Krissia Campos Spivey is a rising national leader in ensuring equality of educational opportunity for Hispanic families. After raising the bar for parent-facing school choice resources in Spanish as a part of National School Choice Week, she’s expanding on that work as director of the newly launched Conoce tus Opciones Escolares (CTOE). In tandem with National School Choice Week, CTOE helps parents explore all of their K-12 education options, in Spanish, year-round.

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Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Empowering Parents of Every Background with Krissia Campos Spivey appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Healthcare supply is an especially important issue in China. Ground zero for the pandemic, China had already long been beset by shortages of healthcare professionals, largely thanks to the surprisingly low pay and status of the health care professions in that country. Despite this, China has (as far as we can tell) mitigated this problem by shifting the supply of health care professionals from other areas into the Wuhan region. (Emphasis mine)

Sometimes it takes a crisis to highlight what’s wrong with a medical system. In China, however, the coronavirus hasn’t uncovered any surprises. Instead, it’s thrown a spotlight on problems that have festered for decades, including the lack of a primary care system, and — most critically — a shortage of qualified medical personnel. Although reform efforts have been underway for years, the situation in Wuhan is a stark reminder of how far China must go to meet the minimal medical standards expected by its fast-growing middle class. . . .

For now, China can treat Wuhan’s shortage of doctors as a health crisis and mobilize qualified personnel from across China to work in the city. Indeed, 6,000 medical workers from across China have either arrived in the Wuhan area or will soon, and they will alleviate much of the pressure building up in hospital corridors. But they’ll stay only as long as the immediate crisis requires. When they leave, Wuhan — like most Chinese cities — will be left scrambling to find enough doctors to treat a long-term health-care crisis.

Meanwhile Italy, which has also been hard hit by the virus, has also been dealing with a shortage of doctors and facilities for many years. That shortage has only been accentuated by the severe pressure the coronavirus has placed on the Italian healthcare system in recent weeks:

“We have a health-care system in southern regions, especially south of Naples, where we actually have very few facilities,” said Prisco Piscitelli, an epidemiologist and vice president of the Italian Society of Environmental Medicine. Their ability to cope may be “even worse with the increased number of occupied beds in hospitals and intensive-care units.”

Hospital berths are only part of the answer. Italy is also suffering from a shortage of doctors. As many as 1,500 leave the country every year after finishing their specialization, according to doctors’ association Fnomceo.

Thankfully the worst of the coronavirus hasn’t hit the United States yet, and hopefully the disease will be brought under control before it reaches Spanish flu epidemic levels. Whatever the outcome, the experiences of China and Italy reemphasize the threat posed by uneven and inadequate healthcare supply, both in terms of medical professionals and medical facilities. The consequences of government intervention in the United States and in Missouri that exacerbates these shortages—whether by blocking interstate licensing reciprocity or erecting barriers to new healthcare facilities—will be borne by patients, even under non-crisis circumstances.

Reformers should continue to focus on bringing supply-side reforms into law because not only will such reforms help the public during periods of healthcare normalcy, but they will also help the public when a healthcare crisis is upon us.

The post In Crisis, Supply-Side Healthcare Reforms Are Even More Important appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

That same month, we at the Show-Me Institute released Course Access in Missouri: Diversity, Personalization, and Opportunity. That paper highlighted the dire need for higher-level courses in hundreds of school districts across the state, and it also offered a solution already used by numerous states around the country: Course Access.  Course Access allows students to take a portion of the funds that the state spends to educate them to a provider outside of their traditional school.

If a student’s school only offers Spanish, but he’d like to study Mandarin, then when his classmates head to Spanish class, he could head to the library to log into an online Mandarin course. If he wants to take Calculus, but his school only offers up to Algebra II, he can get funding to take that class.

Promoting Course Access was part of both the 2017 Blueprint for Missouri and the 2018 Blueprint for Missouri. We have blogged about Course Access, created videos about Course Access, testified about the benefits of Course Access, and penned op-eds about Course Access.

Last night the legislature sent SB 603 to the Governor, which will create a course access program. The bill passed with huge bipartisan majorities in both chambers. At a time of great dysfunction in state government, it is great that legislators were able to come together to do right by Missouri’s students. Of course, as with all “omnibus”-style bills, there are provisions that we think are less than helpful, but such is the way democracy works. To be sure, we would love to see educational choice expanded further—with education savings account programs and the expansion of charter schooling, for example—but a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and this was a good one.

Now the real work begins. Parents need to know that this option is available to them. Schools need to figure out how to leverage this program to broaden their course offerings. Districts need to see Course Access offerings as part of the portfolio of classes that they make available to students and think hard about how they can help solve staffing problems and promote efficiency and effectiveness.

These are exciting times! Congratulations to all involved. We will be following this program closely and working to publicize its availability. Stay tuned!

