Susan Pendergrass speaks with Jude Schwalbach, senior policy analyst at Reason Foundation, about declining K-12 enrollment nationwide and what it means for the future of open enrollment. They discuss why enrollment dropped in 40 states since the pandemic, how districts have responded to increased competition from charter, private, and homeschooling options, why open enrollment tends to cause far less disruption than critics predict, the case for Missouri to catch up with its neighboring states, and more.

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Susan Pendergrass (00:00):
Thank you so much. Jude Schwalbach, you’re back, I think for the third time, from the Reason Foundation. We appreciate you joining the Show-Me Institute Podcast once again, taking the time.

Jude Schwalbach (00:09):
Yeah, thank you for having me. I’m always excited to join.

Susan Pendergrass (00:26):
We were chatting for a second before we started recording. I talk about open enrollment a lot in Missouri. We don’t have it. In so many places in this country, kids choose where they go to school. They don’t just look at their utility bill, or their parents make this life-or-death real estate decision where they have to look at all the schools before they buy a house so they can pick where they go. Missouri has been really reluctant to let anybody choose a school over being assigned to one. I’ve been saying for some time that we have this phenomenon happening simultaneously: we don’t have as many kids anymore. I’ve talked to demographers on this podcast. We know that birth rates topped out in 2009, kindergarten enrollment topped out in 2013, and graduating high school seniors topped out a year or two ago. It’s a fact you can see all through the pipeline: there are fewer kids. In my mind, that’s going to make open enrollment more attractive, because we’re going to have districts that, for no explainable reason, just don’t have as many kids. Some of our top-performing districts, like Clayton, used to have 2,500 kids and now have 2,000. I keep thinking districts are going to wake up and realize they either have to fire teachers or get in the open enrollment game and actually have faith that they’ll attract students. You recently wrote about this, and that’s why I wanted to bring you on. Tell me what’s going on nationally with these enrollment trends and how you think that impacts this idea of whether kids should be assigned or allowed to pick.

Jude Schwalbach (01:51):
Yeah, so the latest national data we have on K-12 enrollments is from fall 2024. What we see is that in 40 states, K-12 enrollments dropped, by about 1.4 million students between 2019, right before the pandemic, and 2024. However, 10 states did manage to avoid those drops. In two of them, Florida and Utah, enrollments remained flat, they didn’t gain or lose students. The other eight states, places like North Dakota, Delaware, Alabama, and Texas, gained students. They really stand out because they gained students when literally everyone else lost students. They didn’t gain a ton, those eight states together gained around eighty thousand students, but when everyone else is losing and you’re gaining, you look pretty good. There are probably three factors driving this. As you mentioned, there are just fewer kids. The number of births in every single state except Florida

Susan Pendergrass (02:39):
Right.

Jude Schwalbach (02:53):
had dropped between 2014 and 2019, and those are the corresponding kindergarten cohorts five years later, 2019 to 2024. So there are just fewer kids. There’s also migration. There’s plenty of domestic migration occurring. In some states, especially the ones that gained students, they received quite a few new residents from other states. There’s also states, I think it was North Dakota actually, that lost a lot of residents through domestic migration but received a bunch of new residents from abroad, which reversed their general population decline and had them gain students. Presumably those families from abroad brought students with them, which is part of why they’re not losing students.

Susan Pendergrass (03:41):
Mm.

Jude Schwalbach (03:53):
There are various economic factors driving those things. But another component is that satisfaction with public schools is at an all-time low, especially post-pandemic.

Susan Pendergrass (03:50):
Yeah.

Jude Schwalbach (03:53):
Families are starting to choose schools other than public schools at a much higher rate than they used to, because they have more options. There are states with universal private school choice programs now, which ten years ago were just a pipe dream. You could achieve a small, targeted private school choice program, but not much more. Then there are families choosing homeschooling. This has created a much more competitive education marketplace. And it’s not just states with robust private school choice programs where you see increased private school enrollment. Places like California and New York, which have no private school choice, have also seen their private schools increase in popularity in the interim while public enrollment has been declining. So if you’re going to be in this tighter market with fewer students and increased competition from homeschools and private schools, you’re going to want to provide some flexibility within the public system to make it more attractive to families. Flexibility like open enrollment. Sorry, that was a really long answer.

Susan Pendergrass (04:59):
No, I think it’s perfect. It makes me think of the cliche of skating to where the puck is going, rather than where it is right now. I feel like a lot of the pushback from folks is they’re just looking at where the puck is right now. They’re like, well, we’ve got lower teacher-student ratios, fewer kids in every classroom, this is great. Or, bringing in a whole new topic here, the federal tax credit that’s looming for private school choice, where people can donate their tax dollars to a scholarship organization, and you have leadership in the teachers unions telling Democratic governors, you better not do this, because the way we’re going to keep the kids in the public schools is to lock them in. That seems so short-sighted to me, when, like you just said, we can look at the enrollment trends and know that while there are fewer kindergartners today, ten years from now there’s going to be another five to ten percent drop-off in kindergartners. Who are we kidding?

Jude Schwalbach (05:58):
Yeah. As that market gets tighter, the funding those students produce is going to become more important to public schools. If you look at California, there’s a report by their Legislative Analyst’s Office that found that districts initially losing students through open enrollment, where students were transferring to other districts with better test scores, or maybe they wanted different academic opportunities like AP classes, those districts reached out to families and said, what can we do to get you to stay? Families said, actually, we don’t want to leave the district, we just want to go to a different school inside our district. Or they said they wanted a language immersion class or something along those lines. The districts responded to families’ frustrations, and not only did some of them stop the bleeding, they actually gained students from other districts because they were doing something good that families wanted. So when you create a more flexible system, you shouldn’t just assume you’re going to lose students. There’s real opportunity to gain students as well.

