Parents play a fundamental role in their children’s education, but a lack of transparency from school districts makes it difficult for them to stay informed. Too often, parents struggle to determine how well their children’s schools are performing, how taxpayer dollars are being spent, and what is being taught in the classroom. School districts often make it financially prohibitive for parents to access the information they need to hold schools accountable.

The Solution

The fundamental right of parents to participate in and direct the education of their children should be affirmed in state law with the adoption of a parents’ bill of rights. The parents’ bill of rights would require districts to provide parents with clear information about what is happening in their children’s schools.

Key Facts

• In 2025, the Heritage Foundation ranked Missouri 45th in educational transparency among the 50 states and Washington, D.C.

• Sunshine Law requests sent in recent years by the Show-Me Institute seeking curriculum information from Missouri schools and districts were often ignored or met with demands for tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of dollars to process the requests.

Which Rights Should Be Included in Statute?

At a minimum, parents should have:

• The right to know what Missouri schools are teaching.

• The right to know how Missouri schools are performing.

• The right to know how Missouri schools are spending taxpayer money.

• The right to choose the educational option that works best for their children.

• The right to know their children’s physical and mental health and to be informed when concerns arise. This includes, but is not limited to, the right to opt out of health measures not required by state law.

Public Schooling in Partnership with Parents

Schooling works best when parents and educators work together. However, school district policies increasingly undermine such cooperation through a lack of transparency. Missouri’s Sunshine Law is intended to ensure openness in public agencies, yet many school districts routinely claim that fulfilling Sunshine Law requests is prohibitively expensive, then pass those inflated costs on to the requester. This practice effectively blocks Missourians from accessing important information, such as which curriculum materials are being used in their local schools. There is also a growing trend among public schools to withhold information about student health from parents.

The state needs to take action to expand access to information among parents. School districts that fail to comply should be subject to meaningful financial and administrative penalties. Transparency and accountability in local government, including schools, should not be optional. The law must have strong, unambiguous consequences attached to violations of its provisions.

Policy Recommendations

• Pass a parents’ bill of rights into law so that schools and districts understand the rights and expectations of the parents and taxpayers who fund their operations.

• Ensure that the law includes “teeth” —real consequences for violations—so that it isn’t seen merely as a set of recommendations that can be violated without penalty by school districts.

The post Missouri Parents’ Bill of Rights appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass talks with Matthew Ladner, senior advisor for education policy implementation at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, about a recent Washington Post article blaming Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts for school closures in the Roosevelt Elementary School District. They unpack the real reasons behind declining enrollment, the role of open enrollment and charter schools, and why most Arizona students exercising school choice are still in public schools. The discussion covers how media narratives overlook parent-driven decisions, the political resistance to letting kids leave low-performing districts, and why open enrollment could be a game changer for states like Missouri. Ladner also shares his broader perspective on the post-COVID shift toward educational self-reliance and what it means for the future of public education.

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Episode Transcript

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Susan Pendergrass (00:00)
Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast this morning, Matt Ladner of the Heritage Foundation. You are no stranger to Arizona education or school choice, right? Nor am I. I feel like I could be wrong, but we met at the Goldwater Institute around the year 2002. Does that sound right? It’s been a minute and it was so—

Matthew Ladner (00:03)
That could be, yes, indeed.

Susan Pendergrass (00:28)
It was surprising to me to see in the Washington Post a week or so ago, basically a hit piece on Arizona education. Because oftentimes Arizona’s held up like Florida as one of the states that’s really making strides in both test scores overall, but in particular in Arizona, test scores and growth scores for low-income kids. They’ve really taken bold moves and made an actual difference in outcomes.

And yet we have this piece that says because Arizona is giving parents the option of a scholarship instead of an assigned public school, that is killing this poor Roosevelt Elementary School in Phoenix. I assume you saw the article.

Matthew Ladner (01:08)
I did indeed. Well, so I moved to Arizona in 2003. Of course, I was doing work here before I moved here. So we probably met the year before at the Goldwater Institute.

Susan Pendergrass (01:10)
What’s your take? What’s your hot take?

Matthew Ladner (01:24)
The first I heard of the Roosevelt Elementary School District was in 2005, when someone I worked with had a child who was attending a Roosevelt school and was brutally assaulted. By brutally assaulted, I mean rushed to the emergency room based on what happened to this child.

Susan Pendergrass (01:39)
My gosh.

