Susan Pendergrass speaks with Andrew G. Biggs, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, about the Social Security trustees’ latest report and what it means for the program’s future. They discuss the projected 2032 insolvency of the retirement trust fund, why the trustees’ birth rate assumptions may be too optimistic, the proposed Moreno-Warren plan to eliminate the payroll tax ceiling, the Cassidy-Kaine plan, and why pension experts oppose it, what would actually happen if the trust fund ran out, and more.

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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00):
I feel fortunate to have grabbed some of your time. Andrew Biggs from the American Enterprise Institute, I appreciate you coming on to talk to us. Social security has been nothing but in the news recently, and you know more than anyone else. So thank you for taking the time.

Andrew Biggs (00:14):
That’s why I’m so cheerful. The more you know about Social Security, the happier you are. But thanks for having me, Susan. It has been busy. I’m really happy to be with you today.

Susan Pendergrass (00:16):
I’m in my sixties. I see something about Social Security running out of money and I pay attention. So just to bring us all up to speed: in the last week, there was a news flash that Social Security is going to run out of money sooner. What does it really mean?

Andrew Biggs (00:39):
Every year the Social Security trustees, which is mostly members of the cabinet, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Social Security Commissioner, and so on, come out with a report projecting the program’s financial health, both in the short term and the long term. That happens every year, and it’s been getting worse every year. In this year’s report, they projected that the retirement trust fund will go insolvent, or run out of money, in 2032. They also projected a significantly larger long-term funding gap in the years thereafter, and this is worth explaining.

When the trust fund runs out, it doesn’t mean there’s zero money to pay benefits. As long as we’re paying a trillion dollars a year in payroll taxes, there will be money to pay benefits. But when the trust fund runs out, it means benefits will be cut, and their projection is somewhere around 22%. The size of that long-term funding gap dictates how big the cuts are going to be in the years thereafter. The trustees lowered their projections for birth rates, and they found that the One Big Beautiful Bill has worsened Social Security’s finances. A variety of things made this long-term funding gap worse. It’s really hard to paint a happy picture. The trust fund can be running out in about six years, and the funding gap and the benefit cuts in years thereafter are going to be larger. It’s a sobering picture.

Susan Pendergrass (02:16):
I’m not trying to pile on, but I think I saw that they extended the time when they expect birth rates to bounce back. Is that true? Because I have not seen anything anywhere, and I’ve spoken to some demographers, to suggest birth rates are ever going to bounce back.

Andrew Biggs (02:35):
Here’s the interesting thing. If you look at the Congressional Budget Office or the US Census Bureau, right now the fertility rate is about 1.6 children per woman on average, and both the CBO and the Census project that’s going to remain pretty much steady, declining a little bit over coming decades. Social Security had a very different picture. As of last year, they thought the birth rate, which is 1.6 now, was going to immediately start rising and go back up to 1.9 children per woman in the next several decades. That makes Social Security’s finances better. More kids being born means more people paying into the system. What they did in this year’s report is moderate a bit on fertility. They said, okay, it’s not going to rise back to 1.9, it’ll rise back to 1.75. So they are still over-optimistic. I’ve talked to some demographers and economists who’ve really focused on the birth rate, and they described the trustees’ assumptions as, quote, fanciful, meaning they just weren’t plausible. Now they’re somewhat more plausible, but they still tend

Susan Pendergrass (03:32):
Okay.

Andrew Biggs (03:48):
to be more optimistic than other agencies. And to me, frankly, this is a concern. You really want the people who are the scorekeepers, the umpires, to be playing it as straight as they possibly can. We know that these guesses are going to be wrong because this stuff is impossible to predict with certainty, but most demographers think the best guess is we’ll stay around 1.6 going forward. You’ve seen a decline, and a good predictor of birth rates is religiosity, the level of religious belief in a country. The US has typically been much more religious than Western Europe, and that’s played into fertility. There has been a big decline in religious belief, particularly among younger Americans, along with all the other pessimism you see among younger people. When people are pessimistic, they tend not to have a lot of kids. So the best guess is we’re going to stay about where we are.

I wrote something the other day saying the bad news in this trustees report is even worse than last year’s, but it could have been even worse. They project a long-term funding gap above 4.4 percent of payroll. What that means is if you took the 12.4% payroll tax today and raised it immediately and permanently by 4.4 percentage points, from 12.4 to 16.8, that would in theory keep the trust fund solvent for 75 years. But a better guess would be a funding gap of around 4.8 to 5 percent. This is real money. For years, people on the left have said, well, okay, we know Social Security has a solvency problem, but it’s a manageable issue. They were saying that when the funding gap was 2% of payroll. Now you’re looking at four to five percent. That’s a lot of money, at a time when a lot of other things are making claims on the budget. We have some difficult choices to make and we really have to start thinking hard about this.

