That we can’t publicly fund private schools for students. It’s saying, “You have to go back to the school that didn’t work for you.”

I know the teachers’ unions brought the lawsuit, and they often take on the PR risk of being on the wrong side of things—like trying to take scholarships away from kids. I don’t see how they can sit well with that.

Shaka Mitchell (06:20):
Yeah. I had the great fortune of meeting a parent in Missouri, Becky Ucello. Her daughter was able to attend a private school through the program. Becky is a public school teacher.

So the idea that private choice programs are anti–public school is a myth. Of course she wants the best for her students—and her own daughter, who has exceptional needs. The district school wasn’t working. Who among us wouldn’t want the best for our child?

The unions get this wrong every time. And they usually get defeated in court. I expect the same in Missouri. There’s strong federal and state case law supporting the idea that parents can choose and that funds given out in a non-discriminatory way can be used at religious schools—because the parent is making the choice, not the government.

Susan Pendergrass (07:47):
In addition to the lawsuit, there’s a potential initiative petition in Missouri to amend the constitution to say you can’t spend public funds at private institutions for students.

But we already have several higher ed programs that work like Pell Grants—you can take them to public or private colleges. We have Bright Flight. This petition might even cut off those programs, too.

And even when open enrollment comes up, it’s often the lowest-performing districts that say, “We can’t be part of it—we can’t let our kids leave.”

Shaka Mitchell (08:41):
It’s totally short-sighted. Nearly every district already outsources some of their special needs education to private providers. That petition could cut off even that.

It’s absurd. Districts don’t make their own computers, books, or desks. They purchase from private companies all the time. The idea that public education is this sacred, fully public institution is a fiction.

Susan Pendergrass (09:33):
Cisco trucks are in every school. Pearson brings the textbooks. Public education is filled with private corporations. And we’ve made so much progress nationally.

I’d love for you to explain the potential for federal scholarship expansion through tax credits. What is that new program, and how will it work?

Shaka Mitchell (10:09):
Sure. The federal scholarship tax credit passed as part of the One Big Bill earlier this year. It’s the first-ever federal K-12 tax credit program.

First, it’s a tax program—not from the Department of Education. So it’s not adding to federal bloat or undermining local control.

Any federal taxpayer can direct up to $1,700 of their tax liability to a scholarship granting organization—like the ones already in Missouri. So instead of sending it to the IRS, I could say, “Let’s send this to a scholarship org in Kansas City.”

Then, the organization can award scholarships to families, most of whom will qualify based on income. The families can use them for a range of educational expenses—just like ESAs. It’s really exciting.

Susan Pendergrass (12:09):
I’ve heard opponents call it a federal voucher—but it’s not a voucher, right?

Shaka Mitchell (12:18):
Correct. Think of it like when your tax return asks if you want to give a dollar to the presidential campaign. But now it’s $1,700 to a scholarship org.

In Missouri, we have Catholic, Hebrew, and non-sectarian scholarship organizations. You can choose which one to support.

Susan Pendergrass (12:59):
Do you know the total amount of available tax credits?

Shaka Mitchell (13:06):
It’s unlimited, within that $1,700 per-taxpayer cap. Initially, there were discussions of state-by-state limits, but now the limit is per individual—not by state.

Susan Pendergrass (13:34):
So governors have to opt in, right?

Shaka Mitchell (14:10):
Yes. Governors or other state officials need to opt in. That may look different state to state. Some legislatures, like North Carolina’s, have already voted to participate.

Susan Pendergrass (14:45):
Where does Missouri stand?

Shaka Mitchell (14:59):
Probably not much discussion yet. It doesn’t go into effect until 2027, so there’s time. But Missouri is in a good spot—you’ve already got scholarship organizations and experience with tax credit programs.

Susan Pendergrass (15:20):
What about blue states like Oregon or California?

Shaka Mitchell (15:27):
Great question. All eyes are on states like California, Pennsylvania, New York. There are a lot of taxpayers there.