The post Missouri Legislature Follows the Blueprint and Passes Course Access appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In his First Thanksgiving 1621, we see prosperous, black-clad Pilgrims in the company of new-found friends – bare-chested Indians in feathered war bonnets (one of several historical inaccuracies). The “thanks” here are for a bountiful harvest and the early realization of America as a land of milk and honey.

But how could it have been so easy for the settlers to carve a life out of the wildness in a cold and unknown land far from home?  Simple answer: It wasn’t, as most people instinctively recognize.

Out of 102 passengers on the Mayflower who arrived in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in December of 1620, 51, or exactly half, died from malnutrition or disease within a few months. The bereaved survivors must have been painfully aware of the precariousness of their own existence. They included William Bradford, the author of the classic Of Plymouth Plantation, who went on to become governor of the colony for many years. Gravely ill, his young wife, Dorothy May, either fell or threw herself to her death as the Mayflower lay at anchor in Cape Cod.

The Pilgrims did not build on a record of success.  As Donna Curtin, the executive director of the Pilgrim Hall Museum points out, “Many other colonies (in the Americas) had failed terribly.” Set up in 1607, the original English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, had all but collapsed three years later – with 80-90 percent of its inhabitants lost to starvation and disease. In Ms. Curtin’s words, “They had murder, cannibalism, you name it – horrific, brutal conditions.”  No fewer than 10 colonies set up before Jamestown by the Spanish and French had also ended in disaster.

The Pilgrim leaders were well aware of this string of failures, as we know from Bradford’s journal. Coming with intact families and a strong sense of community, the Pilgrims bore more than a passing resemblance to the ancient Jews who sojourned in Egypt before going on to find their new home. Having fled religious persecution in England, the Pilgrims spent a dozen years in the Netherlands before fresh troubles there prompted many of their congregation to pin their hopes on the new world.

However, within three years of their landing, Pilgrims faced major problems of their own.   Bradford wrote:  “Famine began to pinch them [the Pilgrims] sore.”

The investors who paid their passage hoped to get an adequate payback on their investment in the founding company.  Fearing that would not be possible if people were free to farm their own land, they insisted upon “a common course and conditions” over the first seven years – under which there were no individual property rights and each member was entitled an equal share of total output.

Bradford recognized the demoralizing aspect of this arrangement. The industrious would subsidize the slackers; the most productive would get no more “in the division of the victuals and clothes” than the least productive. Instead of fostering harmony, communal property led to laziness, envy, thievery, poverty, and social dysfunction – just as it would in the 20^th Century through the spread of communism.

In 1623, Bradford and other leaders assigned to every family “a parcel of land” for its own use. With private property came economic freedom and individual initiative. “This had a very good result,” Bradford wrote, “for it made all hands very industrious” – leading to a big increase in corn production and far greater “contentment” for the community as a whole.

That’s how private property and economic freedom saved the Pilgrims. Happy Thanksgiving!

The post A Thanksgiving Reflection: How Private Property and Economic Freedom Saved the Pilgrims appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Now it’s time to get to work. At the top of the to-do list should be education reform. Education reform has a proud tradition among conservatives, and reflects the core conservative values of free enterprise, entrepreneurship, and accountability for public dollars.

The need is great. Among the class of 2015, only 22 percent of Missouri students who took the ACT scored “college ready” in all four tested subjects. On the 2015 National Assessment for Educational Progress, only 31 percent of Missouri 8th-graders were deemed “proficient” in math and only 36% were found proficient in reading. The most recent AP Report to the Nation found that only 9.5% of Missouri’s students graduated high school having scored 3 or higher on an AP test, putting us in the bottom five states in the nation for AP performance.

There is no time to waste. Luckily, there are at least three steps policymakers can take to improve Missouri’s education system:

Expand charter schools statewide. Right now, charter schools are functionally limited to operating within the boundaries of the Kansas City and Saint Louis school districts. Within those constraints, they have created some incredible opportunities for students. Independent evaluators found that Kansas City’s Ewing Marion Kaufmann School produced a whopping 1.35 additional years of learning in Math and 1.29 years of learning in reading for students who attended the school for at least three years—all while serving a student population that is 86% free and reduced lunch eligible. Many students in Hickman Mills (whose performance data looks nearly indistinguishable from that of the Kansas City Public Schools) and other struggling districts across the state would jump at the chance to attend such a school.

Create a course access program. In the 2014–15 school year, 285 school districts in Missouri had zero students take an AP class. 255 districts didn’t have a single student take Calculus. 213 districts didn’t have a single student take Physics. In most cases, these are smaller rural districts that simply don’t have enough demand to justify hiring a full-time AP or advanced Math or Science teacher. Course access programs were created to address this very problem; they allow students to direct a portion of their annual per-pupil funding to approved course providers outside of their traditional public schools and to receive credit for classes they successfully pass. If, for example, a student’s school doesn’t offer calculus, or only offers Spanish and she wants to take Mandarin, she could head to the library and log into an online class. The cost for the class would be paid with the fraction of her state funding that would normally cover that class period.