Matthew Ladner (01:49)
Obviously, the school administration did not react well. In fact, they questioned whether the attack had been provoked—classic blame-the-victim. At that time, I put my coworker in touch with someone who did informally what we would today call navigation—helping people find schools.

Susan Pendergrass (01:59)
Thanks.

Matthew Ladner (02:13)
At that time, it was incredibly difficult to find a school for this woman’s children. The school year had already started. There were charter schools in South Phoenix, where the Roosevelt Elementary School District is located, but they had waitlists. We had scholarship tax credits, but the school year had already started, the money had already been committed, and there were waitlists.

We had open enrollment, but school districts were not interested in taking students from Roosevelt. In fact, I recall my coworker calling about an open enrollment transfer, and when she said her kids attended Roosevelt Elementary, they hung up the phone on her. It was visceral. She was almost as stuck as she would have been in 1993, the year before Arizona started any kind of school choice.

Fast-forward 20 years, no one in Arizona is stuck like that anymore. Every child has access to an ESA program. While only a minority actually use it, it’s available to everyone. That, I believe, motivates these drive-by shooting journalistic exercises, because very powerful vested interests don’t like people having the option of leaving.

If you read the Washington Post article, the unstated hypothesis is that the world would be a better place if people like my former coworker did not have the option of going somewhere else.

Susan Pendergrass (04:04)
That’s exactly right.

They chronicle the closing of an elementary school in that district. People are sad, heartbroken, and anxious. It’s a tragic story. But dwindling enrollment is less due to the ESA program and more due to the fact that in Arizona, you can pick any public school in the state.

In fact, they cite one group of low-income parents of color who started their own micro-school to avoid going to that school. Yet the counterfactual is: “If only they didn’t have the option of leaving, this school would stay open.” As if we should have kept kids trapped in a failing school. Hard to believe that’s the case in 2025.

Matthew Ladner (04:52)
Absolutely.

It’s offensive to argue the world would be better if people didn’t have the option of leaving a situation that wasn’t working for their child. The reality is, the largest form of school choice in Arizona remains district open enrollment.

Back in 2017, a study of Phoenix-area school districts found that the number of open enrollment kids—within and between districts—was about twice the number of charter school students. And Arizona has the nation’s largest charter sector.

Susan Pendergrass (05:42)
About how many kids are in charter schools?

Matthew Ladner (05:44)
Today it’s around 21% of public school enrollment. Back in 2017 it was about 16%.

Open enrollment is the King Kong of school choice. If Arizona has a school choice justice league, Superman is district open enrollment. Then come charter schools, and trailing far behind are private choice programs.

I do understand people don’t like school closures. Even schools that are underperforming and half-empty have emotional attachment. When you move to close them, people say, “My grandfather graduated from that school—how dare you close it!”

Susan Pendergrass (06:33)
No, yes.

Matthew Ladner (06:55)
State data shows Roosevelt has 6,500 kids who live in the district and attend its schools. But 5,700 kids live in Roosevelt and attend a charter. Another 2,700 attend a different district. About 800 use an ESA.

A final report showed only 129 ESA students previously attended a Roosevelt school. If you’re running a 6,500-student district, you don’t close five schools over 129 students. The Post article was misguided and misleading. Roosevelt’s enrollment has been declining since about 2006. There’s also the baby bust since 2007, which Arizona has worse than most states.

Susan Pendergrass (09:11)
Right. And in addition to bad reporting, the article says this ESA program “offers a window into the GOP vision for K–12 education.” In other words, nothing to do with what parents want. It’s supposedly a GOP political strategy to kill public schools.

That’s damaging because a lot of people don’t read past the headline. In Missouri, we don’t even have open enrollment. Some of our lowest-performing districts demand to be carved out from letting kids leave because they believe they’ll all leave and the district will collapse.

For example, in Ferguson, only 3% of 8th graders are proficient in math. Yet they don’t want kids to leave, even though they’re arguably not even fulfilling the constitutional duty to provide a free and fair public education.

Matthew Ladner (11:02)
Yeah, it’s bad all around. The Fordham Institute’s open enrollment map of Ohio shows every urban district is surrounded by districts that don’t participate. Arizona is the opposite. Almost all districts do open enrollment, including Scottsdale Unified—where about 25% of kids come from outside the district.

They do that because 9,000 kids who live in Scottsdale attend elsewhere. Financial incentives pushed even wealthy districts to open up.

Susan Pendergrass (13:10)
Right.

Matthew Ladner (13:23)
The Post piece framed this as a GOP vision, but really it’s about giving families dignity and autonomy. The underlying hypothesis was that low-income Hispanic and African American parents in Roosevelt are doing something wrong by making the best choices for their kids. That’s offensive, and bad reporting on top of it.