Susan Pendergrass (06:09):
Okay, so what about this idea that’s been floated in the last week of getting rid of the payroll cap? First of all, explain the payroll cap, and then this idea of getting rid of it.

Andrew Biggs (06:17):
Sure. Social Security has a 12.4% payroll tax, half paid by you and half paid by your employer. That applies only to wages up to $184,500. That’s called the payroll tax ceiling, or the tax max. That dollar figure goes up every year, but this year it’s $184,000. You only pay taxes on those wages, and you also earn benefits only on those wages. People say, well, Bill Gates doesn’t pay more taxes than that. But he doesn’t earn any benefits either. So you’re capping both the taxes and the benefits.

To fast forward a little bit: there’s an op-ed in the Washington Post this week from Senator Bernie Moreno, a Republican from Ohio, and Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts. They say it’s just common sense to eliminate that cap and tax all earnings for Social Security. The interesting thing is how uncommon that would actually be. Our payroll tax ceiling is $184,000. Almost every other country has a ceiling on their payroll taxes for their pension system, and in almost every other country that ceiling is lower. In Canada, you only pay taxes and earn benefits up to around $60,000 in earnings. In the UK it’s about $70,000. In Germany it’s about $70,000. We are already an outlier for how high up the income ladder we tax people. To eliminate the cap entirely is a big deal. It’s effectively a 12 percentage point increase in the top marginal tax rate. I pulled an example of somebody living in New York City. A high-income person already pays 37% in federal income taxes, plus regular Medicare taxes, the additional Medicare tax, state taxes, and city taxes. If you add another 12 percentage points on top of that, their marginal tax rate would be in the mid-60s. And that’s before we’ve fixed Medicare or done anything else. The federal budget is still broke, and you’ve taxed these people as high as you possibly can. So these things that look like common sense, why don’t we just tax everybody,

Susan Pendergrass (08:37):
Right, right.

Andrew Biggs (08:46):
look, there are reasons for that.

Susan Pendergrass (08:49):
And were they suggesting that if I make $300,000 and I pay my 6.2 percent, totaling 12.4 with my employer, on my entire salary, that my Social Security benefit one day would be higher? Are they talking about capping the benefit or just getting rid of the cap on contributions?

Andrew Biggs (09:06):
They haven’t been very specific. They say Social Security would continue to be an earned benefit, which kind of implies you would continue to earn benefits on the additional taxes you would pay. Let’s say if we uncap the payroll tax and base your taxes on your total earnings, you’d also base your benefits on your total earnings. What you get then is, okay, you’re getting all this money from people in the short term, but you have to pay them higher benefits in the long term. That offsets some of the savings. And this morning I was running some numbers looking back to the 1970s. We had a huge run-up in benefit levels from Social Security in the 1970s. The benefit formula we have today is not the one FDR invented. It really happened in the 1970s, where they jacked up benefits in a really foolish way, and then to help pay for it, they increased the payroll tax ceiling. Right now you pay taxes on earnings up to $180,000. If we had just kept the tax max from 1970 and indexed it to wages, it would have been only $95,000. So they essentially doubled the wages on which you pay Social Security taxes. But what happens is they also doubled the wages on which people earn benefits. I’ve highlighted the point that if you have a high-income

Susan Pendergrass (10:38):
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Biggs (10:43):
couple retiring today, they could get almost $100,000 in total benefits, which is absurd. There’s no reason a government program should be paying anybody that amount. If you want that kind of income in retirement, you save more in your 401k. It’s better for you, better for the economy. But it was a result of this short-term step they took in the 70s. They said, hey, we raised benefits too high, let’s jack up the tax max. And they didn’t worry about the fact that in the future you’d have to pay benefits on that. Well, the future is today.

Susan Pendergrass (11:05):
Okay.

Andrew Biggs (11:13):
Now we’re broke again, we need extra money again, and these guys say, well let’s just jack up the tax max. But then you’ll pay extra benefits in the future. It becomes this chasing-your-tail kind of thing.

Susan Pendergrass (11:16):
Yeah. Yeah.

Andrew Biggs (11:25):
And the problem when you do it is there’s no country on earth paying $100,000 a year from a social insurance program, except for us. And the reason we do is these stupid historical decisions. If you’ve got this high-income couple in the US retiring today, they can get almost $100,000 from Social Security. If they lived in Canada, they’d get like $35,000. And that’s perfectly fine. Nobody’s starving to death in Canada in retirement. They just save more on their own.

Susan Pendergrass (11:35):
I’ll say.

Andrew Biggs (11:55):
The irony is that we think of ourselves as a free-market, small-government country, and our Social Security program is enormous, primarily because we’re paying benefits to people that other countries say, yeah, we don’t need to pay benefits to these guys.