Susan Pendergrass (07:09):
Yeah, I’ve certainly heard superintendents say it forced them to stop and think about what they offer. What is our mission? What do we offer? When you have a captive enrollment zone, you don’t need to do that. I studied this a long time ago in Massachusetts, and people would say, well, you can’t really prove that districts respond to competition. But I did research on it and talked to superintendents. They said, we moved the date of our orientation so kids would come visit our school first, or we redid parts of the school that parents had been complaining about. There are these little micro-responses, which is to say they realized that this is no longer a guaranteed monopoly. They have to start responding to families. And in the end, everyone kind of wins.

Jude Schwalbach (08:01):
Yeah, another good example that builds on what you were just saying is Minneapolis Public Schools. For the past ten years, their enrollments have been in decline, largely because of competition with charter schools and other public schools in the area. But recently they reversed that ten-year decline and gained new students, because when they were doing school tours, they started following up with parents, saying, we just want to remind you what you thought, and these are the options we offer that other districts nearby don’t.

Susan Pendergrass (08:24):
Yeah. What’d you think?

Jude Schwalbach (08:33):
This is what makes us a unique education option. I think it’s no surprise that families liked that personal touch and started enrolling in Minneapolis Public Schools.

Susan Pendergrass (08:40):
Yeah, we need it. I know you study school finance a lot too. I wonder, in Missouri anyway, certainly within St. Louis County but across Missouri generally, the number of teachers being hired has only continued to increase. There’s this belief that spending on public education should only go one direction, up, regardless of the number of students, and that the number of teachers should only go up. Our state education agency, one of their only five goals is more teacher certifications, more, more, more, as though there’s an ever-expanding pool of students without looking at the reality. Oddly, I just did a podcast on Social Security and they’re doing the same thing. They’re not looking at the reality of the number of workers, they’re just operating on the assumption that there will always be more. Our schools are doing bond referendums to build new schools in Columbia, Missouri, even though the new ones they just opened are under capacity. Their enrollment is down two or three percent and expected to go down more, but

Jude Schwalbach (09:50):
Yeah, I think state policymakers should take steps to encourage districts to be more thoughtful about how they’re using taxpayer dollars. Indiana, where I live, did something a couple of years ago where districts have to prepare for permanent closures if one of their school facilities has lost ten percent or more of its students over a five-year period. It’s basically saying, look, if you’re not able to attract new students, if your local enrollment is declining, we shouldn’t be keeping these facilities open and draining taxpayer dollars. To be fair, this is a really painful decision for communities. No one likes to close schools, no one likes to rearrange staff. But it’s not fair to taxpayers to keep funding and maintaining buildings that are really only educating a small fraction of students. Florida also publishes a report on school facility capacity, but most states don’t even make this information public. A good first step is just making this sort of data available so families and taxpayers, when they get approached about bonds or hear about decisions to hire more staff, can ask, if your enrollment is declining and your buildings are half empty, why are you doing this? This sort of information helps hold district administrators accountable.

Susan Pendergrass (11:13):
Yeah, and the way schools are funded, and have been for at least a hundred years, these are very long-term commitments, because school districts are in the real estate business. They buy the land, build the building, fund it over fifty years rather than leasing, like a lot of charter schools do. They’re in the business of buying land and building buildings. And teachers, that’s a twenty-five or thirty-year commitment too. That’s also hard to adjust down. There are ways to do it, but districts are making these long-term commitments without paying close attention to the trends happening right under their nose. It’s a very odd situation to me, because you can see this coming, and we’re not getting a response out of the system. And to your earlier point about school choice programs taking students, they’re taking the blame. They’re blaming school choice for the fact that they have to close schools when that’s not actually the reason.

Jude Schwalbach (12:15):
Yeah, there’s a really interesting paper, I think published by Thomas Dee from Stanford in the last couple of years, where he looked at why 1.8 million students left the public school system since the pandemic. He looked at increased competition from private school choice, homeschooling, and changing demographics, whether it’s families moving across state lines or lower birth rates. What he found is that he couldn’t explain why one-third of those students exited the public school system. It’s just unexplained. There are demographic factors, there’s increased competition, those certainly matter, but they aren’t the only reasons. We don’t even fully know why some of these students are exiting the public system. But you can’t change the fact that they are.

Susan Pendergrass (13:00):
And you don’t address it by locking the door. They want to close the gate and lock it to stop it, and that to me is the most short-sighted approach.

Jude Schwalbach (13:09):
Yeah, I think locking students within a particular system without allowing them any agency in school selection is really unfair. If states are going to require you to go to school, you should have some agency in what that school is, because education is a really personal experience.

Susan Pendergrass (13:27):
Mm-hmm.

Jude Schwalbach (13:28):
Maybe you don’t get along well with a particular teacher, or their teaching style isn’t a good fit for you, or maybe you’re being bullied at school. But where you go to school shouldn’t ultimately depend on your parents’ largest financial investment, which is very much constrained by their income. Increasing open enrollment options, where if there’s space available,

Susan Pendergrass (13:45):
Yeah, yeah.