Establish an education savings account program. Rather than sending a child’s yearly education funding to their local public or charter school, the state could put that money into a flexible-use spending account that parents could control. Parents could use the money in this account for private school tuition, tutoring, special education services, or any number of other approved expenses. This maximally flexible funding system would do the most to move our education system into the 21st century, allowing families to fully customize their child’s education.

Our children deserve a world-class education system. Gridlock, vetoes, or divided government can’t be an excuse. Let’s work together to give it to them.

The post Education Reform Should Be Top Priority for Missouri’s Leaders appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Two slides in the presentation jumped out at me. The first one is above.

Dovetailing nicely with the research I have done on rural schools in Missouri, DESE’s slide shows there are shortages in more than 10 teacher certification categories in 16 counties across the state, and shortages in 43 counties in 5 to 9 categories.

What are these categories, you ask? The next slide tells us.

Want to learn Spanish? Are you a gifted student? Interested in learning science? Live in one of these rural counties? Tough luck.

I commend the efforts that the state is taking to try and tackle this problem, but here at SMI we’ve been promoting a solution for quite some time now that would address these shortage issues—a course access program.

MOVIP has already certified courses in these subject areas. (Check out the list for just grades 6 to 8—its huge!) For $600 a year, students in these counties could take Spanish from a vetted source and get credit for it. All they need is the flexibility to reroute 600 of the dollars that the state sends their district to these alternative providers. Course access would do that. More than a dozen states around the country have figured this out.

The state’s current efforts, while laudable, seem to constitute a complicated and labor-intensive process with a high amount of uncertainty as to whether or not they will be effective. Every once in a while the simpler solution is the best one, and I think in this case Occam’s razor favors course access. If the state wants to solve these shortage issues, the state should seriously look into it.

The post Teacher Shortage Data from DESE Makes Great Case for Course Access Program appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

It is vitally important that our community know the facts of the case, because there’s more here than meets the eye.

Beginning at the beginning

Courts first heard the issue of school segregation in St. Louis in 1972. That year, Minnie Liddell, a parent in the Saint Louis Public Schools, and a group of 4 other parents filed a complaint in U.S. District Court arguing that the policies of the school district and the State of Missouri were promoting segregation in Saint Louis. The case was complicated and difficult, because segregation in the region involved much more than just school policy. Housing policy, history, and the free choices of individuals all contributed to the problem.

In 1983, after several iterations of the original lawsuit (you can see the whole timeline here), and under the gun of a court-mandated consolidation of the city and county school districts, the St. Louis Public Schools entered into a voluntary transfer program with the 23 districts in St. Louis County. At the same time, investments were made to create magnet schools, offer kindergarten, and make other improvements within St. Louis. The hope was that the magnets would bring white students in from the county, and black students who attended overwhelmingly black schools would be free to go to schools in the county.

While the program satisfied the demands of the courts, the crux of the plan was its cost.  Because the courts found the state at fault for the segregated conditions of schools, the state initially had to pay the lion’s share of the program. By the mid to late-1990s, the state argued that it had done what was asked of it and should therefore be released from its obligation to pay for the desegregation efforts.  The compromise that resulted is central to today’s lawsuit.

In 1999, voters in St. Louis City agreed to a dedicated two-thirds-cent sales tax to fund the desegregation program. The voluntary transfer program became a standalone entity, financed by this new tax, and still exists today. According to its website, this year about 4,500 students will transfer out of the city and into the county and 140 students will transfer from the county into city schools (charter and district). The rest of the money went to provide quality options within the city, both to attract white students and to provide minority students who remained as good an education as possible.

Starting in 2006, when charter schools became their own local education agencies, a portion of those funds started being sent to them directly (previously, the money had to funnel through the district). And therein lies the rub. The district thinks that only it should receive the money. The state says charters, which operate within the boundaries of the district as open-enrollment public schools, should get it as well. As the Post-Dispatch reports, the St. Louis Public Schools want the $42 million charters have received returned to them, and want the $8.8 million that is supposed to go to charter schools this school year to be remitted to the school district as well.

Should charter schools receive desegregation funds?

The purpose of the various desegregation lawsuits in St. Louis is clear. First, they were intended to provide an opportunity for black students to get out of the segregated schools in St. Louis City. Second, they wanted to promote schools that would attract white students from the suburbs to help integrate the schools. Finally, they worked to create quality school options for all students, regardless of race, in St. Louis.

With respect to interdistrict transfers, charters have little bearing on the first goal of these lawsuits. Most charter schools participate in the Voluntary Interdistrict Choice Corporation (VICC), but because such a small number of county students want to go into the city, they play a small role in it. Charter schools do not adversely affect the students who want to leave.

Charter Schools do affect the second goal. As my colleague James Shuls pointed out last week, charter schools attract white students to the school district. In fact, they have been singularly responsible for increasing white enrollment, helping integrate the schools.