Susan Pendergrass (14:14)
Right. In Missouri, we rank all schools. When we launched that website, protesters said it was racist because many low-performing schools enrolled Black and brown kids. But those kids are already stuck in F schools. Shouldn’t we let them out?

Instead, the approach is: “Let’s not tell them it’s an F school, and if they find out, let’s not let them out.” That’s insulting to parents.

Meanwhile, in St. Louis, schools are losing kids but the district passed a moratorium on new charters because they know a new charter would fill up immediately.

Matthew Ladner (15:42)
Right.

Susan Pendergrass (15:43)
What’s your global view? In Missouri, we’re fighting lawsuits against our scholarship program. Do you see this as a last gasp, or what?

Matthew Ladner (16:03)
Not a last gasp. The struggle will continue past our lifetimes. But we are making progress.

The reason you see lawsuits and agenda-driven journalism is that there was an awakening during COVID. People realized the district system isn’t run for parents—it’s captured by unions and contractors. Schools are not about your kids. They’re about employees and contracts.

Now we’re seeing a self-reliance movement in education—school choice, homeschooling, co-ops. It’s growing. And frankly, Randy Weingarten’s actions during COVID made her the poster child for this failure.

Susan Pendergrass (18:18)
In terms of keeping schools closed and how she reacted?

Matthew Ladner (18:21)
Exactly. If you didn’t realize during COVID that the system wasn’t about you, someone needs to draw you a picture.

Susan Pendergrass (18:33)
The protests with coffins in the street, saying we were sending teachers to their deaths—they overplayed it a bit.

Matthew Ladner (18:37)
Yeah. And now we’re in a different environment. Young parents I talk to say there’s no way they’re sending kids to district schools.

That’s not to say everyone in districts is bad. There are good teachers trapped in a bad system. But the exciting part is teachers leaving to start their own schools. In Florida, there’s nothing stopping them, and it’s beautiful to see.

Susan Pendergrass (19:46)
Yes. In Missouri, we’ve cut off the teacher-as-entrepreneur option. It’s too bad. Every summer, parents reach out to me desperate to transfer kids to other districts, but we have nothing for them—except paying very high tuition.

It reminds me of your coworker stuck in Roosevelt. People say, “Just move.” But not everyone can move, nor should they have to.

Matthew Ladner (20:49)
Right.

Susan Pendergrass (21:09)
When I see a major outlet still saying in 2025 that ESAs are killing public education, when it’s really poor parents finding alternatives, that’s sad.

Matthew Ladner (21:28)
Exactly. It’s not up to me or lawmakers to decide where kids go. Families should decide, and that’s as it should be.

Susan Pendergrass (21:55)
Thank you so much for joining us. We have to keep this in front of people, and I appreciate you coming on.

Matthew Ladner (22:05)
Thank you, Susan.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

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Maybe I should have seen this coming, as SLPS was the second-to-last district to have its Annual Secretary of the Board Report available on the Department of Secondary and Elementary Education (DESE) website—and it was months behind schedule.

Transparency is important in public institutions. Parents deserve to know what their money is being spent on in public education. The Show-Me Institute created MOSchoolRankings for this very purpose, providing needed transparency regarding the performance and spending in our public school system. DESE ought to provide this information, but its spending and performance data website is woefully inadequate.

Missouri’s education system has struggled with transparency. In fact, in 2023, the Heritage Foundation ranked Missouri 46th in educational transparency—a very poor ranking, but a slight improvement on Missouri’s 51st rank in 2022.

Increased transparency can come in many forms, one of which is a Missouri Parents’ Bill of Rights. Additionally, the sunshine law needs to be strengthened, as school districts have demanded hundreds of thousands of dollars from Institute researchers to access curricular documents. The sunshine law needs to have “teeth,” perhaps in the form of significant financial consequences for violations. That way, this law will not just be seen as a mere set of recommendations that can be violated without consequences.

SLPS is facing an uphill battle this year. We will see what we can learn from the state audit. In the future, increased transparency may be able to head off some of these problems before they become a crisis.

The post St. Louis Public Schools Exemplifies the Need for Educational Transparency appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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In fact, the researchers at CER determined that our governor has “been quiet on the subject of parent power and educational choice.” They also noted that, while school report cards can be found on DESE’s website, they are “not very user-friendly or easy to navigate.” (So apparently, Institute analysts  are not the only ones making that claim.) We got a C on our charter school law because it’s only limited to students in a couple of communities. We got D’s on digital and personalized learning, choice programs, and teacher quality.