Jude Schwalbach (13:50):
we’re not talking about building new facilities or hiring new teachers to accommodate these students, these are spots that are actually open right now, and allowing students who don’t live in that district or attendance zone to attend that school, I think that’s just a common-sense reform.

Susan Pendergrass (14:05):
Do you think declining enrollment is going to spur that into action more? Is it going to have an impact on whether states like Missouri consider open enrollment?

Jude Schwalbach (14:17):
It seems like it could go either way, honestly. If there’s declining enrollment, that means there are spots available and districts would have an incentive to try to attract new students from other places. But on the flip side, individuals don’t always see the opportunity, they only see the cost, which is, we could lose students. What’s interesting is that when you look at open enrollment programs across the nation, especially the largest ones with the most established data, places like Wisconsin, Colorado, or Florida, you don’t see massive enrollment fluctuations when these programs are launched or even soon afterward. Instead you see small, incremental change, which means districts have plenty of time to adjust. In some cases it could mean they actually reverse course and start gaining students. I know in Missouri there’s a lot of concern in rural areas that they’ll only lose students. But the irony is that if you look at Wisconsin, which also has a lot of school districts, around four hundred, their rural districts actually gained students on net in their most recent open enrollment report. Sure, they lost some students, but they ended up attracting more students from their suburban counterparts. I think rural districts can absolutely compete successfully

Susan Pendergrass (15:22):
Yeah, we have over five hundred.

Jude Schwalbach (15:44):
in a more competitive education marketplace.

Susan Pendergrass (15:47):
We actually just released a report saying exactly what you just said, by my colleague Dr. Cory Koedel, showing that there isn’t a massive, or really much of any, enrollment disruption in the first three or four years after these programs pass, in states that have had them for a long time or even a short time. There really isn’t a disruption in the way that, when a bill gets a committee hearing in Missouri, folks from the school boards association or superintendents association say, oh my god, we won’t be able to keep up, the kids will be coming and going, it’s going to completely throw off our enrollment. But we’ve found there really isn’t a massive disruption. On the one hand, you have a pretty low cost to districts. On the other hand, as you mentioned, there’s a really large benefit possible for an individual family who has a child they have to force onto the bus every day because they dread going to school due to their teacher, bullying, or whatever. It’s a big benefit at the individual level for those families, and the cost is really quite small or very dispersed.

Jude Schwalbach (16:49):
Yeah, one thing I’ll note is that it benefits districts as well. In California there are small rural districts that actively rely on K-12 open enrollment to keep their doors open. One administrator basically said, look, this doesn’t let us hire new staff, we’re not making money off this program, but we aren’t letting staff go either. We’re keeping our doors open and the lights on in our schools. If they didn’t have open enrollment, that would not be happening. They’d have to shut the school or let go of staff. It’s really important to remember this is a real opportunity for districts to gain students.

Susan Pendergrass (17:30):
Yeah. As Cory points out all the time, if you have a fourth grade classroom with ten students and you can add two or three more, your marginal cost is almost zero. You probably already have the textbooks, the computer, the desk is sitting there, it’s literally idle assets. And those three students, even if they don’t bring a lot of money with them depending on how the funding follows the student, that’s a very low marginal cost for some marginal revenue. I think the more districts see it that way, because I don’t think in Missouri that funding for education is going to continue to just go up. We have a tight budget and we know enrollment is going down. That’s going to be a whole new horizon for folks to accept. And partly, similar to the findings across those forty states, we have more old people. We have fewer young people, more old people, and older people are expensive and need a lot of services. So schools and assisted living facilities are going to be competing against each other in a sense, and I think the trend would suggest assisted living wins out because there’s more of those people and fewer children. Some of these trade-offs are going to have to be considered in a way that no one

Jude Schwalbach (18:44):
Yeah.

Susan Pendergrass (18:48):
seems to want to do. So is open enrollment growing across the country, stagnant, or on the decline?

Jude Schwalbach (18:49):
Yeah, I think that’s certainly correct. Since 2021, eighteen states have strengthened their open enrollment policy in some capacity.

Susan Pendergrass (19:06):
Okay. I know our neighbor Kansas did, right? Oklahoma too, our other neighbor.

Jude Schwalbach (19:10):
Yeah, Kansas did it, Oklahoma too. Several of your neighbors have improved their open enrollment policies.

Susan Pendergrass (19:17):
Well, Oklahoma has complete universal school choice. If you move across our northern border, you can pick public or private. If you move across our western border, you can pick any public school. The big pushback on that was that the highest-quality, most desirable districts would see a rapid influx, and they haven’t. In Oklahoma you can either pick a public school or take a tax credit for private school. Then we have Arkansas as a neighbor, and they’re also universal. We’re kind of getting surrounded by it and we’re just holding out as the last bastion

Jude Schwalbach (19:43):
Yeah.

Susan Pendergrass (19:51):
of assigned public schools.

Jude Schwalbach (19:52):
Yeah, I think Illinois and Kentucky are about on par with Missouri, but I think their programs are actually slightly better. Not by much, but

Susan Pendergrass (20:03):
We sort of write off Illinois, like, at least we’re not Illinois, but they have a lot of public sector problems. Yeah, we have no open enrollment, very limited charter schools, and a very small scholarship program. So ninety-five percent of our kids are going to their assigned public school with no other option besides virtual.