Charter schools affect the third goal as well, by providing quality education options for students within St. Louis. According to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, City Garden Montessori, Northside Community School, and the St. Louis Language Immersion schools all earned at least 90% of the possible points in the state’s Annual Performance Rating. That places them in the top echelon of schools in the state and well exceeds the citywide average 76.1%. The three St. Louis Language Immersion Schools provide instruction in French, Spanish, and Chinese. These are the very types of diverse, quality options the desegregation money was levied to provide.

Now, I imagine there are numerous legal technicalities buried in the various motions related to this case, but the plain Jane, average-citizen understanding of the issues couldn’t be clearer. Charter schools help the city’s desegregation efforts. If those dollars are being levied to aid in desegregation, charter schools should have access to them.

What’s up with the timing? Didn’t charter folks just come out for the District’s property tax increase?

Why, yes. Yes they did. And that is what makes this very interesting.

If there is some kind of violation here, it has been happening since 2006. According to the Post-Dispatch article, concerns were first raised in 2008. Why is the lawsuit being filed now?

Well, on April 5 (a Tuesday) the district won its first property tax levy in 25 years. Charter school supporters backed the increase, as they are slated to get about a third of the money that it raises (because charters educate about a third of St. Louis’ public school students). The following Monday, April 11, the District filed the lawsuit. Was it just happenstance that the lawsuit wasn’t filed until after the property tax levy vote?

What will the impact of this lawsuit be?

This is the $42 million question. On one level, the increased revenue from the property tax vote is slated to provide about the same amount of money to charter schools on an annual basis that they would lose should they lose the lawsuit. If they lose, the best case scenario for charter schools would be for the state to pay the $42 million.  While the district would be able to have its cake and eat it too (with both a property tax increase and a huge windfall of desegregation money) the charter schools would be in about the same financial position as they are today.  That position is tenuous, however, as charter schools are funded at a level significantly below that of traditional public schools.

There is also a second, much more troubling scenario. Under the wording of the lawsuit, the plaintiffs are asking the state for the money that was allegedly improperly paid to charter schools. According to the Missouri Charter Public School Alliance, though, the State of Missouri could require schools to pay back the money the state gave them. I am not one for hyperbole, but this could very well end charter schooling in St. Louis. None of the schools has the money to pay back 10 years’ worth of desegregation payments.

Either way, losing this funding stream would harm charter schools and limit the kinds of programming they would be able to offer to students in Saint Louis.

Summing it all up

This lawsuit would hurt charter schools in Saint Louis, many of which are getting great results and providing a high-quality education for city children of all races. The average citizen may see the Saint Louis Public Schools attempting to claim money they believe they are entitled to, but to a more cynical observer this might look like an attempt to stifle competition at the expense of students. Providing a quality education in Saint Louis is the expressed purpose of the two-thirds-cent sales tax, and so long as charter schools are playing their part, they should have the city’s support. This suit is misguided, and my only hope is that when it is heard, the judge dismisses it on the spot.

The post #Dropthesuit, Explained appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Fantasy football is a useful analogy when it comes to public policy.  We all have our “dream team” we want to put together—the perfect set of policies that would make a championship polity. But we don’t always get the perfect team, and we need a strategy should we not get our first choices.

With that in mind, I decided to put together an ESPN-like cheat sheet of my rankings of school choice programs for Missouri; stars and sleepers, first choices and backups.  Without further ado:

The Top of the Heap

If you get the first pick in your draft, you pick a stud running back.  It’s fantasy football 101. They get a lot of carries; they get touchdown opportunities; they’re steady, solid points all season long.

If I had the first pick in the school choice fantasy draft, I’d take an education savings account (ESA) program. ESAs place state funding for a child’s education into a flexible-use spending account (like an HSA) that they can take to a private school or spread out among multiple providers to pay for online courses, tutoring, or services for students with special needs.

Nevada just passed a huge, nearly universal program that has already seen thousands of students apply. Arizona, Mississippi, and Florida have ESAs for students with special needs. A large, substantial ESA program would be a solid anchor for the state’s education system.

The Runner-Up

OK, so all of the best running backs are taken.  It’s now time to dip into the quarterbacks and wide receivers.  There is a little more variability, more ups and downs from week to week, but still lots of upside. 

The most solid second-tier option is a tuition tax credit program. Tuition tax credit programs (there are currently 16 across the country) allow individuals or corporations to get a credit on their tax bill for money that they donate to nonprofit organizations that give scholarships to K12 students. This would encourage participation in civil society, avoid thorny state constitutional issues, and drastically expand the number of options available to students in the state.