The Parent Power! Index doesn’t seem to mesh well with the Heritage Foundation’s Education Freedom Index, where we did great on everything but Transparency. The key difference between these two measures is that the CER index examines how Missouri families are actually faring in the education landscape. Do policies as implemented empower parents? What are the governor and state legislature actually doing to put students first and give families the information they need? Meanwhile, the Heritage index is grading how we appear on paper. We’ve got charter schools and a private school choice program. Kudos to us. The fact that 95 percent of Missouri families can’t access this school choice program is just an inconvenient truth.

If Missouri were on a dating app for school choice, our profile would look great. But the first date is going to reveal the truth. There’s very little “there” there.

The post The Results Are in—We Got a C- 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.

Jude Schwalbach is a policy analyst at Reason Foundation. He previously worked at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy where his research focused on expanding educational opportunities for K-12 students and reducing the federal footprint in education. Before joining Heritage Foundation, Schwalbach taught high school in Phoenix, Arizona.

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The post We’re Number Four? With James V. Shuls appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

By now, we have all seen that wonderful photo of the young child sitting in the backseat of her parents’ car. You know, the one where the adorable blonde with buck teeth gives her mother the side eye. The meme has been shared countless times via social media. It also happens to exemplify the exact feeling I had upon reviewing the Heritage Foundation’s recently released Education Freedom Report Card.

The report ranked Missouri 17th overall in terms of education freedom. This ranking includes measures on “transparency,” “regulatory freedom,” and “spending.” But it was the ranking on “school choice” that stood out the most. The Heritage Foundation ranked Missouri 4th in the country in terms of having the best school choice environment. This ranking included considerations for private school choice, private school choice program design, charter schools, homeschooling, and public school choice.

The reason I was so shocked by this ranking should be obvious to anyone living in the Show-Me State—school choice options are almost nonexistent for anyone living outside of St. Louis or Kansas City.

This is what school choice looks like in Missouri.

Charter Schools

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reported that in Missouri there were 71 total charter schools in 2019—20 (Missouri ranks 27th in the number of charter schools). This accounts for 2.9 percent of total public schools (34th overall). In total, these charter schools served fewer than 25,000 students (28th overall), or 2.7% of all public school students (34th overall).

What the NCES rankings don’t reveal is that all these schools and all these students are in either St. Louis City or Kansas City. Missouri has had charter schools for more than 20 years. The first one ever to open outside of the major cities just opened this year; the Leadership School opened with 94 students in the Normandy School District, and it faced considerable opposition. As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports:

Normandy schools have not been fully accredited for the last decade and are under the control of the Missouri Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. In 2021, Normandy students scored lower than any district in the state in English with 14% proficiency and second lowest in math with 5% proficiency.

This is what number four looks like?

Private School Choice

The Missouri Legislature created the Missouri Empowerment Scholarship Accounts Program in 2021. Students are using the program for the first time this year. EdChoice reports that 51% of families in “applicable Missouri cities and counties” are eligible for the program. While that sounds impressive, it is not. The program is limited to counties eligible for charter schools or cities with more than 30,000 residents. Just as charter schools are out of reach for many in our state, these program restrictions put school choice out of reach for many Missourians. Furthermore, that 51% number includes everyone eligible based on income restrictions without taking into account other factors (200% of the federal free-and-reduced price lunch income level).

Even if you do live in Clay, Jackson, Jefferson, St. Charles, or St. Louis County (the eligible counties), or Columbia, St. Joseph, Joplin, Jefferson City, Cape Girardeau, and the City of St. Louis (the eligible cities) and you meet the income requirements, you still have other hurdles. Your child must meet one of the following criteria to be eligible: have an Individualized Education Program, be entering kindergarten or first grade, or have attended public school the previous year.

At most, based on the number of tax credits available for the program, the scholarship program could serve 3,900 Missouri students.

This is what number four looks like?

We are certainly glad to see the small gains Missouri has made toward greater educational freedom, but the work is not done despite this curious number four ranking.

The post This Is What Number Four Looks Like? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

On March 17, 2022 Senator Jim Talent and Heritage Foundation’s James Jay Carafano joined us for a virtual event to discuss the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and what it means for The United States, China, and more.

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Jay P. Greene is a senior research fellow in the Center for Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation. At Heritage, Jay conducts and disseminates research on the key issues facing education today, including the cultural, civic, and economic implications of how education systems are designed and implemented.