Jude Schwalbach (20:23):
Yeah. But to answer your question, I think there’s a real opportunity for open enrollment to continue to grow, especially in states, I think Nevada is a good harbinger of what could be coming. They passed a strong within-district open enrollment policy last year, and that was a bipartisan bill, championed by the governor and Senate leadership that was Democrat. I think part of the reason they wanted to do that was to strengthen their public school system, to ensure that students had a reason to invest in their public schools, especially low-income ones, and one of the ways they wanted to do that was through creating flexibility within the public system.

Susan Pendergrass (21:12):
Yeah.

Jude Schwalbach (21:12):
That was one of the compromises that occurred there. You also see that in Kansas. That was an earlier reform, but also a compromise. That one was passed by increasing funding for public schools, and Republicans got increased flexibility within the public school system for students.

Susan Pendergrass (21:18):
Yeah. I mean, when you poll parents it’s ridiculously popular. Everybody clearly wants to pick.

Jude Schwalbach (21:37):
Yeah, families really want these policies. I think residential assignment works for some people, that’s the form of school choice they like. They like being able to purchase a home in a district and be guaranteed a spot. But if there are extra seats, there should be students who can fill those seats, especially when funding is flexible and portable.

Susan Pendergrass (22:03):
I believe declining enrollment is going to motivate open enrollment. I have a very optimistic view of this: superintendents and school boards are going to wake up and say, our enrollment is declining, the only way we can turn this around is to try to get kids from across the lines. In St. Louis County we have more than a dozen school districts within one county, for reasons that would take a two-hour podcast to explain. It’s very easy for a child to just cross the street and be in a different district, and I feel like districts are going to have a wake-up call and start trying to get those kids from across the street rather than making their parents move. Because it’s going to be that or lay off teachers. You can only keep your teaching staff for a limited amount of time if your enrollment is going down and your schools are staying open.

Jude Schwalbach (22:58):
I think you’re right, Susan. When you look at the NCES projections, which are a little dated at this point, they anticipate losing millions more students by 2031.

Susan Pendergrass (23:08):
Yeah, yeah. So our heyday in Missouri, you could kind of say we had a million students, we had about 952,000 or so. If you wanted to round up, you’d say Missouri has about a million students. Now we have, depending on how you count pre-K and ungraded, somewhere between 830,000 and 850,000. And the NCES projections you just mentioned project that Missouri will be below 800,000, more like 785,000. We can’t even round up to a million anymore. We’re going to be more like 780,000. That’s more than a twenty percent loss, and that’s a lot.

Jude Schwalbach (23:58):
Yeah, enrollment declines aren’t new to the US. This happened in the seventies and eighties, but it took almost two decades for districts to recover their lost enrollment. That’s a long time, and it means you can’t hang on to buildings or staff in that interim when you don’t have the enrollment to justify them.

Susan Pendergrass (24:19):
Yeah, and I think in Missouri, good.

Jude Schwalbach (24:19):
I don’t think they returned to 1970 enrollment levels until 1997, if I remember correctly. There’s the baby bust,

Susan Pendergrass (24:31):
Wow, because the baby boom went through and then there’s a baby bust. But we don’t have a baby boomlet on the other side. There’s no evidence of one right now based on global trends.

Jude Schwalbach (24:39):
Yeah, it was fifteen years later before they even saw that sort of resurgence in births. They didn’t know either, and we don’t know either.

Susan Pendergrass (24:47):
Yeah. Yeah. I like that, that’s hopeful, that’s true. It just frustrates me, because if Missouri wants to hold out as the last residential-assignment state in the era of declining enrollment, I just feel like, there’s a professor from SLU, Ness Sandoval, who talks about Missouri demographics a lot, and he’s not optimistic about where we’re headed. One thing I think we could do to turn it around is throw open the doors on school choice to try to get families to locate here, but we’re kind of doing the opposite. Well, thanks so much. I appreciate you coming on and explaining it. I think it’s pretty interesting stuff, and I think we’re going to have to talk about this more as more enrollment numbers come in and we see how folks respond. I’m hopeful that Missouri legislators will get it and will press for it in the 2027 session. We’ll be pressing for it at the Show-Me Institute, but maybe I’ll use all of your data, Jude, and hope they read it and see what’s on the horizon. That would be awesome. Thank you so much, I appreciate it.

Jude Schwalbach (25:47):
That would be great. Thank you, Susan.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Declining Student Enrollment and a Growing Opportunity with Jude Schwalbach appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

But one takeaway for me, as someone who has been in the field of education reform for decades, is that we need to stop apologizing and giving up ground because our work happens outside of the circled wagons of the education establishment. The fact is that partnering with parents instead of hiding things from them, giving parents access to the childcare setting of their choice instead of creating universal, government-managed pre-K programs, and letting parents decide where each of their children will attend school aren’t really reforms—they’re just common sense. And most people agree.

Take school choice, for example. It’s no longer a radical idea that must be wrangled with and heavily negotiated by state legislatures. Public opinion surveys repeatedly find that very few people are opposed to the idea, regardless of the type of program.

Teachers unions may have loud voices and large platforms, but that doesn’t mean that we have to set common sense aside. The idea that parents can be trusted should no longer be up for debate.

The post Why Is This Still a Debate? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

But boy, is there a lot of spending—some of which might be justified, such as expanding Interstate 70—but the emphasis on expanding government made the speech basically indistinguishable from a speech by a tax-and-spend liberal. The governor didn’t propose a single meaningful change to the state’s failing education system or suggest a single reduction in government. Nothing about further tax cuts. Nothing about anything truly aspirational, reform minded, or geared toward good governance at all.