The Sleeper

Lots of players are off the board now.  The draft is in its later rounds, and maybe you don’t have the team you wanted when you set out. Now it’s time to try and find a sleeper—an undervalued player that will have an outsized influence

My school choice sleeper? A course access program. Course access programs allow students to take a portion of their per-pupil funding to a provider outside of their school for individual classes.  A student still attends school normally, but might head to the library to learn Mandarin while the rest of the students go to Spanish class, or might duck out early to head to the local community college for a welding class. Course access is blowing up like Clinton Portis did against the Chiefs in 2003.  Thousands of students across 11 states are rerouting some portion of their state funding into different providers and customizing the education that best fits their needs.

The Kicker

You wait until the last rounds. Some buddy of yours picks one way too early. Yes, I’m talking about a kicker.

Just like you have to draft a kicker, the state has to expand charter schools outside of Kansas City and St. Louis.  Of the 41 states across the country that offer charter schools, Missouri is one of the few that limits them to a particular geographic area.  Given the well-documented struggles in several St. Louis County school districts, denying students better choices is just wrong. 

Putting the Team Together

I worry that too often school choice advocates get their hopes up for their top picks and are then disengage during the later rounds of the policy draft.  That’s a mistake.  People can still win their fantasy league if their top pick goes bust. They just have to be smart with the rest of the draft. 

The post School Choice in Missouri: The Power Rankings appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In Missouri, 88 percent of school districts are classified as rural, and in 2014 almost 15 percent of Missouri school districts enrolled a student population of 150 or less. A course access program has the potential to provide diverse curriculum options for students in these districts, as well as an opportunity for local school districts to earn revenue through student enrollment outside district boundaries.

Guthrie Common School District in Texas provides an example of the possibilities offered by course access programs. In 2013, the district enrolled 91 students. Like many small, rural school districts, Guthrie faced staffing challenges. According to a recent report, the district could not afford to hire a foreign language instructor, posing a problem for students wanting to attend the University of Texas, which has a foreign language admission requirement.

To solve this program, Guthrie leveraged the state’s course access program and partnered with Rosetta Stone to create state curriculum–aligned Spanish courses. Now, students from Guthrie who want to get into the University of Texas have a chance. 

But that’s not the end of the story. Because of the flexibility built into the program, Guthrie was allowed to enroll students from other districts. Guthrie Virtual School now enrolls 850 students, and offers programs in multiple subject areas. Students from around the state can access these courses from their own brick-and-mortar schools.

A small, rural school district in Missouri in Guthrie’s situation would have few choices: either merge with another district, or continue to beat the drum for more education spending.

Guthrie did neither.

Districts like Guthrie show that with a little creativity, students in rural and remote school districts can have access to the course opportunities their urban and suburban counterparts already enjoy, but policy must set the stage for innovation to take place.

The post Course Access in Rural Texas appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Missouri, like all other states, requires teachers to pass a series of examinations before they can become a teacher. These tests act as a barrier to entry. As I have written before, barriers to entry are only effective if they do what they are supposed to do. In this case, the tests should keep out individuals who would be bad teachers. My research has shown that the relationship between performance on licensure exams and performance in the classroom is pretty weak. Despite this fact, Missouri’s Department of Elementary and Secondary education sees licensure exams as a key driver to improving the quality of the teacher labor force.

Education is not the only area in which tests are used to screen out candidates. For example, lawyers have to take the Missouri Bar Exam, which has three parts. Compare this to the sheer number of teacher licensure exams for those wanting to work in public schools (see below). Whether you are in bankruptcy law, civil rights law, criminal law, corporate law, family law, or any other field in the law profession, you take one exam—the bar exam. In education, however, we have constructed tests for just about every single thing.

Want to be a high school biology teacher? There is a test for that. Want to teach chemistry? There is a test for that. Want to teach earth science, general science, or physics? There is a test for each of those. Oh yeah, and you will also have to take a test of your disposition, the Missouri Educator Profile; a test of general knowledge, the Missouri General Education Assessment; and you’ll be evaluated in the classroom by the Missouri Performance Assessment.

It is understandable to want to ensure that prospective teachers have basic competencies. We will not change the quality of the labor force, however, unless we change the structure of the profession. We must begin rewarding great teachers and become more diligent on removing or remediating the bad ones. As it is, we’ve simply gone test crazy when it comes to teacher certification.

The post Too Much Testing in Public Education – For Teachers appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

From Ugarte’s commentary:

[T]he reason I’m against SB 465 is that I don’t trust the motivations of those who are proposing it. It’s a bill with an agenda that goes far beyond a desire for transparency. It provides an opportunity for those determined to question, debunk, attack and diminish the pedagogical and research projects of university professors. I don’t think the effects will be positive; rather, we will have more of the same: animosity and lack of understanding.

As someone who has written on and testified in support of curriculum transparency for Missouri’s public universities, I can tell you that my motivation for supporting proposals like this comes from a conviction that public universities—and all public institutions—should be candid and open with the public about their affairs. Members of a public university should abide by the same transparency laws as everyone else who works in our public sector.