Susan Pendergrass (12:11):
And yet people say, I put my money in, I get my money out.

Andrew Biggs (12:14):
Yeah, and I understand it. When I say we shouldn’t be paying $100,000 a year to a high-income couple, you get the email saying, well, I paid in. And if you paid in, you feel you have this moral claim on benefits. The problem is Social Security is still broke. We still need higher taxes or lower benefits. The idea that you’re just going to get your full benefits with the taxes you paid doesn’t work because the system can’t afford to do it. So you have to make the choice: do I want to pay higher taxes or get lower benefits? I’ve got to pick my poison. Most high-income people would prefer to get lower benefits. They care more about their taxes than their benefits. But people are still living in this dream world where this system, which is $30 trillion in the hole, is somehow going to pay them everything they’ve been promised and just screw somebody else. Everybody thinks they’re the guy who’s going to get everything and somebody else is going to get screwed.

Susan Pendergrass (13:14):
Yeah. I definitely hear people saying today, maybe I should go ahead and take it early and then I’ll get grandfathered in and my benefits won’t get lowered.

Andrew Biggs (13:26):
It probably won’t make a difference. In general, the Social Security benefit formula works based on your birth cohort, the year in which you’re born, not really the year in which you claim benefits. And people who are going to do Social Security reform understand the incentives. They don’t want to make it easy for people to game the system. So Social Security reform will probably work itself out in such a way that

Susan Pendergrass (13:42):
Right.

Andrew Biggs (14:03):
you can’t get some big advantage by claiming early. I could think of some conceivable possibilities, but I still would not encourage people to claim early.

Susan Pendergrass (14:14):
Okay, I want to talk about two more things I read in the last week. One was a letter from Tim Kaine about his idea with Senator Cassidy. What’s that idea for fixing it?

Andrew Biggs (14:24):
The interesting thing is people say Social Security reform has to be bipartisan. So we have two bipartisan ideas. We have Moreno and Elizabeth Warren, a Republican and a Democrat. They’ve got one idea, eliminating the payroll tax ceiling.

Susan Pendergrass (14:39):
Third rail.

Andrew Biggs (14:49):
Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, and Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, they’ve got a bipartisan plan. And guess what? Their plan is also terrible. If there’s any lesson from this, it’s that bipartisan doesn’t mean good.

Susan Pendergrass (15:00):
Bipartisanly terrible.

Andrew Biggs (15:04):
Yeah. Look, ultimately Social Security reform is going to have to be bipartisan, given the way the political system works. On the other hand, there is some lesson that if both Republicans and Democrats can agree on something, it might be a terrible idea. With Cassidy and Kaine, they are explicitly, and Cassidy said this, solving a political problem. The political problem is that neither Republicans nor Democrats want to vote for either tax increases or benefit cuts. You’d think Democrats want to raise your taxes and Republicans want to cut your benefits. The reality is they don’t want to do either of those things because they realize both are politically unpopular, which is why we’ve gone 40 years literally doing nothing. So their solution is that we don’t have to make these difficult votes. Instead, the federal government will borrow about $2 trillion, invest that money

Susan Pendergrass (16:02):
Tough.

Andrew Biggs (16:04):
in stocks and private equity, high-risk, high-return stuff. Then they claim they’re going to hold this fund for 75 years so it can build up value. In the meantime, when Social Security’s trust fund runs out in 2032, the federal government will borrow against the assumed gains on this investment fund.

Susan Pendergrass (16:06):
Right. Mm-hmm.

Andrew Biggs (16:29):
They say the borrowing will be at a lower rate because it’s the federal government. And they say after 75 years, all the gains in this investment fund will pay back all the borrowing and we’re all good. And let me count the ways there are problems with that. If you work at the state level,

Susan Pendergrass (16:45):
It’s just kicking the can.

Andrew Biggs (16:52):
state-based think tanks almost know more about this than federal people. A lot of underfunded state pension systems do things called pension obligation bonds. Their pension system is underfunded, they don’t want to raise contributions or cut benefits, so they borrow and invest in the stock market and hope it works. The pension obligation bond is the hallmark of a poorly funded, poorly run pension system. Think New Jersey, Illinois, things like that.

Susan Pendergrass (17:21):
Yeah.

Andrew Biggs (17:23):
There’s a national group of state budget officers that has come out and basically said as an institution, don’t do this. Borrowing for your pension is a bad idea. So it really is fitting for the times that the Cassidy-Kaine plan says, let’s take this worst idea from state and local government

Susan Pendergrass (17:45):
Yeah.

Andrew Biggs (17:47):
employee pensions, which has been condemned as bad practice, and put it on steroids and do that for Social Security. And what it really gets to is they just don’t understand the finances of it. And to be frank, they won’t listen. They have talked to every pension expert I know, and this Social Security world is pretty small. We all know each other on both sides. We may not agree on everything. Literally every pension expert I know says this is a terrible idea.

