Right now, Missouri only classifies a school as unsafe if it has a high rate of violence and a high number of expulsions for three years in a row. Because expulsions almost never happen, the conditions are almost impossible to meet. As a result, no school is ever designated as unsafe, and families aren’t allowed to transfer out.

Changing one word, from “AND” to “OR,” would finally make the rule work the way federal law intended.

What doesn’t work

Since the law passed, there have been nearly 19,000 violent incidences in Missouri schools and over 4,000 weapons violations. In 2024, more than 12,200 Missouri students attended schools that had at least one violent incident in each of three consecutive years, 2022, 2023, and 2024. Even with these numbers, the state has not identified a single school as unsafe.

Missouri schools expelled zero students in 2024 and only five students in 2023. With so few expulsions, the Unsafe School Choice Option almost never applies, even in schools with serious safety problems.

The simple fix: change one word

In places like Poplar Bluff, University City, and the City of St. Louis, students face serious safety problems each year, yet their families have never been told about their rights.

Missouri should replace the word and with or.
A school should be designated unsafe if it has serious violence, or a high expulsion rate, or weapons violations.

This one change would help families learn when a school is unsafe and allow them to use the transfer option that federal law gives them.

More About the USCO

This one-pager explains how Missouri’s overly narrow definition leaves families without the protections ESSA guarantees and outlines steps policymakers can take to fix it.

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But don’t take my word for it. Look at the research. An economic impact study was conducted by the Center for Economic Information at the Department of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City that indicates between $15 and $17 million will be generated from the Zero Fare initiative. For those living paycheck to paycheck, as most Americans are, the cost of a monthly bus pass or cumulative single fares can make the difference in deciding which bills to pay. Tax revenue alone is expected to increase about $700,000 from the increased spending, and 100 jobs would be created.

UMKC’s Center for Economic Information (CEI) has no such study on its website. And the public information officer at KCATA responded that the CEI had not yet presented the final version of its paper. So I asked for a copy of whatever the KCATA CEO had used to make his claim. I was sent a four-page “draft mini report” dated December 5, 2019. (A PDF copy of this mini-report can be found at the bottom of this page.) The report does not list an author. But it didn’t require a degree in economics to see serious flaws in the analysis.

First, the study does not contemplate the net effect of a fare-free bus system—it simply adds up the costs saved by passengers and ignores any additional cost occurring elsewhere. It does not consider any additional tax, reduction on city spending in other programs or additional costs to the KCATA due to increased demand and wear and tear. Like a child arguing in favor of getting a family dog, the report counts all the benefits and none of the cost. For this reason alone this mini-report ought to be dismissed immediately.

I shared the draft report with some university economists for their comments. Each of them pointed out the failure to account for additional spending to cover the lost fare revenue.

Dr. Howard Wall at Lindenwood University in St. Louis pointed out that the authors misapplied the model they used to calculate the benefit. Understood correctly, the model, called IMPLAN, calculates the impact of additional money injected into an economy from outside—such as the local impact of a large federal grant. But this is not the case with fare-free buses in Kansas City. The policy would only move money already within the local economy by shifting the burden of bus fare. The UMKC mini-report argues, in effect, that one can fill a bathtub by moving water from one side of the tub to the other.

Dr. Byron Schlomach at Oklahoma State University was dismayed by the speciousness of the claims of growth in regional gross domestic product (GDP).  The only way regional GDP could rise by the amount claimed in the analysis is if free buses attracted huge numbers of people (or made workers more productive) and added money or physical capital such as buildings and machines. As you can guess, there is no evidence for this anywhere. It’s hard to imagine any scenario in which eliminating bus fare in Kansas City attracts significant residents, jobs, or capital.

Dr. Schlomach also offered another compelling point. He wrote by email, “Pricing plays an important role even in 90% subsidized, publicly-owned enterprises like bus transit. It can provide information for where and when the service is most highly valued and serve as an indicator for where resources should be allocated.” How would KCATA collect information on the popularity of routes if not through the farebox? Perhaps it could install people-counting sensors on every bus entrance, but then that too is an additional expense not considered in this analysis.

But the giveaway from UMKC is on the last page. The draft mini-report spends one-fifth of its total content discussing the ideas of Henri Lefebvre, a 20th-century French Marxist philosopher and sociologist. Why this is included in a memo claiming to be an “economic impact” analysis is a mystery. But it indicates that this was not an attempt to understand the impact of a significant change in public policy—it does none of that.

Rather, it seems that advocates of fare-free buses, aware that the research and experiences of others who have considered fare-free buses, sought out someone willing to make dubious claims of a positive economic impact. That UMKC lent its name to this is a shame.