Imagine millions of California taxpayers sending $1,700 each to scholarships in Missouri. It would be crazy for a governor to allow that much money to leave their state. But we’ll see.

Susan Pendergrass (16:13):
What do you think those states will do?

Shaka Mitchell (16:25):
Hard to say, but some Democratic governors have said they’re researching it. It’s not really a partisan issue—it’s just the tax code. And everyone pays taxes.

Susan Pendergrass (16:55):
It’s an interesting political move—making school choice national.

Shaka Mitchell (16:59):
Exactly. And because it’s tax-based, it reaches everyone—Republican, Democrat, or Independent.

Are states really going to let billions in scholarships go to other states? I doubt it.

Susan Pendergrass (17:45):
It’ll be interesting to see how private school supply responds. Like in Arizona, where more parents have access, vendors have stepped in with customized, creative options. This could fuel huge innovation. The fact that it’s unlimited in size is surprising.

Shaka Mitchell (18:43):
Yes. These federal scholarships could stack on top of state programs.

Say your state gives $6,000, but tuition is $9,000. The federal credit could close that gap. That’s a big deal.

Susan Pendergrass (19:38):
Will there be a lawsuit?

Shaka Mitchell (19:39):
There probably will be. Lawsuits are easy to file. But this program is part of the tax code—it’s hard to challenge. It’s not clear who would even have standing.

If unions want to burn money on a lawsuit, I say go ahead.

Susan Pendergrass (20:27):
I think what works against them is how happy families are with these scholarships. Satisfaction is high.

Shaka Mitchell (20:53):
Yes. Since 2019, we’ve seen an explosion of education freedom.

And there’s now long-term data—like from Ohio—showing EdChoice students, especially Black and brown students, have higher college attainment. That kind of data is compelling.

Susan Pendergrass (21:59):
And the ROI is incredible. You keep one kid out of prison or help one finish college—you’ve already saved more than the scholarship cost.

These families take $6,000 when the public system spends $18,000. They make it work. I’ve never seen anything in traditional public education with this much impact.

Shaka Mitchell (23:10):
It reminds me of the early 2000s with the excitement around No Child Left Behind.

But this is even more grassroots. Parents are organizing—helping each other on Facebook, answering questions, forming communities. That’s powerful. You can’t put that genie back in the bottle.

Susan Pendergrass (24:34):
Right. I don’t think we’ll go from more choice to less. And I know people who considered moving to Missouri until they realized they couldn’t pick their child’s school.

Kids from these programs are having their own kids now. It’s not going backward.

Shaka Mitchell (24:40):
Exactly.

There was a great article today in the New York Times saying, “The monopoly is dead.” I mean—from the New York Times!

Susan Pendergrass (25:21):
That’s what these lawsuits feel like: a desperate last gasp.

Never underestimate parents. They’ll show up. Thank you so much for joining us today. That was fascinating. I know you’ll be following the lawsuit.

Shaka Mitchell (25:59):
Happy to do it. Thanks for having me, Susan.

Susan Pendergrass (26:01):
Great, thanks.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

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Waiting for Perception on Crime to Change Is Not a Winning Strategy for St. Louis

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 00:29:12 +0000

I’ve highlighted the progress St. Louis has made in reducing crime in recent blog posts. The improving data are positive news, and city leaders have taken several steps in the right direction to make this possible. While St. Louis still experiences high levels of crime well above the national average, things are trending in the right direction with homicide rates at the lowest in a decade However, even though crime is declining, that doesn’t mean that citizens’ perception of crime is changing.. Even if this trend of lower crime continues, it likely won’t significantly impact how safe people in the city feel. People don’t tend to make judgements of safety based on numbers alone.

In March of this year, KSDK 5 published an article titled “St. Louis leaders say crime is at a historic low, but public perception takes time to catch up.” The issue is that this isn’t necessarily true. Perception does not always “catch up,” although there certainly can be lag effects between the reduction in crime and the perception held by citizens. In fact, there are over 30 years of surveys from Pew Research showing that Americans believe there is more crime in the United States in the year they were surveyed than the year before. Violent crime rates have dropped by almost half over the span of these surveys beginning in 1993.