Susan Pendergrass (17:54):
Yeah.

Andrew Biggs (18:17):
But their political considerations are more important than policy, and that’s the problem with all of them.

Susan Pendergrass (18:24):
I mean, it feels free. They’re basically saying it’s like a timeshare. It just feels free right now. We just borrow the money. Okay, so

Andrew Biggs (18:31):
It’s been pointed out to them that if you can fund Social Security this way, you could fund the entire federal government this way and never collect any taxes. At one point Senator Cassidy was quoted in a newspaper article saying, well, yeah, sure, in theory you could. And I’m like, if something implies there’s a free money machine, maybe you need to question your assumptions.

Susan Pendergrass (18:38):
Sure. Okay.

Andrew Biggs (18:54):
I could give you a whole variety of reasons why this doesn’t work, but one macro point that’s come to me: I’ve been doing Social Security for a long time. I worked in the Bush administration in 2005 when they tried and failed to do Social Security reform. One of the problems we face today is that your elected officials understand Social Security policy much less well than they did 20 years ago. They just don’t understand how the system works. Going back to the Moreno-Warren idea of applying the payroll tax to all earnings,

Susan Pendergrass (19:22):
Yeah.

Andrew Biggs (19:37):
okay, you’re adding 12 percentage points to your top tax rate. There’s a reason Sweden and France and others don’t do this anymore. They used to have incredibly high tax rates. They don’t now. We would end up in many cases with a higher tax rate than most European countries. We have some philosophical dedication to small government and things like that. They don’t. And so if they’re not doing it,

Susan Pendergrass (19:43):
Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Biggs (20:02):
it’s because there’s a practical reason this isn’t a good idea. The same applies to wealth taxes. That’s been tried in Europe. They’re like, yeah, we’re not doing that anymore because it doesn’t work. But your average senator now

Susan Pendergrass (20:14):
It is happening around the country, the billionaire tax. What happens in 2032 if no one is either brave enough or smart enough to take this on in the next six years?

Andrew Biggs (20:17):
They’re just not aware of these policy issues, and that’s a real problem. It’s like having a guy fix your car who doesn’t know how to fix cars. 2032 is the date. If you have a recession, it might be 2031. It’s not certain, but it is certain it’s happening soon.

Susan Pendergrass (20:47):
Yeah. Okay.

Andrew Biggs (20:53):
There’s a literal reading of the law, which is that Social Security can’t pay out benefits it doesn’t have dedicated resources for. Once the trust fund runs out, the only dedicated resources are mostly the payroll tax, plus a little bit of money from income taxes levied on retirement benefits. And those were cut as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill. So if the trust fund runs out, they’d have to rely on the money they have on hand, which implies around a 22% benefit cut.

A lot of times people assume that benefit cut has to be across the board. If you did it that way, you’d throw a lot of people into poverty. I did some work a year or so ago with a lawyer in DC named Kristen Shapiro, and what we found is that the legal precedent shows the executive branch, meaning the president working through the Social Security Commissioner, would have some discretion. What we found is you could maintain full benefits for about 50% of people, the poorest 50% of seniors, and then cap benefits above that. If you cap the maximum benefit at about $24,000 per year for a single person or $48,000 for a couple, that is enough to make Social Security solid without raising taxes. So the point is simply you have some discretion.

The reality is Congress isn’t going to allow big benefit cuts, for political reasons. On the other hand, are they willing to have the size of tax increases needed, all in one go, to keep Social Security paying full benefits? I don’t think they want that either. So the reality is probably they’re going to borrow a lot of the money. And that’s where you get to the issue of how much more borrowing the financial markets will swallow. We effectively borrow from the public to repay the Social Security Trust Fund, but there’s an end to that. You say, okay, 2032, we have to do something. We have to raise taxes or cut benefits. If in 2032 the stated policy of the federal government is, well, we’re just going to keep borrowing to pay Social Security even though we have no prospect of paying it back, you wouldn’t blame some big market players for saying, yeah, I’m out, because you don’t want to lend money at low interest rates to someone who says they can’t pay it back. Then you start getting a couple of things. One is more federal borrowing squeezes out capital in the rest of the economy, and so interest rates naturally rise.

Susan Pendergrass (23:18):
Right.