It’s understandable that the governor would want to pursue some form of legacy initiative or project near the end of his final term. Frankly, redoing I-70 should be plenty. But programs that permanently expand the reach of Missouri’s welfare state—like a universal pre-K program that the Heritage Foundation has eviscerated time and again—run completely against the small government view that many politicians in Missouri had historically given lip service to.

Perhaps in future speeches and press availabilities, the governor will expand upon his State of the State remarks, adding back in some of the reform-minded small government conservatism.  The legislature has been advocating for a variety of these small government reforms, and I thought the governor’s office was in agreement. The governor can, and should, do better.

The post Missouri’s State of the Bloating State appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The problem is that the report quickly glosses past their acknowledgment of “decades of economic underperformance, population stagnation and racial division” to a future of growth and expansion in a mere nine years. And the path to achieving this miracle is less than clear. The report is peppered with buzz words, but short on detail.

As someone who spends time studying education policy and results across the state of Missouri, I’m very curious to know how this group plans to turn a school system in which just 18.5 percent of students score Proficient or above in math into a “talent engine.” The commission wants to ensure “that every student receives quality STEM education and exposure to various occupations beginning in pre-K and continuing through high school”? What does quality STEM education look like and who’s going to teach it? And don’t we have quite a long way to go there, given that the average high school ACT score is currently 16.6?

Action item number four is “Become a talent magnet and engine,” and that’s the only part of the plan that mentions education. “Successful” programs at local community colleges and universities are identified, but fewer than 60 percent of SLPS graduates enroll in college and the report acknowledges their dismal completion rates.

Not to be a wet blanket, but St. Louis is not going to be a talent engine or magnet until we figure out how to better educate the 82 percent of students who are not able to do math at grade level. All the jargon and buzzwords in the world won’t help a district with a mobility rate (a measure of how many kids joined or left a district in a given year) of over 46 percent. Turning this ship around will be difficult and will require big ideas and open-minded thinking.

St. Louis already has quite a few high-performing charter schools, but we could use more. There are existing charter school networks with proven track records of success in STEM education for disadvantaged students. The Denver School for Science and Technology (DSST) network, for example, serves nearly 7,000 students across nine middle schools and six high schools. Just 15 percent of DSST students are white and over 70 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. But here are the numbers that matter: DSST has had 100 percent college acceptance for its high school seniors for the last twelve years in a row. Its average SAT score of 1092 is higher than the national average of 1059. And two-thirds of its graduates become first-generation college students.

DSST is just one example. Cities like Denver that encourage strong portfolios of education options for their students become growth engines. Families want to stay and raise their children in these cities. Putting STEM materials in front of students who are stuck in schools that can’t teach them math isn’t going to cut it. Every parent in the St. Louis region should have several publicly funded options for educating their children—traditional public schools, charter public schools, private schools, or homeschooling. A robust system of choice should be our goal, not waving a wand over the existing system and imagining it will simply transform itself.

The post We Need Actions, Not Words appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Fortunately, the findings from a recent nationwide survey conducted by Gallup, the Strada Education Network, and the Lumina Foundation, suggest that a college degree isn’t necessarily the only thing that employers are interested in. Researchers looked at two types of credentials that can be earned without a college degree and measured their impact on the employability and the earning power of the people who earned them. The credentials studied were the following:

• Certificates “awarded by educational institutions for completion of professionally oriented courses that typically represent a year or less of work.”
• Certifications “awarded by independent bodies that verify specific skills and competencies through testing”

The survey looked at adults 18 to 65 years old who had no postsecondary degree and compared those who had earned a certificate/certification with those who had not. The results suggest that earning a credential offers some real benefits in terms of employment rate and income.

It’s important to note that the study involved subjects of widely varying educational levels. Some had been to college (but hadn’t earned a 4-year degree), while others hadn’t completed high school. Those who hadn’t finished high school are overrepresented in the non-credentialed group, while those who had gone to vocational/technical school are overrepresented in the credentialed group. This means that we can’t easily separate the effect of the credential from the effect of the amount of education a participant has had.

However, the study also found a benefit to having a credential among low-, middle-, and high-income earners:

There’s strong evidence that educational programs that result in students earning these certifications provide real benefits, but what does that mean for Missouri?

It could mean a lot, especially with respect to prioritizing needs when allocating the money Missouri spends on education. Credentialing programs appear to offer a positive return to students on the money invested in them. So why can’t these programs capture the imaginations of the public (and of policymakers) in the way that things like pre-K programs do—even though the case for the long-term benefits of pre-K is anything but ironclad?

Nothing against imagination, but when making spending decisions, policymakers are better off being guided by the facts. Although this survey covered adults aged 18 to 64, investing in high schoolers so they can earn industry-recognized credentials could help students leave high school qualified to enter the Missouri workforce immediately. In this case, the facts are lining up behind credentialing programs as a possible way to help Missouri’s workers and employers alike.

The post What Can Credentials Get You? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A voucher would be . . . taking public money and pouring it into a non-public entity. But pre-K doesn’t work like that and this tax doesn’t work like that. It’s not a voucher. What we are doing with pre-K instead of pouring money into [schools] from the public trough is we’re pouring more money into all of the [schools].

The mayor seems to think that money raised through a three-eighths percent sales tax is not the “public trough.” But his is a distinction without a difference; a program does not need to spend particular tax dollars in order to be considered a voucher.