Even at the local level, citizens have misperceptions about crime and where it is occurring. Brookings surveyed people from some of the biggest cities in the United States, including Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. One of the most common complaints was fear of going downtown due to higher crime. Data show that downtowns accounted for a very small percentage of the increase in crime in these cities. For example, Chicago experienced a 48% increase in property crime between 2019 and 2022, but downtown only accounted for 6% of this increase.

The examples above demonstrate that numbers and time don’t always solve the issue of the perception of crime not matching reality. If St. Louis is to close the gap, it must start with the appearance of the city. Police Chief Tracy briefly mentions in a quote from the KDSK article that quality-of-life crimes need to be addressed.

Quality-of-life crimes (substance use, panhandling, etc.) have an impact on how people feel about a particular area. Former New York City police commissioner William Bratton believed this so much that he implemented “broken windows” policing back in the 1990s, which was intended to crack down on these lower-level crimes. The rationale behind this was that by preventing smaller crimes, it not only prevented worse ones from occurring, but also symbolized that the city had control over the area.

St. Louis would benefit from following in the footsteps of New York and addressing lower-level crimes. A short drive across the city is enough to see the number of panhandlers and abandoned buildings in the area. Downtown is a prime example of an area where worries of crime have contributed to empty buildings. Multiple restaurants downtown have closed or cut hours due to the lack of business this year.

Preventing these quality-of-life crimes and cleaning up the streets impacts where people choose to go and helps determine how safe they feel in an area. It’s intuitive that citizens will make judgements on levels of crime based on the conditions of buildings and what is occurring on the streets more than what data shows.

Public perception to is unlikely to shift based solely on crime statistics. 30 years of data demonstrate this. Instead, it would be more beneficial to take appropriate measures to clean up the streets regardless of how much crime numbers are going down, because people will always care more about their own intuition when it comes to safety rather than the numbers.

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In St. Louis County, Who Will Audit the Auditors?

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 00:34:13 +0000

A version of this commentary appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

When one thinks of no-show political jobs in Missouri government, most people (at least those with a knowledge of Missouri history) would think of the infamous Pendergast political machine of Kansas City a century ago. Giving out jobs to political supporters who rarely, if ever, were required to actually show up to work was a staple strategy of that machine (and many others). Over the past decade though, there has been another job reminiscent of the well-paid, no-show jobs of political yore: the St. Louis County Auditor.

In June, the St. Louis County Council fired the county auditor, Ms. Toni Jackson, for lack of work output after her office completed only two audits in her more than three years in the position. (The county auditor is one of the only jobs in county government that reports to the council instead of the county executive.) Jackson had been hired in 2021 after the council had fired the previous auditor, Mr. Mark Tucker, also for lack of audit output. How little work have the last two auditors been doing? A quick perusal of the St. Louis County Auditor’s Office website shows that the office has released just 13 reports since 2018. Many of these reports do not qualify as “audits.” For example, three of the 13 reports were short 2018 memos about pet adoptions.

By comparison, the St. Charles County Auditor’s Office released 13 audits in 2024 alone, many of them substantial. If you are keeping score, that is 13 audits in one year in St. Charles County, and 13 reports (including a few actual audits) over eight years in St. Louis County. As frustrating as the lack of production in St. Louis County has been, one almost has to admire the audacity of it all. In Tucker’s case, he also wasn’t properly qualified for the job, so some of the blame for hiring him was on the council. In Jackson’s case, she was well-qualified, at least on paper, so the fact that she didn’t do the work is all the more frustrating.