Andrew Biggs (23:31):
But then there’s a second element: if you’re afraid the federal government can’t pay you back, over and above that natural increase in the interest rate, you’d apply a risk premium to treasury debt. You’d say, look, Treasury is not this rock-solid investment anymore. It’s more like a junk bond, or like borrowing from Illinois, and you make them pay a premium. That’s going to drive up

Susan Pendergrass (23:43):
US government borrowing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Andrew Biggs (24:01):
interest rates, and that makes it tougher not just for the federal government but for everybody. If you want to buy a car or a house, all your interest rates rise. There’s also going to be real temptation to inflate away the debt. The federal government doesn’t want to default on its debt, but

Susan Pendergrass (24:24):
Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Biggs (24:25):
historically the way you deal with this is inflation. Think about all the debt we took on during COVID, shoveling money out the door to everybody, and then we had massive inflation after it. A lot of those people who bought treasury debt didn’t get a good deal, because if you get 20% inflation on

Susan Pendergrass (24:34):
Absolutely. Yeah.

Andrew Biggs (24:47):
a treasury bond with a nominal fixed interest rate, that’s a real problem. So inflation becomes increasingly tempting. You look at this scenario and you’re like, can’t anybody here play this game? Every other country is not going bankrupt. We just have to do what they do.

Susan Pendergrass (24:51):
Yeah, yeah. So could we, if we really got our heads around it and started today or next year, incrementally raise the 12.4%, or incrementally get people used to lower benefits after a certain income or wealth level?

Andrew Biggs (25:18):
Sure. Yes. The way I think about it, there are two ways people think about it: the wrong way and my way. The wrong way is, let’s just pick from this menu of options to make Social Security solvent. We can raise the payroll tax a bit, raise the retirement age a bit, cut cost-of-living adjustments a bit, raise the tax cap a bit, and do these things until the system is solvent.

Susan Pendergrass (25:34):
Yes. Yeah.

Andrew Biggs (25:54):
That’ll get you a solvent program, but it won’t be a program that particularly works very well or is good for the economy. A more effective way is to ask, what do we want this system to do? If you talk about Social Security reform, what you hear is that it’s a social insurance program, a safety net, an anti-poverty program. Okay, it has to do that. And that part is really very cheap, because we don’t literally have that many poor seniors, their benefits aren’t very high, and it’s not a problem to maintain benefits for low-income seniors. When you ask what Social Security should do, nobody is saying we need to be paying high-income seniors $100,000 a year. There’s no public purpose for it. Nobody thought it out in advance. It was simply an unintended consequence. So if you’ve got things that are really costing a lot of money and have no public purpose, and those people can save for retirement on their own, you start scaling that back. The distinction I’m making is between policy changes simply for the purposes of keeping Social Security solvent, and policy changes for the purpose of making Social Security do what it needs to do, the real public purpose, and not doing things that serve no public purpose. My point is the things I’m talking about are things you should do whether Social Security is insolvent or not.

I’ll give you an example: Australia’s retirement system. Australia is a lot like us, not particularly more conservative or liberal, just sort of normal. Their Social Security program essentially is targeted at eliminating poverty in old age. It’s actually a better safety net than Social Security provides, but the benefits decline down to zero once you get above the poverty level. And to help people above that level save for retirement, everybody is enrolled in a 401k-type account. What that says is, if everybody’s participating in retirement plans as they should, the government’s job becomes easier. Their Social Security system costs about two percent of GDP. Ours costs about six percent. It’s a third as costly, provides a better safety net, and it comes because they’re actually thinking about what they’re doing.

Susan Pendergrass (28:18):
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Biggs (28:26):
We’re literally not thinking about what we’re doing. There’s a saying in business: the worst reason to do something is because we’re already doing it. That is literally how Social Security policymaking works. Nobody knows why our benefit formula is what it is or why the tax max is what it is. It’s all just stuff we inherited from the 1970s from people who were not in any way thinking clearly about what they were doing. It was people in the 70s trying to win elections, and we end up with the bag.

Susan Pendergrass (28:52):
Speaking of 2005, there was an attempt to offload a small portion of people’s contributions into the market, right? That failed.

Andrew Biggs (29:09):
That was the Bush proposal. I was in the White House then, kind of in a number-cruncher role, so I knew that stuff pretty well. I did a lot of events with President Bush around the country. When we came up on the 20th anniversary of Bush’s proposal in 2025, I started thinking to myself, what if his plan had passed? What would have happened? So I built a model. Back then they were saying, okay, you’re going to have some reductions in traditional Social Security benefits for middle and high-income people, and then you’re going to have a personal account where you can invest part of your existing payroll tax in stocks and bonds. The total benefit you get at retirement is a combination of those two. People were speculating. Well, we don’t know what the stock market’s going to do. But 20 years later, we’ve got some data, so let’s just see what happened. The results were that for people

Susan Pendergrass (30:01):
Now we do.