The post About That “Economic Impact Study” Conducted on Free Bus Service in Kansas City . . . appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

You can view the booklet here, or download the .pdf at the link below.

The post Condition of Education in Missouri: 2019 appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

And guess who also eschews letter grades for schools? Missouri. The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) recently released the list of Targeted Schools (pretty bad) and Comprehensive Schools (the worst of the worst). Seemingly, this is to be compliant with the federal law to release the list of the lowest five percent of schools in the state in terms of performance, although neither list quite matched that mandate in numbers.

As I converted the PDF lists of Targeted and Comprehensive Schools to an Excel file that I could use (meaning merged with performance and demographic data), I kept having to remind myself which list had 64 schools and which had 323. Targeted and Comprehensive don’t carry much meaning to me. At least these 387 schools got some sort of label. The other 2,200 or so purposefully aren’t “labeled.” Rather, they get a score between 0 and 100 that reflects the number of possible points that a school received (with tons of extra credit points available) divided by their possible points. Parents in the state have been trained to look for the number 70, because that’s the threshold for accreditation.

So, which Missouri schools are doing well and which are doing poorly? Maybe ask your neighbor or the parents on the sideline at this weekend’s soccer game. They probably have some sense of what “most” people think are the “good” schools and which ones to avoid. They may be right, they may be wrong. I don’t recommend turning to DESE to figure it out.   

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Let me re-set the stage. Missouri’s Sunshine Law (RSMo 610) requires municipalities and other public bodies to provide records of public interest, with some exceptions. It also states that if there is a charge billed to the requester, the municipality fulfilling the request should use employees of the public body that will result in the lowest amount of charges for search, research, and copying time.

Obtaining records of city expenses over the last five years is central to our project, and because there are so many cities in Missouri, it has been interesting to see the wide variety of reactions we have received from our uniform request (available below). As my colleague Scott Tuttle has noted before, responses to our inquiries have been uneven, with many cities promptly providing us the information we requested for reasonable fees, while others were less responsive and charged more.

For instance, the city of Festus took several days, waived their fees (as they are allowed to do) and gave a detailed Excel spreadsheet of their spending, which can be filtered and easily searched. Smithville took one day to fulfill the request and charged $20.00 for its records in PDF form. Meanwhile, Manchester—which to be fair is a city larger (population ~18,000) than either Festus (~12,000) or Smithville (~9,500)—told us it would cost approximately $1,200 and take up to four weeks for its staff to complete the response to my request.

Why the huge discrepancy in cost? The law does not specify the format in which information should be kept, or what a reasonable fee to charge is. To some degree this ambiguity makes sense, because the law has to be flexible enough to address situations and requests not considered when the statute was written. But should that gray area allow locales to drag their feet or (arguably) overcharge for documents that should be easy to access, while nonetheless complying with the law?

Although the responses from these three cities fulfilled statutory obligations, Festus and Smithville’s responses seemed to be most faithful not only to the law, but also to its spirit. As for Manchester’s response, you can judge for yourself.

It is puzzling with the technology available today why our cities and counties don’t simply publish their “checkbook” information online. There are plenty of free or low-cost platforms to keep these records up-to-date and accessible (look at what Manchester’s neighbor Ballwin is doing), and given the taxpayer interest and treasure involved, why should obstacles get in the way of accessing that information?

Click on the link below to see the request we sent out

The post How Easy Is It to Get a Sunshine Request Fulfilled? It Depends. appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Around the country, states are creating and expanding educational options through the use of vouchers, education savings accounts (ESAs), and tax credit scholarships. Similar proposals have been put forth in Missouri. To inform the discussion regarding these proposals, the Show-Me Institute conducted a survey of private school leaders in Kansas City and Saint Louis. The survey asked school leaders to indicate their willingness to participate in a state-sponsored private school scholarship program at various price points and with varying regulations. This paper presents the findings of our survey. Additionally, we use the survey responses to generate estimates of the costs or cost-savings that would be incurred if the state created a private school scholarship program. The research questions and some of the key findings are below.

At what price point are private schools willing to fill available seats with students supported by a state-sponsored scholarship program?

• Seventy percent of private school leaders in Kansas City and Saint Louis indicated they are interested in a state-sponsored scholarship program.
• A relatively modest scholarship of $3,000 would entice more than half of the schools to participate in the program, opening up more than 2,000 seats to new students.

What regulations or program requirements are private schools willing to accept when participating in a state-sponsored scholarship program?