It’s not like St. Louis County government is so clean that it has no need for auditors. I know of at least two cases of county employees embezzling large amounts of money in the past two decades. A qualified (and courageous) auditor could have raised questions about the activities of former St. Louis County executive Steve Stenger, who went to prison for various nefarious activities right when the prior auditor was busily engaged in doing nothing. A state audit of Stenger’s criminal actions as county executive identified Tucker’s lack of qualifications and actions as one of the reasons Stenger got away with his activities for as long as he did. Stenger, a CPA himself, was well aware of Tucker’s poor record as auditor. The former county executive routinely criticized the council for hiring Tucker while quietly benefitting from Tucker’s inability (or desire) to track any of Stenger’s illicit actions.

There is a pressing need for quality audits in local government. In a review of New York State comptroller audits of New York municipalities between 2003 and 2009, 234 out of the 259 audits included reports of deficiencies and recommendations for improvements in internal controls. Twenty-five percent of those cities with internal control problems had funds missing or unaccounted for (though outright fraud or theft was likely not the reason in every one of those instances). Within St. Louis County, two unsupervised clerks were charged in 2023 with stealing $650,000 from the village of Flordell Hills.

One of the recent St. Charles County audits identified several county-operated phone lines that the county was improperly paying phone taxes on. (As a government agency, it is supposed to be exempt from those taxes.) The audit identified the oversight and the matter was corrected. Have the last two St. Louis County auditors saved taxpayers money with insightful analysis and helpful digging? Since it is impossible to identify problems by audits when you don’t do any real audits, we all know the answer to that question is “no”.

Unreliable auditors have compromised the effectiveness of St. Louis County government in recent years. While outside auditors have reviewed the county’s annual financial statements for accuracy, the lack of a proactive internal auditor has deprived county residents and taxpayers of the watchdog they need and deserve.

Tom Pendergast may have mastered the use of the no-show political patronage job, but it was auditors who helped end his reign and send him to prison for tax evasion. Government auditors aren’t going to detect waste, fraud, or errors with taxpayer dollars if they don’t show up to do the job in the first place. Hopefully, that simple requirement will be understood by whomever the council hires next.

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“Just Let Me Write the Definitions”

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 22:06:04 +0000

In The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s legendary biography of Robert Moses, Caro describes how Moses was fully capable of getting his way by writing things in legislation that none of the legislators understood, even as they passed it. In one example early in Moses’s career (which I am going to do from memory and not look through the entire 1,200-page book for), Moses wanted to take over control of water rights off of Long Island. So, he drafted a rather innocuous bill that contained an opaque reference to legislation from the mid-1800s about water rights off of New York, but which otherwise was written in the same manner as all other water rights–related issues that the legislature was familiar with in the 1920s. None of the legislators or their aides bothered to find and read that mid-1800s law (which was probably much harder to do before computers), so they voted on and passed a new law that they thought did X, when it in fact it did Y. Moses, of course, wanted it to do Y, and by the time the legislature discovered the difference it was too late to do anything about it.

This brings us to the recent Missouri Supreme Court ruling on whether or not counties can collect the sales tax on marijuana in incorporated parts of a county. The court ruled that counties can only collect the tax in the unincorporated parts of a county. This is what the state constitutional amendment said, so in that respect the court’s decision makes sense. However, the way the constitutional amendment was written had a different definition of “local government” than was previously used and generally understood in Missouri. Do you think most (or any) voters read to page 19 of a 38-page ballot description to see that, in this case, the definition of a county only applied to unincorporated areas?

Longtime former Missouri State Senator Clifford Jones used to say (I’m paraphrasing here), “You can pass any bill you want. Just let me write the definitions.” That is what the ruling by the Supreme Court is rewarding, and perhaps it had no other choice in the matter. We let initiative petition writers create a major change regarding how local governments operate, which very few people will see or understand, and then that change becomes law.

To be clear, county taxes are almost always collected countywide, not just within unincorporated areas. Yes, there are a few other exceptions, such as utility taxes, but that doesn’t justify initiative petition writers using obscurity as their ally, as in this case. (I am not disputing that a majority of Missourians wanted legalized marijuana. My concern is with the use of legal minutiae in initiative petitions to get other changes made at the same time.)