Andrew Biggs (30:07):
retiring today, low and middle-income people would have had higher total benefits by a little bit. The very highest-income people, their benefits would be down by a couple percent because the cuts to their traditional benefits would be larger than the gains from their personal account. But even they would be fine; it’s not a big deal. Going forward, it looked like people would do a little bit better with the Bush plan than with the traditional system. But here’s the important thing: the traditional system is broke. We just talked about how it goes broke in 2032, with huge deficits. The Bush proposal wouldn’t have made Social Security totally solvent, but it would have addressed half or two-thirds of the long-term funding gap. So you’d get a system that would have paid you benefits around the same as, or maybe a little bit better than, Social Security, but would be in much more solid financial shape. Today the times are different, and I don’t think personal accounts are really viable. But the point is, if they had done something back then, everything could be easier today. But members of

Congress were just too afraid. Republicans were afraid of taking the political hit. For Democrats, it was too tempting to give the political hit. They knew they had to do something, but they couldn’t swallow hard and say, look, let’s just go in on this thing together. They didn’t want to give Bush the win because by that point Iraq was going badly and they really didn’t like him. So they beat him up. But the problem is Bush served his term and is happily retired in Texas. The people who really got screwed were the ones who depend on Social Security, because we didn’t fix it. And you just hope that’s not what we do again.

Susan Pendergrass (31:42):
Yeah. Somebody not us in 2045 could be having the same conversation, right? Like, if only in 2025 or 2026 we’d gotten serious. And I do think people mix up the trust fund with the whole program. A lot of people think all of Social Security is going to be bankrupt in six years, versus the reality that we’re still taking in a trillion dollars, we just need about 22% more than what we’re taking in.

Andrew Biggs (32:14):
Yeah. If you go back 20 or 25 years, there were all these arguments about whether the trust fund is real or fair or whatever. The trust fund is essentially IOUs written from one side of the government to the other. I thought at the time the trust fund is not real in an economic sense. It doesn’t make it easier for the government to pay Social Security benefits. It is a pledge that we will pay them, but it doesn’t make it easier to pay them. But here’s the interesting thing:

Susan Pendergrass (32:25):
Right. Al Gore. The lock box.

Andrew Biggs (32:50):
if having a trust fund doesn’t make it easier to pay benefits, then not having a trust fund doesn’t make it harder. The trust fund runs out, we still have taxes coming in, we can still pay 80% of what is owed. If we retarget that, you can maintain the safety net. It’s not like you’re totally insolvent or broke. All those long debates over whether the trust fund is real get resolved because the trust fund itself is gone in six years. So that doesn’t matter very much anymore. But I do hope that, as you said, we’re not in 2045 looking back on a solution of just borrowing $500 billion a year or whatever it’s going to be. People in 2045, when the federal government is bankrupt, the dollar is dropping, and all these financial crisis things we think only happen to other countries are happening to us, they would look back and say, I wish those people were more responsible. The Social Security problem, in a sense, if we went back 25 or 30 years ago, was a manageable problem. The real issue is not the demographics or the benefit growth or whatever. The real issue is just poor stewardship of this program by Congress and respective presidents. It is absolutely a governance problem. It is not a problem of economic or demographic fundamentals. All of that can be handled.

Susan Pendergrass (34:19):
Everyone wants to be Santa Claus, right? No one wants to be the Grinch.

Andrew Biggs (34:22):
It’s very true, but leadership is about giving people bad news. Good news kind of tells itself. Bad news has to be told and people have to be convinced that this is going to hurt, but we’ve got to do it. And we just didn’t have the willingness. President Clinton in the late nineties tried to do some stuff, but he didn’t deliver much bad news because we had surpluses. President Bush was willing to tell people, okay, look, you’re not going to get every penny you’ve been promised. Beyond that, the level of leadership has been very poor.

Susan Pendergrass (35:01):
Hasn’t been good. All right, well, next year when the trustees report comes out, come back and give us more bad news.

Andrew Biggs (35:09):
Yeah, until then, things are looking up. But no, it’s something people want to be aware of, and I think that’s the key thing.

Susan Pendergrass (35:13):
Well, I think one of the more important things you said is that no one understands it. People are upset and arguing over something they don’t understand the mechanics of. I do know people who think they have an account with their name on it that their Social Security taxes went into, and they’re just going to start taking the money out.

Andrew Biggs (35:23):
I have some bad news for that. Your taxes go into Social Security and go straight out the door to pay for your grandmother’s benefits. If you want to know where your taxes are, they’re in your grandmother’s bank account. So go ask her.

Susan Pendergrass (35:45):
That’s right. That’s right. All right, thank you so much. I really appreciate the time.

Andrew Biggs (35:51):
Thank you, Susan. It’s a pleasure to be with you.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post The Social Security Crisis Is Worse Than You Think with Andrew G. Biggs appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The piece focused on five cities: Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Los Angeles, and detailed each city’s experience of homicides.