My motivation for supporting this bill doesn’t stem from a desire to “question, debunk, attack or diminish” the university, but I find it odd that a scholar would view someone questioning his work as a problem. Scholarship thrives on debate and challenges. As a student at Mizzou, you can bet I questioned my professors. They questioned, attacked, and debunked me right back. And I got a great education because of it.

I disagree with Professor Ugarte’s contention that an open academy will breed animosity and lack of understanding between it and the rest of society. On the contrary, I believe an open and honest discourse is the way you build trust and understanding. And there’s no reason why open and honest discourse can’t involve questions, debate, and, yes, sometimes even debunking.

The post No, Transparency Benefits the Academy appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

ITRCC is a 50-50 partnership between a Spanish toll road operator and an Australian investment bank. In 2005, those partners paid the state of Indiana $3.8 billion for the right to operate the Indiana toll road for 75 years. As part of the agreement, ITRCC had to make significant capital improvements to the toll road; from 2006 to the present the company invested $458 million.

ITRCC investors expected steadily rising highway traffic to generate returns that would exceed these upfront costs and justify the many stipulations under which the company had to operate the toll road. However, post-recession highway utilization has made the original traffic projections, and hence the debt repayment plan, untenable. This is what forced the company to declare bankruptcy.

While it is unfortunate to see any company fail, Indiana taxpayers have made out like highway robbers on the deal. The state invested its $3.8 billion windfall in a 10-year, statewide transportation improvement plan. The privatized toll road received $458 million in upgrades courtesy of ITRCC, making it a better road now than when Indiana privatized it. And even though ITRCC has declared bankruptcy and must be restructured, the investors, not the taxpayers, will take the hit for overly optimistic traffic projections.

The important lesson of the Indiana Toll Road bankruptcy is not that a private company failed to make a profit, but rather that privatization deals can tap into significant capital for infrastructure improvements and transfer risk to the private sector. In the case of Indiana, we can retrospectively say that the buyer overpaid, but that was (and still is) a risk investors are willing to make when there is a reasonable prospect of profit. Indiana residents did not share the investors’ risk, but they have benefited from more than $4 billion of investments to their transportation infrastructure. With MoDOT slowly running out of the money necessary to maintain its state highway system, the fate of Indiana’s highway privatization deal should not make Missourians wary. It should make them jealous.

The post The Bankruptcy of Indiana Toll Road Highlights Privatization Advantages appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The typical public education model restricts most families from having much say in the type of education their child receives because children are sorted by attendance catchment areas. The traditional model does have school choice; but those choices are, for the most part, limited to moving to a better neighborhood or paying for private school tuition. Many families do not have these options. In Saint Louis, this is changing. Charter schools are giving more and more families educational opportunities for their children.

I recently took a tour of six of the 22 charter schools in Saint Louis and was amazed at the differences among the schools. Gateway Science Academy students are focused on developing their expertise in math and the sciences through innovative programs. Preclarus Mastery Academy students are learning Latin and preparing for college success while students at Saint Louis Language Immersion Schools are immersed in Spanish, French, or Chinese. Grand Center Arts Academy students in one class were acting out scenes they had written, while students in the next room were learning a dance routine. Students at City Garden Montessori were spread out, working on self-directed learning projects as teachers provided guidance.

Each school focuses on academics, but each also has a unique niche, offering something distinctive to students.

The conversation about schools often focuses on standardized test performance. We ask how charter schools are doing compared to the district, or how the district is doing compared to the state. Those are worthwhile questions, but schools are doing more than preparing students for tests. The schools I visited offer students something very unique that may or may not translate to gains on a standardized test, such as learning a new language or developing creative skills. When we focus solely on a school’s performance on standardized tests, we miss a big part of the picture. We miss the variety and options that these schools provide to families.

Critics of school choice often argue that families will not know how to make good choices or that students who remain behind will somehow be hurt by other students leaving. Both of these claims are unfounded. First, parents are very savvy and are capable of making choices for their children. I know nothing about the medical profession, but we were able to choose a great pediatrician. If anything, parents lack experience, but experience comes from having the opportunity to make those decisions.

Secondly, most of the scholarly evidence suggests that the traditional public schools are no worse off, and in some cases, are better when they face competition. As school choice has accelerated in Saint Louis, the St. Louis Public School District has also been improving. The district appears to be responding to the increased competition, opening innovative magnet schools, focusing on teacher quality, and exploring opportunities to improve. As they do, the portfolio of quality educational options in Saint Louis will continue to grow.

Robbyn Wahby, deputy chief of staff for Saint Louis Mayor Francis Slay, says three more charter schools are slated to open next year, and she expects that trend to continue in the foreseeable future. With more schools comes more opportunity; more opportunity means finally being able to ask, ”Which school would best meet the needs of my child and my family?” That is what school choice is really about, giving families options.

If you have not had the opportunity to visit any of these unique schools, I highly recommend you do so.

James V. Shuls is the education policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.