It’s true, however, that many voucher programs use education dollars. National Public Radio, in an explainer piece on vouchers, said only that they are state dollars taken from “what the state would have otherwise spent to educate” children. Ed Choice, an organization that supports education vouchers, described vouchers as coming from “funds typically spent by a school district.”

Regardless of the tax source, vouchers are simply public dollars made available to families to offset the costs of the school they choose for their children, essentially functioning like a scholarship. Those public dollars can be raised from property taxes as in the case with local school funding, income taxes as in the case of federal programs, or sales taxes as in the case with the Mayor’s pre-K program. But they are all voucher programs.

It is understandable why the Mayor, in pitching his program to the education establishment, wants to avoid the term. Vouchers, and programs like it, have become toxic among public school bureaucracies since it would break their monopoly on public dollars for education. This is the main reason the public school districts in Kansas City oppose the Mayor’s proposal, but giving parents the power to choose which program is best for their kids is the strongest aspect of his plan.

Mayor James should be congratulated for recognizing and answering the demand for more and greater parental involvement in their children’s education. School choice is the trend in Kansas City and, despite its other significant shortcomings, his pre-K voucher program at least respects that.

The post Yes, the Mayor’s Pre-K Program Is a Voucher appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launched the Head Start program in 1965. It was expanded in 1981 and now has a $9 billion budget. Operated in Kansas City since 2005 by MARC, the program works to provide:

Comprehensive, high-quality birth-through-five early education services that facilitate healthy development including physical and social/emotional development and prepare children for school success.

Is it working? No. According to HHS’s own 2012 report, “after the initially realized cognitive benefits for the Head Start children, these gains were quickly made up by children in the non-Head Start group.” The report indicates this finding is similar to other studies published between 1995 and 2010. 

A 2013 story in The Washington Post is a pretty even-handed write up of the value of pre-K. The author points out that extrapolating findings from the HighScope Perry study (an influential pre-k study of a small group of children in Michigan) to larger populations like Kansas City’s is highly questionable. In discussing the fade out of any initial Head Start benefit, the author wrote:

Some Head Start supporters, like Danielle Ewen, formerly of the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), argue that this says more about K-12, and that what’s likely happening is that poor quality public schools are actually reversing Head Start’s gains.

If this is the case, children in the Kansas City Public School District can expect to see no long-term benefit whatsoever. Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution points not only to research on Head Start, but to large scale pre-K programs such as the Tennessee Voluntary Pre-K (TVPK) program. In those follow-up studies, children in the control group soon outperformed those who received the preschool benefit.

Using the state test data and the full randomized sample, the evaluators report negative impacts for reading, math, and science scores at the end of third grade for children assigned to TVPK. The negative impacts on math and science are statistically significant and substantive: children randomly assigned as preschoolers to TVPK had lost ground to their peers who had randomly not been offered admission to the pre-K program.

Whitehurst revisits this in a 2018 paper in which he writes:

Unabashed enthusiasts for increased investments in state pre-K need to confront the evidence that it does not enhance student achievement meaningfully, if at all. It may, of course, have positive impacts on other outcomes, although these have not yet been demonstrated. It is time for policymakers and advocates to consider and test potentially more powerful forms of investment in better futures for children.

As we wrote in a previous post, policymakers in Kansas City may not be interested in confronting such evidence. This is especially true of Whitehurst’s observation that direct aid to families, such as the earned income tax credit (EITC), “produced substantially larger gains in children’s school achievement per dollar of expenditure than a year of preschool, participation in Head Start, or class size reduction in the early grades.” 

Designing public policy is not easy. Neither is delivering effective education on a large scale. But we need to rise to the challenge of both. As it stands, the proposal of pre-K in Kansas City is unlikely to lead to significant long-term benefits for the children involved, especially if they matriculate into underperforming K-12 schools. A program with questionable efficacy that taxes the very low-income families it is meant to help seems, on balance, to make this plan more harm than help.

The post Pre-K in Kansas City Likely Won’t Deliver on Its Promises appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

On Tuesday, March 12, I appeared as a panelist on an American Public Square discussion titled “Pre-K for All?“ about the upcoming April ballot measure. Proponents of pre-K point to a single, small-scale study of a specific pre-K program conducted from 1962 to 1967. The study, called HighScope Perry, did show a positive relationship between participation in the program and educational and financial success. However, the program that was studied was intensive, expensive, and only included 123 children. While the Mayor and Mid America Regional Council (MARC) specifically cites the HighScope Perry study, the plan they endorse for Kansas City is nothing like what was done there.

Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution has written at length about the failure of larger-scale pre-K programs such as Head Start and the Tennessee Voluntary Pre-K Program to generate impressive results. We’ll discuss that research more in future blog posts. But in a survey of the research on various school-readiness interventions, Whitehurst pointed out that direct aid to families, such as the earned income tax credit (EITC), “produced substantially larger gains in children’s school achievement per dollar of expenditure than a year of preschool, participation in Head Start, or class size reduction in the early grades.” That is a fascinating bit of information and should be of interest to anyone who is serious about helping low-income children.

During the panel discussion I offered, “You could do more for poor families in Kansas City by removing the sales tax on food and by exempting, say, the first $26,000 of earnings from the earnings tax. You can do more by aiding families—giving them more money in their pocket—than you can by taxing them and providing a program.”