But what is noteworthy for Kansas Citians is that, based on the Post’s reporting of “crime data from 52 of the country’s largest police departments,” it appears that Kansas City may have the highest homicide rate for 2025—notwithstanding a reduction from previous years.

The homicide rate indicates homicides per 100,000 population; it is a useful tool for comparing cities with different total populations. While Kansas City’s total homicides in 2025 will likely be lower from the peak of 182 in 2023, when adjusted for population, it appears we may be on top. (St. Louis will likely have an even higher rate, but was not included in the Post’s analysis due to its size.)

This should serve as a reminder to all Missourians that it is not enough to reduce crime, though that is welcome. We must adopt policies that demonstrate results year over year rather than congratulate ourselves for drops that may have nothing to do with public policy. And if Kansas City does indeed end 2025 with the highest homicide rate in the country (out of the 52 cities selected for the study), it’s a reminder that public safety—and specifically homicide—must become a greater concern.

The post Kansas City Homicide Rate May Be National Leader for 2025 appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Learn more about the book here: www.cato.org/books/fighting-freedom-learn

Susan Pendergrass speaks with James Shuls, fellow at the Show-Me Institute and head of the Education Liberty Branch at Florida State University, and Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute about their new book, Fighting for the Freedom to Learn: Examining America’s Centuries-Old School Choice Movement. They discuss how the fight for educational freedom long predates modern debates over public schooling, why early advocates viewed schooling as a family and community responsibility, and how today’s school choice expansion connects to America’s founding principles. The conversation covers the history of the common school movement, the roots of residential school assignment, and why educational freedom has always been central to the American story, and more.

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction

02:33 The Genesis of ‘Fighting for the Freedom to Learn’
05:41 Historical Perspectives on School Choice
08:04 The Evolution of Common Schools and Their Impact
10:59 The Role of Religion in Early Education
14:01 The Shift Towards Standardization in Education
16:43 The Need for School Choice in Disadvantaged Areas
19:29 The Historical Context of Property Taxes and School Assignment
22:17 The Recent Surge in School Choice Movements

Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00)
Certainly looking forward to this conversation with two very, very smart people: Dr. Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute and Dr. James Shuls of Florida State University. James, can you first tell us about this new center that you are in charge of at Florida State University? I think it’s innovative and really cool, and I’d like to hear a little bit more about it before we talk about your book.

James Shuls (00:21)
Absolutely. So I’m with the Institute for Governance and Civics, and it was created by the legislature a couple years ago. And while I would like to take credit and say I’m in charge of it, as you sort of said there, Susan, I’m not in charge of the Institute, but I’m one of the branch heads. So the IGC, as we call it, has four branches. We focus on economic liberty, constitutional liberty, conscience liberty, and education liberty. I’m the head of the education liberty branch.
And so part of what we’re doing is outreach to K–12 schools, helping to focus on civics instruction, improving knowledge and preparation for teachers as it relates to civics and governance and those sorts of things. At the same time, we’re writing about issues of educational liberty from a school choice perspective, which is exactly the topic we’re talking about today.

Susan Pendergrass (01:12)
Yeah, so you guys have a book that you just co-edited, Fighting for the Freedom to Learn: Examining America’s Centuries-Old School Choice Movement. How did you come up with this idea, and why did you decide to put this book together?

Neal McCluskey (01:27)
Sure, I’ll go with that. The idea behind the book stems from just about everything I ever do, which is I got angry about something, and I was like, well, somebody ought to do something about this. If you work in school choice advocacy for more than a day or so, you’ll quickly hear that school choice started by people trying to avoid desegregation in the South. And that’s always given as the origin. And even if somebody wants to say, well, you know, Milton Friedman wrote this essay in 1955—and he really wrote it before 1955—we know that that was really just taking advantage, at the very least, of this backlash against desegregation.
And it just drives me nuts. There is a very long, rich history of the idea and practice of school choice. So I thought, you know, somebody ought to do a book on that, and we can hit, sort of semi-chronologically, all the different eras in which this happened and the ebbs and flows. The Cato Institute and the Center for Educational Freedom, which I direct, also had something called the School Choice Timeline—this interactive online timeline that I put together also because I was angry. In particular, I wrote a chapter about the gap where not much was going on in school choice, and I wanted to explain the gap.
But we have lots of chapters—one on how progressives were really into school choice for a while, and how schooling worked before the common-schooling movement, and all sorts of stuff like that. The genesis was aggravation on my part, at least, about always hearing this narrative that school choice stems from efforts to avoid desegregation. And then I said, you know, James Shuls—there’s a guy who probably is angry a lot, too. Maybe he’d like to get in on this.