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About the Speakers

Senator Jim Talent

Senator Jim Talent brings over 30 years of government and political experience including service in both chambers of Congress. He is a nationally-recognized leader on military affairs whose counsel is frequently sought by administrations and members of the House and Senate on both sides of the political aisle. During his service in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House, Senator Talent served on each chamber’s Armed Services Committee where he worked to advance a strong national defense and military readiness. In the U.S. House, in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, he was a vocal opponent of cuts in the size and strength of the military On the Senate Armed Services Committee, he fought to rebuild the force, which even then was too small, too stressed and desperately in need of recapitalization. An advocate for expanding the U.S. Navy’s fleet to project American power abroad and keep the peace, he chaired the committee’s Naval Power Subcommittee.

James Jay Carafano

James Jay Carafano, a leading expert in national security and foreign policy challenges, is the vice president of Heritage’s Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy and the E. W. Richardson Fellow. Carafano is an accomplished historian and teacher as well as a prolific writer and researcher. His most recent publication is “Brutal War” (Lynne Reinner, 2021), a study of combat in the Southwest Pacific. He also authored “Wiki at War: Conflict in a Socially Networked World” (Texas A&M University Press, 2012), a survey of the revolutionary impact of the Internet age on national security. He was selected from thousands to speak on cyber warfare at the 2014 South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas, the nation’s premier tech and social media conference.

The post March 17: Russia, Ukraine, and the Impact on the United States Virtual Event appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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Brian Riedl is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, focusing on budget, tax, and economic policy. Previously, he worked for six years as chief economist to Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) and as staff director of the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Growth. He also served as a director of budget and spending policy for Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign and was the lead architect of the ten-year deficit-reduction plan for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.

During 2001–11, Riedl served as the Heritage Foundation’s lead research fellow on the federal budget and spending policy. In that position, he helped lay the groundwork for Congress to cap soaring federal spending, rein in farm subsidies, and ban pork-barrel earmarks. Riedl’s writing and research have been featured in, among others, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and National Review; he is a frequent guest on NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, and C-SPAN.

The post Virtual Town Hall – The National Debt Crisis with Brian Riedl appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Our conversation also highlights that even within the market movement there remains a great deal of disagreement about the best way to reform our health care system. Mr. Butler was an early supporter of an “individual mandate” that required the purchase of health insurance, a position he now has largely rejected but does distinguish from the mandate as passed in the Affordable Care Act.

But the main reason we invited Mr. Butler on the program was to talk about his “Medicare Advantage for All” proposal, which he recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Mr. Butler explains what he means by “Medicare Advantage for All” in the podcast, but to be plain (and perhaps unsurprisingly), I disagree with the idea. I don’t think American patients are well served by the government “designing” a health care system that relies more and more on third-party, government-financed and government-controlled coverage for the vast majority of our health services. Proponents of free market-reforms should, I think, focus most of their efforts on expanding supply to meet public demand for health services, and we’ve certainly talked about those options at length and for some time.

In the podcast, we also talk about Medicaid expansion and proposals for changing how Medicaid is administered. As a general matter, I think Mr. Butler is more optimistic about the prospects of the federal government delegating control more definitively to states to control costs and manage the Medicaid program. I’m not so optimistic. In light of the federal government’s Lucyball treatment of state waiver proposals in both Republican and Democratic administrations, I’m not nearly as hopeful as Mr. Butler when it comes to believing states will be allowed to innovate in the program. All of that said, Mr. Butler provides an important perspective that is already part of a larger debate on the future of American health care.

Mr. Butler’s perspective may not be your philosophical cup of tea, but if it isn’t, rest assured that you’ll have plenty of other flavors to digest in the weeks ahead. In the next few days, we’ll be sitting down with Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute and Christopher Pope of the Manhattan Institute to talk about the future of health care in this country, with more guests planned. We hope these podcasts are informative, and we invite your feedback and ideas.

The post Agreeing and Disagreeing on Health Care Reform appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Schools and districts are grappling with spring standardized testing. The U.S. Department of Education has issued guidance allowing states to request a waiver for submitting test results this year. The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) has already changed the Annual Performance Report metric to count attendance as only “reportable,” not “scorable.” There’s plenty more to figure out in this ongoing process.