• Private schools are sensitive to program requirements and are less inclined to participate when strings are attached. Specifically, most private schools want to maintain their current admissions procedures and they are less likely to participate if they are required to provide transportation.
• Religious private schools are concerned about maintaining their religious identity. Seventy-one percent indicated they would not participate if they students were allowed to opt out of religious services or classes.

What would be the fiscal impact of a state-sponsored private school scholarship program?

• Estimates vary depending on the scholarship amount and the assumptions in the model, but a well-designed voucher/ESA or tax credit scholarship program could save state and local school districts millions of dollars. The most cost-savings would be realized with a scholarship of $3,000.
• Vouchers and education savings accounts could generate significant cost-savings, but the biggest savings could come from a tax credit scholarship program where the credit is worth less than 100 percent of the donation. This type of program could generate cost-savings in excess of $20 million.

Read the fulll essay: (PDF)
View the presentation:  (PDF)

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Offering middle-school math teachers bonuses up to $15,000 did not produce gains in student test scores, Vanderbilt University researchers reported Tuesday in what they said was the first scientifically rigorous test of merit pay.

Some 296 middle-school math teachers — two-thirds of the district’s middle-school math teachers — volunteered to participate in the experiment. Half were placed randomly in a control group, while the rest were eligible for bonuses of $5,000, $10,000 or $15,000 if their pupils scored significantly higher than expected on the statewide exam known as the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program.

Except for some temporary gains for fifth-graders, though, their students progressed no faster than those in classes taught by the 146 other teachers.

The PDF for the study is available online.

As a merit pay advocate, I’d love to disparage these results as the product of some unsound methodology, but I can’t, in good faith, do that. This seems like a relatively clean experiment. Yet merit pay supporters need not abandon their cause. The study provides good answers, but the questions may be too narrow to be fully relevant. For example, in evaluating the responsiveness of teachers to potential performance bonuses, the study approximates what a labor economist would call elasticity of effort but not elasticity of labor supply. Put differently, the study suggests that the performance of existing teachers may not change in the presence of performance incentives but the study does not consider the dynamic changes in the overall teaching pool that may result from implementation of merit pay programs. More research must be conducted to evaluate whether merit pay attracts a better pool of educators who, in turn, have positive impacts on student performance.

The post Does Merit Pay Get a Passing Grade? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As unlikely as it may seem, this middle-aged, middle-income, Midwestern state is pushing the envelope on its way toward fundamental tax reform. […]

[A]lthough Missouri’s revenue replacement could prove difficult politically, the benefits from reform could be enormous if the process is administered well and the constitutional amendment is carefully crafted.

In their discussion, the authors cite Prof. Joseph Haslag and Abhi Sivasailam’s recent Show-Me Institute policy study, “Previous Estimates Overstate ‘Fair Tax’ Rates, Harms,” in the appendix.

Laffer, et al., also include a comparison of Missouri and Tennessee, and they provide evidence that Missouri would experience additional growth if it eliminated its personal income tax. From chapter 2:

During the past 10 years, if Missouri had just caught up with the average of the states with no income tax, the average Missouri resident’s income would be more than $12,000 higher. That is amazing. Taxes really do matter. […]

The evidence is clear: States without an income tax outperform in every conceivable fashion than their higher-taxed brethren and have more tax revenues.

Given the data at hand, it is hard to imagine any more conclusive results from a cross-section time series of states that could be obtained in favor of Missouri’s tax proposal. Like many states in our current economic climate, Missouri needs help, and from the looks of it, a switch from onerous income taxes to broad-based sales taxes is exactly what the doctor ordered.

This echoes what Jenifer Roland and Dave Roland concluded in their 2009 policy study for the Show-Me Institute, “All Caught Up: How Tax Policy May Have Allowed Tennessee to Outgrow Missouri.”

The state snapshot for Missouri contains some good news and bad news. In 2008, Missouri’s personal income per capita cumulative growth is higher than the national average, but the state experienced negative net migration for the first time in a decade. This indicates that, when voting with their feet, people are choosing to locate outside of Missouri. On the 2010 ALEC-Laffer State Competitiveness Index, where 1 is the best and 50 is the worst, Missouri has an economic performance rank of 35 and an economic outlook rank of 15.

The post Missouri and the Show-Me Institute Featured in Rich States Poor States appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

1. This production incentive encourages overproduction. This is undesireable from an environmental perspective, because it leads to deforestation. It’s also detrimental for the American economy because it results in an inefficient allocation of resources.
2. It increases the cost of fuel for taxpayers. Each gallon of ethanol that is produced costs them $4.18. This is separate from and in addition to the price that they pay at the pump. In a piece on The Huffington Post, Nathanael Greene explains how this happens:
   

   [N]ext year the oil companies will be required to buy 12.6 billion gallons of conventional corn ethanol, but because tax payers are giving them $5.85 billion they’ll consume 1.4 billion more than required. That works out to $4.18 per extra gallon.