The post Charter Schools Are Giving Families Options appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

We are not alone. The quality of local schools is often one of the highest considerations for home buyers. Parents want what is best for their children. My wife and I are both traditionally certified teachers, with bachelor’s degrees in education. I taught elementary school for four years in southwest Missouri. My wife has taught high school Spanish for eight years, five in Missouri and three in Arkansas. As teachers, we know the importance of a quality education. When looking for houses, our first step was to identify the best school districts, then the best schools within those districts. Unfortunately, in many of the areas with high-performing schools, we were unable to find a home that fit our search criteria within the school boundaries. Though we are a middle class family, even we have been priced out of some great schools. Our plight is really not all that bad; luckily, there are plenty of great options which we can afford.

School choice by mortgage is the current system of choice in most of Missouri and has been around for decades. Parents with the financial means can move their families to neighborhoods with good schools or they can afford private school tuition. The problem with our current system of school choice is that it leaves many parents with no options. The wealthier a family is the more choices they have, while the most disadvantaged are left with little or no choice.

When we finally buy a house, we will pay the tuition embedded in the cost of our home for the high-performing local public school, and our kids will attend the school to which they are residentially assigned. Hopefully, we will make a good decision and our children will be well served; but if they are not, what then? It seems a sad state when a decision as important as how our children are educated comes down to where we buy our home. School choice by mortgage should not be the default system of Missouri. Instead, all parents should have access to a variety of options regardless of their ZIP code; whether they are traditional public, public charter, private, or digital.

James V. Shuls is an education policy consultant for the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy, and a Doctoral Academy Fellow at the University of Arkansas.

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Well, the school’s leaders have submitted a new proposal — and this time they’ve done away with the Hebrew-language specialty. Hebrew would still be an option at the school, but students would be free to concentrate on Spanish or Arabic instead.

It would be very detrimental to language-immersion charters if this board’s policy became the norm, and no charter could specialize in a single language or culture. For example, the St. Louis Language Immersion Schools teach French and Spanish — in two separate schools. This allows them to reinforce students’ exposure to the target language. Students hear the target language in class, but they also hear it on the playground and in the school office. If each school had to offer both languages, French students would end up hearing some Spanish, and vice versa.

If applied more broadly, this policy could make it difficult for charters to specialize, because as soon as a charter developed a program to focus on one subject, it would have to start over and create parallel programs for whichever students weren’t interested in that first course of study.

The post Update on Hebrew-Language Charter School appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I believe the main reason for this disparity is that foreign languages are treated by our public education system as less important than math, science and English. In contrast, E.U. governments expect their citizens to become fluent in at least two languages plus their native tongue.

Another panelist laments the fact that “unlike Europe, the U.S. has no coherent strategy for making our society bilingual.”

I suspect European countries’ policies are a reflection of their citizens’ interest in languages, rather than the cause. Europeans have ample reason to study languages; they all live within a short distance of other countries where different languages are spoken. As Norman Matloff notes in his response to the Room for Debate question, Americans who live close to the border with Mexico show more enthusiasm for learning Spanish than do their fellow citizens to the north.

Could it be that although proximity to foreign language speakers can spark people’s interest, policies are what really make them use other languages? If that’s the case, I’d be hard pressed to explain what happened in Ontario, Canada, where a ceremony was conducted in English a few weeks ago. That was despite French’s status as an official language of Canada, and despite the French-language public school boards and community colleges that are established throughout the province. When a language isn’t useful to people, policymakers who promote it are wasting their time.

The United States shouldn’t order everyone to learn languages, but the education system should give opportunities to become bilingual to people who are interested. Magnet schools and charter schools are good environments for language specialization, as are the optional language-immersion programs offered by some traditional districts. (Examples in Missouri are Academie Lafayette, the St. Louis Language Immersion Schools, and the Kansas City School District’s Foreign Language Academy.) Parents who want their children to have a lot of foreign language exposure can enroll them in these schools.

If Chinese language education is to continue growing, more people must be free to choose schools that teach it. Policymakers who are worried about American students learning English only ought to try to make it easier to open new language-immersion choice schools.

The post “No Coherent Strategy” for Teaching Foreign Languages appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Mary Campbell, who is in charge of English language learning programs at L.A. Unified, said students must learn English as well as the grade-level material to move into mainstream classes. That often takes longer than learning the language, she said.

It must be a big challenge for a district with lots of non-native language speakers to integrate them all within a few years, so I don’t want to rush to blame L.A. Unified. But it does make you wonder why traditional districts’ English language learning programs are held up as a model for charter schools. The districts’ approach doesn’t work with all students, and charters should be free to try new ways of teaching English that could help students who fall behind in regular English classes.

Several charter proposals in Oregon have been turned down on grounds that they lacked plans to educate children who don’t speak English (and that they didn’t have enough community support, and a bunch of other things). Given the results of English programs in districts like L.A. Unified, no plan could be the best plan. If charters don’t expect large numbers of English language learners, they might mainstream them and let them learn English through immersion. Students would hear English all day long, instead of sitting in a class with others who don’t know any more English than they do. Parents who prefer a structured English program would always have the option of staying in the traditional district instead of choosing a charter.