But Mayor James was not having it. He responded, “There’s no way that you can tell me, regardless of what study you may cite,” that by reducing taxes on the poor that they, “are going to use the money to educate their children.” And maybe they won’t, but the data Whitehurst cites don’t specify how families spend the extra money. EITC funds are not earmarked, yet this direct support to low-income families still outperformed pre-K according to Whitehurst’s research.

Perhaps what low-income families need is not to have more money taken away from them in order to provide them more services. Perhaps what they need is more money, more flexibility, more agency to address their own challenges as they see fit. Perhaps telling poor people that government knows best how to spend their money and educate their children isn’t the best way to solve problems. The research (at least if we go beyond a specific study that seems cherry-picked to support a rosy view of Pre-K programs) seems to suggest this, if only policymakers will listen.

The post Pre-K Supporters Dismiss Research on Efficacy of Pre-K appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Details and key questions of the sales tax plan — how the money is distributed, who oversees and manages the program, how outcomes are measured — remain a work in progress.

While the details of the 3/8-cent sales tax plan remain unclear, so too are the benefits. My colleague Emily Stahly wrote in late 2016 that,

In Georgia and Oklahoma—states with universal pre-K programs—there is evidence that pre-K has reduced achievement gaps. The jury is still out in New York, which established universal pre-K only two years ago. Tennessee, on the other hand, implemented targeted pre-K for low-income children. Positive results were evident when these children entered kindergarten, but the benefits began to fade by first grade. By third grade, these students were performing worse than other students on statewide assessments.

One much-heralded study claiming big successes as a result of pre-K was perhaps oversold. Mike McShane wrote for National Review,

If you look at the table [page 8 of the study by Heckman et al.] that describes the cohort of students the authors studied, you see an initially recruited sample of 121 students. The actual “treatment” of center-based child care from ages zero to five had 53 participants in one of the two programs and 17 in the other, for a total sample of 70 students. It is a huge leap to argue that such an intensive, hothouse study of such a small sample is proof that such an intervention would work at scale.

Pre-K education makes intuitive sense, but actual research suggests that it isn’t as simple as funding a program and getting results. Sometimes it seems to work, and sometimes it doesn’t. Similarly, we agree that K–12 education is a good idea and yet recognize that not every district does a good job of offering it.

One promising aspect of the plan, according to the Star, is that the program may be set up to offer tuition assistance for families to choose their own program, including from among public and private providers. Giving decision-making power to parents will increase the likelihood that the Pre-K providers will need to produce results if they want to attract students.

In any case, there’s no need for a headlong leap of faith into a costly pre-K program. If Kansas City leaders want to once again increase an already-high sales tax rate, voters need much more detail and likely more time, to evaluate the proposal and its promise.

The post Are Sales Taxes to Fund Pre-K a Good Idea? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Many people have been drawn to the discussion because of the unique political situation surrounding Amendment 3. It is a cigarette tax designed to fund pre-K education that is supported by tobacco companies and opposed by the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. How can you not be interested by that?

But let’s cut through the fog. Politics are interesting and might get folks hooked, but ultimately it’s the policy that should concern us.

Backers have some solid reasons to support the proposal. Funds will be made available to both public and private providers, which would, in theory, provide a wider set of options than if funding was restricted solely to traditional public schools. Additionally, the drafters of the Amendment have taken steps to try and insulate the program from the forces of the educational status quo by requiring funds generated by the tax to be kept separate from general revenue and be managed by an independent board.

That said, there are reasons to be concerned about this proposal. While insulating the board from the pressure of interest groups is a laudable objective, it could mean that the board is less accountable to taxpayers. The amendment language also states that the board needs to be “equitable” in its distribution of funds. If you’ve even casually followed discussions of education finance in Missouri and Kansas, decades-long court cases can be fought over exactly what “equitable” means. Is this just opening a similar can of worms?

And all of this dances around the more central question: Even if we think that pre-K is something worth supporting, is a tax on cigarettes an appropriate way to fund it?  Cigarette taxes are extremely regressive. Poor people are far more likely to smoke than their richer peers, meaning that the poor will bear the brunt of the tax increase. Smoking is also on the decline, risking future revenue and raising the possibility that services will be cut or pressure will be put on the legislature to divert general revenue to subsidize the program.

For someone who doesn’t smoke but wants pre-K for their kids, Amendment 3 might seem to offer something for nothing. Unfortunately, nothing is free in this life, and someone is going to have to pick up the tab. Whether or not that “someone” should be a group disproportionately made up of economically disadvantaged people is worth considering.

The post Amendment 3: Politics are Intriguing, but Policy Matters More appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Or, better yet, they may consider how little research there is on the matter. According to a recent article by Haley Glatter in the Atlantic, there are very few studies that thoroughly examine state-run and state-funded pre-K programs. Moreover, these studies are inconclusive on whether or not pre-K offers lasting benefits.

In Georgia and Oklahoma—states with universal pre-K programs—there is evidence that pre-K has reduced achievement gaps. The jury is still out in New York, which established universal pre-K only two years ago. Tennessee, on the other hand, implemented targeted pre-K for low-income children. Positive results were evident when these children entered kindergarten, but the benefits began to fade by first grade. By third grade, these students were performing worse than other students on statewide assessments.