3. It drives up the prices for corn, soybeans, and wheat. This is bad for consumers because they have to pay more for food. This is also bad for the environment because it leads to land-use change and further overproduction and deforestation. The FAPRI report quantifies that eliminating the tax credit for corn ethanol would cause the prices of these grains to fall. According to p. 64, if the production incentives were removed, the average corn prices would decrease by approximately $0.15 per bushel during the 2010-2019 period:
   
4. It discourages the development of biofuels that are cleaner and more renewable than corn ethanol. These alternatives are forced to compete at a disadvantage because they do not receive the financial favor that corn ethanol does.

The corn ethanol production incentive program is an application of the broken window fallacy. Politicians in Washington fail to consider the cost to taxpayers, and the aforementioned negative consequences. When taxpayers are forced to spend their money on subsidizing the overproduction of corn ethanol, they cannot spend it on something else, such as infrastructure or education or alternative renewable fuels.

Supporters of the production incentives will argue that discontinuing the program would hurt farmers’ bottom lines. However, government payments constitute a very small amount of their compensation relative to sales, as shown on p. 62 of the report. For this reason, eliminating the production incentives would not actually be detrimental to this group:

The post Negative Unintended Consequences of Corn Ethanol Production Incentives appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Like Kansas, Missouri is significantly short of meeting all it’s transportation needs. Both states combined have about $60 billion in needs over the next 20 years.

At a recent transportation summit in Mexico, Mo., where MoDOT released a booklet (warning: PDF) detailing the challenges facing Missouri’s transportation system. Included was a list of projects that MoDOT deemed essential.

After detailing some of these projects for the KC Metro area, Cooper remarked:

Just how we fund any of these project no one knows for sure. But expect voters to be asked sometime in the next couple years for some kind of tax increase to fund roads.

Over here at the Show-Me Institute, we always have a few suggestions. David Stokes presented a policy study at the Mexico transportation summit detailing many of them. One is tolling. If the infrastructure improvements are really all that necessary, then people would be willing to pay fees for them when they actually use them, rather than only up front in the form of taxes.

In conjunction with this, public-private partnerships can help as well. Governments aren’t good at much more than actual governing, so instead of having the government take on the financial risk building a new toll bridge, for example, let the private sector do it. If the bridge is likely to be profitable in the long term, firms would be willing to pay for the right to build and operate government-owned infrastructure. This provides another source of revenue that can be used for projects that aren’t as easy to contract out to the private sector.

The best thing is, no new taxes are needed to fund projects this way. With tolling, the only people who have to pay for the projects are the people who use them. I can’t imagine anything that would be more fair.

The post On the Road Again … appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In a lot of organizations, the interns are treated like slave labor. They’re chained to a photocopier, and they get little or no contact with the real decision-makers in the organization. The Show-Me Institute is different. Our interns spend the vast majority of their time doing research and writing. Our current intern, Steve Bernstetter, had no less than three op-eds in the Saint Louis Business Journal this semester, as well as the opportunity to do an in-depth research project. Because there are fewer than a dozen people in the office, our interns get the opportunity to work closely with almost everyone on staff. That means you get an in-depth understanding of how a think tank works, including editing and publishing, event planning, and travel around the state.

More information and the application form is available in PDF form here. Please help us spread the word!

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Critics point out that Sullivan is not a city resident, and that the new governance arrangement will provide parents with little influence over the direction of the district. Moreover, there is no guarantee that this three-person governance panel will show more leadership coherence than the school board it replaces. In 2000, the Washington, DC, school board was re-shuffled to include four members appointed by the mayor and five members directly elected by voters. This fractured leadership structure has not worked very well. DC Mayor Anthony Williams described it as “trying to drive a car with one pedal.” Similarly, under the state take-over plan now under way, control over the district will be fractured among the governor, the mayor, and the president of the board of aldermen?three politicians who may have divergent views on how the district should be governed. Mayoral control could address both of those concerns, giving the district unified, coherent, and stable leadership under an elected official chosen by Saint Louis voters.

However, mayoral control will only make sense if Mayor Slay is willing to step up to the plate and make education reform a focus of his administration. And given the structural limitations on the power of the mayor in Saint Louis, the business community and other civic leaders must be willing to provide strong backing for the mayor’s reform efforts as well.

Here is the PDF of our recent study on mayoral control by Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute.

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