Language immersion charters are another alternative to traditional English classes. In these schools, part of class time is spent in English and the rest in a foreign language. Every student has the experience of learning in a language they don’t yet speak fluently, so English language learners aren’t the odd ones out. An advantage of immersion charters is that grade-level materials are taught in at least two languages. For example, a Spanish-speaking student attending an English-Spanish charter would learn English for part of the day, while continuing to study some subjects in Spanish. This prevents students from taking one step forward in English, two steps backward in math or history.

If they’re to improve education, charters have to be free to depart from the districts’ established routines — including English classes.

The post Charters Shouldn’t Have to Copy Traditional Public Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

First, let’s look at Missouri’s charter school law. I wouldn’t say that it’s easy to get charters approved in Missouri, but at least the requirements for proposals are reasonable. Applications must include a description of curriculum, a financial plan for three years, an admissions policy, and so on. The school board of the traditional district in which a proposed charter would operate is able to file objections with the state board of education.

Now, how does Oregon compare? Potential charters have to apply to their local school boards, which then make the decision themselves. The school boards don’t just get to object — it’s entirely in their hands. School boards can turn down applications for all kinds of reasons; one objection cited against a Spanish-immersion charter was “lack of community support.” Needless to say, it’s difficult to rally a community around a not-yet-existent school that’s forced to constantly go back to the drawing board and change its plans.

And by “change its plans,” I mean change even the minutest details. After prolonged back-and-forth with the school board, the Spanish-immersion charter intends to use Singapore Math. I love Singapore Math, so I commend them for that decision — but how can any charter proposal go through when the school board quibbles about every textbook choice? A charter should demonstrate that it has a curriculum in place, and I would be sympathetic to denying a charter if an application made no mention of instructional materials. Listing textbooks, though, should be enough. A charter shouldn’t have to switch from one book to another to please a school board.

And, once the school board approves a proposal, the work has only begun:

The next step is for the district and charter school to negotiate a contract, which the school board will approve.

After that tortuous approval process is complete, the charter is supposed to contract with the very district it will be competing against.

The post It’s Ridiculously Hard to Start a Charter School in Oregon appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The most recent news about single-sex charters is from New York City: PublicPrep, which operates two all-girls charters, will open two more for girls and one for boys during the next two years. This radio news program interviews some parents as well as a principal. According to the report, 700 families applied for just 132 openings in the Bronx GirlsPrep school.

I’m impressed that the Lower East Side GirlsPrep school teaches Spanish to third graders, even though PublicPrep has no foreign language focus. This is an example of a charter going above and beyond what it would need to provide in order to fulfill its mission — namely, a single-sex learning environment. Charter schools are not slaves to test prep, nor do their themes constrain them from offering a range of subjects.

The post Single-Sex Charters Expand in New York; Will Missouri Be Next? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

One comment blames this state of affairs on charter schools:

There’s seems to be this disturbing trend today, seen specifically in the development of the charter school program, of pushing the education system to higher standards in the name of achievement.

Are charter schools really the culprits? I don’t think so. The article describes public kindergartens run by traditional districts, and at least some of the impetus for drilling kindergartners comes from Utah’s education department:

“Doubling time in kindergarten should mean twice the time for instruction,” said Reed Spencer, a curriculum coordinator at the state office of education who is designing a uniform testing tool for Utah’s full-day kindergarten programs.

I’m guessing whoever wrote the comment would say that the traditional districts are responding to competition from charters. There’s pressure for traditional districts to win back students from charters, and the way they attract them is by ruthlessly pursuing higher test scores.

If districts are pressured to improve, that’s a good thing. However, improvement doesn’t have to mean forsaking common sense. As an illustration, look at some of the new charter elementary schools in St. Louis. There’s a Montessori school, a Spanish immersion school, and a French immersion school. None of those charters takes a drill-and-kill approach. A district that wants to compete with them would do well to avoid standardized tests for five-year-olds and instead replicate what the charters are creating.

As for charters like KIPP, that are known to focus on academic skills, they find ways to do that through age-appropriate activities. Here is a sample schedule from a KIPP elementary school in Houston. There are long hours, lots of time on reading, math, Spanish — what you would expect from a KIPP school. But interspersed throughout the day are blocks of time dedicated to “circle time,” “creative play,” “”storytelling,” and “project-based learning.” (And see this article about the creative ways KIPP is teaching reading to older children in St. Louis.)

It’s not all about textbooks and the blackboard. In fact, any charter that did torture kindergartners with uninterrupted test-prep would have trouble attracting students and would be very easy for any district to compete with. There would be no need to change the kindergarten curriculum in order to compete with such a poorly designed charter.

The post Do Charter Schools Take the Joy Out of Learning? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.