One thing that gives me confidence is classic American ingenuity. No one saw this coming a year ago, but the ideas to make this new normal livable are rolling in. My colleague, Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation, has compiled an excellent list of resources for parents with school-aged children at home for weeks. The College Board is figuring out how AP students can take their spring exams at home. Harvard Business Review has compiled tips for working parents dealing with school closures. Experts on education policy are offering their services pro bono to districts trying to craft a strategy. This is just a small sample of the efforts in the education sphere right now to find the best way to serve children in the midst of a pandemic.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that we can continue to generate and use these great ideas going forward. There is now absolutely no reason for Missouri school boards to resist alternate learning environments. We can think hard about building standards and accountability systems that are flexible and focus on how much each student is learning, rather than giving points for average daily attendance. We can trust parents to be truly involved in their children’s education. We didn’t expect this pandemic and we don’t know what’s coming next. So let’s use this as an opportunity to build a smarter education system for Missouri students.

The post Is This the New Normal? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Some economists and policymakers caution that the law’s loose language is ripe to be gamed or at the very least exploited outside the spirit of the program’s intent. Concerns about gentrification and the displacement of poor, minority neighborhoods in the name of economic development are legitimate, they say, and probably will play out in unexpected ways, should the program work as designed.

Later in the piece we learn the Kansas City Opportunity Zone Coalition is being “spearheaded” by the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce. It is not a surprise that the chamber would be involved, but anyone familiar with their role in city and state economic development policy knows this isn’t necessarily a good sign the program won’t be gamed or exploited.

The Heritage Foundation recently published a piece on Opportunity Zones, and they remain skeptical:

Academic and government studies show that past place-based development experiments often failed to yield promised employment gains or advance general economic opportunity for targeted residents. Even in cases where place-based policies induce greater investment within the targeted zone, the favored businesses gain an unfair advantage over competitors elsewhere. Often, new investments simply represent a shift in capital away from other investment opportunities outside the zone’s boundaries. In those instances where place-based policies draw capital away from more productive investments, they can result in net economic losses of jobs and income.

Incentives lavished on downtown Kansas City are a perfect example of the failed promises of place-based development incentives. A great deal of tax dollars have been spent just to redirect investment; little if any new economic activity has occurred citywide. That’s not to say that governments are powerless. But the power they wield is often negative. They can do the most good by simply getting out of the way, as the Heritage piece notes:

The economic literature, however, does offer a positive vision for helping distressed communities access economic opportunity. Lifting government-imposed barriers to work, housing supply, and education choice can expand economic mobility and opportunity. In stark contrast, top-down federal incentives can unintentionally reward failing state and local policies by masking the need for reform. Paired with removing government-imposed barriers to success, broadly applied tax reforms that reduce taxes on investment for everyone can help lift struggling communities out of poverty.

Pundits and policymakers, like former Kansas City Star columnist Steve Rose pictured above, have for too long said they don’t care what the research reveals. That is unfortunate, because good public policy demands that we pay attention to successes and failures here and elsewhere.

The post Opportunity Zones? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

But exactly how many Missourians would be put at risk if the state actually went through with such a hike? In a recent study, the Heritage Foundation puts a number to the cost of a $15 minimum, suggesting that the full-time equivalent job losses in Missouri could reach a staggering 218,000 if such a wage became law. The problem isn't just that a massive hike would imperil the jobs of the lowest-paid workers; rather, every worker paid a wage between the old wage and the new one would suddenly be put at risk by the government, as well.

Fifteen-dollar-per-hour mandatory starting wages would cover roughly one-third of U.S. wage and salary workers—considerably more than the minimum wage has ever covered.[6] Existing minimum-wage studies shed little light on the number of jobs a $15 mandate would cost, as they examined much smaller minimum-wage increases that affected relatively few workers. In fact, most of the studies look only at sectors significantly impacted by past increases, like teenage employment or the restaurant sector. These studies provide little guidance on the effects of a minimum wage covering one-third of the workforce.

However, economists have extensively studied how businesses respond to higher wages overall, not just minimum-wage increases.[7] On average these studies find a 10 percent increase in labor costs causes firms to reduce employment of less-skilled workers by 6.8 percent in the long run.[8] This is not a precise estimate—some studies find greater job losses, others find lower. This figure does indicate, however, the approximate magnitude of job losses that occur when labor costs rise.

Contrary to what "Fight for $15" supporters might suggest, simply raising the government-imposed minimum wage for the employed isn't an effective way to help our poorest citizens. Rather, such a move could dramatically harm them, thousands of others in Missouri, and millions nationwide. There are many ways to improve the lot of low-wage earners, but government tinkering in the labor market with minimum wage manipulations is neither a serious nor effective means to that end.

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