Here are a few things we can take away from these states’ experiences:

• The quality of the pre-K programs offered matters immensely—not all pre-K is created equal.
• Good pre-K programs will not make up for the deficits of a failing K-12 system.
• There are only a handful of programs operating at a state-wide scale which makes it difficult to draw firm conclusions on pre-K.                                                                                                 

One of the lingering questions about Amendment 3 is what exactly the pre-K program it creates will look like. In his recent analysis of Amendment 3, the Show-Me Institute’s Michael McShane writes:

To date, it simply isn’t clear what the regulations for participating schools will be. In one sense, this uncertainty means we should probably reserve judgment, but in another it makes it hard to support a program when we don’t know what that program will ultimately look like.

On the one hand, it makes sense for us to gather as much information as we can about the effectiveness of pre-K programs before Missouri designs a program of its own. But then, does it also make sense to wait until we have a well-researched plan in place before amending the constitution and investing such a significant amount in early childhood education?

The post Is Expanding Pre-K a Good Idea? The Jury Is Still Out. appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Look at all these glamorous people eating canapés and drinking champagne in their seersucker suits and sundresses! Oh, no—is that what I think it is? RUN!

If you think it’s not a great idea to fund educational programs via cigarette taxes, you can start to feel like a skunk at a garden party.

Here in the great state of Missouri, on November 8 we will vote on a constitutional amendment that would establish a 60-cent tax per pack of cigarettes to create a fund for pre-K education. Backers believe that it would generate as much at $300 million per year, which would pay for tens of thousands of Missouri children to attend pre-K. They have an impressive advertising campaign and a strong social media presence highlighting the bipartisan support they have assembled for their plan.

On one level, I am sympathetic to their cause. I understand that there are perfectly defensible reasons to support raising cigarette taxes. Smoking is terrible, and we want fewer people to do it. Raising taxes will deter them. If we can provide pre-K with the funds such a tax generates, we’re killing two birds with one stone.

But there is more to this plan than meets the eye.

The largest financial backers of the amendment campaign have been big tobacco companies. Why, you might ask, is an industry looking to increase taxes on itself? Well, paired with the 60-cent tax on all packs of cigarettes is a 67-cent surcharge on so-called “wholesale” cigarettes—cigarettes produced by “small tobacco” companies not party to the landmark tobacco settlement that required the big tobacco companies to pay states in exchange for protection against future lawsuits. Big tobacco pays right around 67 cents per pack into these funds, giving small tobacco an edge in the marketplace. This amendment would eliminate that advantage.

What’s more, many anti-smoking and cancer-fighting groups have decided to oppose the amendment. They argue that a 60-cent tax is not substantial enough to deter folks from smoking.

For those of you keeping score at home: We have a cigarette tax campaign that is funded by big tobacco companies and opposed by the American Cancer Society. If I’m a skunk at the garden party, at least I’m in good company.

Setting the parlor intrigue aside, it’s hard for me to not think that for many Missourians, the real draw here is getting something for nothing. I don’t smoke, so I would never pay this tax. Most Missourians, particularly educated and wealthy ones, don’t either, so they won’t have to pay. If the state generates enough funds, there is good reason to believe that many middle-class children of nonsmokers will get pre-K without their parents having to pay a dime.

If we think one step further though, we see the problem. Cigarette taxes are about the most regressive tax we could possibly institute. Poor people pay the brunt of them. If this tax was going to be passed in 1950, when nearly half the population smoked, it would be spread more evenly across the populace. But it is 2016, and only a specific subset of Missourians smoke. What’s worse, a lot of those people are addicted to cigarettes, and we are preying on that addiction to fund something that we want.

Look at what happened in Arkansas, which instituted a lottery in 2008 to provide scholarships for students to attend college in the state. Like cigarettes, lottery tickets are disproportionately purchased by poor people. In Arkansas, scholarship recipients are disproportionately middle- and upper-income, making the scholarship lottery a pretty clear upward transfer of wealth. Sure, it sounded great at the outset, as non—lottery ticket buying parents eyed scholarships for their kids, but on the backs of the poor? It just feels unseemly.

There are reasons to support providing scholarships to pre-K to students in the state, but the how matters. How we fund those services, how we determine who is eligible, and how we pay for them is critically important. These considerations can get lost in big promises to people with little skin in the game.

The post A Skunk at the Pre-K Garden Party for Cigarette Taxes appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

For universal Pre-K supporters, this was a major loss, but for Missouri taxpayers, our “failure” to get the grant is actually a win. Federal grants have a history of costing states more over time—Race to the Top is a recent education-related example.

Missouri already has doubled its expenditures toward expanding early childhood education. The Department of Economic Development (DED) made $10 million available to promote the expansion of public Pre-K programs just last year.

Preschool education is where Missourians already have the most school choice. Expanding public options will only duplicate existing services, likely shifting some students from the private to the public sector, where there is no guarantee the services will be better.

Nationally, 74 percent of four-year-olds already are enrolled in Pre-K or home-based programs. Using listings from Great Schools, the table below highlights the number of private Pre-K options versus public ones in several of Missouri’s cities.

Research on the benefits of early childhood education has yielded mixed results. Even those studies showing significant benefits of preschool expansion touted by Gov. Jay Nixon as “proven” are subject to criticism. One comprehensive study on the effects of Head Start showed there was no long-term increase in cognitive abilities of children who participated in the early education program. Yet, Nixon gave the organization $7 million just last year.

Missouri taxpayers should not pay for services that already exist, especially if the research backing those services is shaky. There are better solutions to addressing the educational needs of children in poverty, ones that don’t include government mandates.

The post If You Like Your Preschool, You’ll Be Able to Keep-Not Again! appeared first on Show-Me Institute.