Missouri needs to reform initiative petition rules to make amending the Constitution more difficult. (In a future post, I will go into more detail about the specific reforms we need.) Otherwise, we will be subject to more well-funded, out-of-state efforts to change Missouri laws using seemingly popular ideas as cover for making major legal changes via obscure and unread ballot language. Did you read the 38-page document that accompanied the marijuana vote and described all of the legal changes? I doubt it.

Robert Moses would be proud of efforts to get what you want by secrecy. We are a republic, not a direct democracy, and we should act like it. Missouri needs initiative petition reforms.

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What Could New Executive Orders on Nuclear Mean for Missouri?

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 02:15:10 +0000

In a recent op-ed, I discussed how national security may once again be a catalyst for the development and deployment of new nuclear technology. President Trump’s new executive orders on nuclear power offer potential opportunities for Missouri to consider. Other states, such as New York, are using next-generation nuclear designs to fortify their grids in a time of growing electricity demand. Missouri should be aware of these new developments.

Below are some new directives that could be relevant to our state’s energy future.

Expediting Nuclear Construction at Federal Sites

One order calls for the deployment of advanced nuclear reactors at both military installations and Department of Energy (DOE) facilities, with timelines that call for completion of the projects near the end of President Trump’s term. To support these goals, the Secretaries of Energy and Defense are required to collaborate with the Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality to apply existing and establish new exclusions to certain requirements from the onerous National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

If next-generation reactors are brought online, then this could trigger a broader wave of nuclear construction across the country, as another order requires the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to “establish an expedited pathway to approve reactor designs that the DoD or DOE have tested and demonstrated.”

Essentially, it seems the administration is trying to lighten the load of nuclear regulation for the DoD and DOE, and if they succeed with these new reactors, then utilities and developers could follow in their footsteps.

Reevaluating Longstanding Regulation and Radiation Standards

One of the primary barriers to new nuclear development has been construction costs. Many of these costs have stemmed from the adoption of NEPA and the incident at Three-Mile Island (TMI) creating new, stringent regulations.

One study notes that for reactors already under construction when the accident at TMI occurred, median costs were almost three times higher and plants took almost twice as long to complete (not including costs of interest, delays, etc.) than plants that received their operating licenses before TMI. NEPA also had a similar, yet smaller, effect on construction costs and timelines.

To address these issues, another order calls for sweeping reform of the NRC’s operations and regulations. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is directed to help reorganize the NRC in order to better support innovation and expedite licensing.

Reform is also targeted at the longstanding radiation standards established in the 1970s. To oversimplify, these standards assume there is no safe threshold of radiation exposure, even those below levels that naturally occur in the environment. Essentially, if a nuclear developer can reasonably lower its levels of radiation exposure, it should, regardless of cost or relative risk. These policies have contributed to rising costs and a lack of predictability in both the licensing and construction process. The new executive orders direct the NRC to consider adopting a fixed and predictable exposure threshold, which should improve the environment for financial investment in nuclear.

These are just some of the key changes that are occurring in nuclear energy. If Missouri is to take part in the industry’s growing resurgence, we should be paying close attention to these developments. One way to do this is by establishing a Missouri nuclear advisory council. Such a council could bring experts together to present critical information for new development, assess emerging opportunities, and identify areas for improvement within the complex and rapidly changing nuclear landscape.

Listed are all four executive orders, each issued on May 23, 2025:

(1) Deploying Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies for National Security

(2) Reinvigorating the Nuclear Industrial Base

(3) Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

(4) Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the Department of Energy

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The Lost Decade of Education Reform with Steven F. Wilson

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 20:49:39 +0000

In this episode, Susan Pendergrass is joined by Steven F. Wilson, senior fellow at the Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research and author of The Lost Decade: Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America, to discuss the rise and decline of the “no excuses” charter school movement.

They examine how once high-performing urban charter networks lost their focus on academic achievement, why ideological shifts around DEI and anti-racism took root, and what it will take to re-center public education around effective instruction. Wilson also explains the importance of urgency in school leadership, the evidence behind student outcomes, and more.