James Shuls (03:17)
Yeah, that’s right. Susan, I’ve been on the podcast before talking about some of my scholarship related to Virgil Blum. He was a real strong school choice advocate starting in the ’50s, did a ton of work, and gets absolutely no credit. I was angry that Friedman gets all the credit—he wrote this paper in 1955, yada, yada, yada—and then in the 1990s we get school choice programs. It’s like, well, a lot happened in that yada, yada, yada period that we’re not covering.
I had been writing about that when Neal came along with the idea to do the book. Part of what we’re doing as we frame this is saying: looking at school choice today through the current lens we have is the wrong way to do it. We think of school choice today as opting out of the public school system—but that only works to frame it that way if there is a public school system. Before common schools were around, people were still advocating for their kids, still trying to get schools created. So there was lots of stuff that wouldn’t fit the framework we have today.
What we’re saying in this book is these impulses for educational freedom have always existed, and we’re essentially tracing them from colonial times to today.

Neal McCluskey (04:36)
James’s stuff on Blum was also a major reason I thought, here’s a guy who could really contribute to this. I just stumbled on Blum in large part because of what James wrote. I was like, why do people not know about this guy?

Susan Pendergrass (04:41)
We did a whole podcast on it. I’ll tell you what makes me mad is that in the last month or two, tops, there have been articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post talking about low-income families—both in Florida and Arizona—generally Black and brown parents, who are participating in this right-wing conservative movement to kill the public school system because they think they deserve to be able to choose where their kid goes to school.
Even locally in political groups, people say, well, that’s a MAGA person, which means they support charter schools. When those two things get put into a sentence, it really makes my blood boil because I’ve been working in this space a long time. As we’re going to find out more, school choice is not a new thing at all. The latest iteration of it is not a MAGA thing or five years old or a COVID thing. Since at least 1990—at least 35 years—parents and activists like Howard Fuller were saying, hey, this isn’t right. We’re literally assigning kids to the worst schools and not letting them out. We ought to let them out.
Somehow this has become the Republican agenda to kill teacher unions and break up the public school system. Nothing could be further from the truth. That makes me mad. That’s why I’m really glad you guys put this book together. Let’s go back—not to the very beginning of the country—but pre–industrial revolution, pre–John Dewey, before standardized schools, attendance zones, and district lines. What did it look like, say 150 years ago? Did parents decide where their kids went to school, or did you have to go to a certain school because that was the one you helped pay to create? How did it work back in the day?

James Shuls (06:50)
I’ll jump in here because I’m awfully angry about this. Before common schools, there was a wide mixture of different types of schools. You had dame schools, private schools, public schools, and publicly funded private schools.
What you get in Charles Glenn’s chapter, “Emergence of the Common School Ideology,” is an understanding of the movement towards common schools. The impetus behind them was really to separate schooling from the family and the community and to use schools for social change. That’s the difference that comes in here—schooling would be used for social change.

Susan Pendergrass (07:29)
Mm-hmm.

James Shuls (07:35)
—to create and form Americans. Some people look at that and say it’s a good thing, but there are certainly negative side effects as well when you separate the impact of community and families. An interesting element that comes out in this book is that the common school ideology and the public school system that has come in its wake was created to form a certain kind of American citizen.
Then we get into Neal’s chapter, where Neal talks about the sort of gap where things aren’t happening. It’s because these systems were under attack. You see a reemergence in the 1950s—not just because of Brown and segregation—but because you start to have a return to some of these values and a return to trying to connect schooling and the family and the church.
When you look at school choice with this longer arc, rather than looking at the ’50s as your starting point, you see the various impulses that were leading pre–common schools, how common schools helped to squash some of those things, and how we’re starting to come back to a decentralized and pluralistic system.

Susan Pendergrass (08:50)
Certainly the common schools—also called public schools before 1900—were Protestant. They absolutely taught religion. They didn’t stop teaching religion until the Catholics started showing up. Then it was, yeah, maybe we get religion out of schools, right? Because we don’t want Catholicism in a public school. Public schools taught Protestantism; they just didn’t want to teach Catholicism. People think there’s always been separation—no religion in public schools—and that’s not true.

James Shuls (09:16)
That’s a key point in Matthew Lee’s chapter: Catholics turned to private schools. He would say it’s not necessarily school choice because the Catholics were saying you had to go to the Catholic schools—so no choice among Catholic schools. Nevertheless, the Catholic schools came up because the public schools were Protestant. Protestants went in—though not all in. There were some segments, which Neal could talk about, with the Lutherans.
By and large, Protestants supported the common school movement. Then there was a movement to secularize public schools. Again, that’s part of what happens in the 1950s with the return of Protestants starting to support school choice—because their capture of the public school system had been weakened and there were no longer Protestant schools.

Neal McCluskey (10:10)
Just as a pitch for the book: there’s so much good history in here that we won’t be able to talk about. You definitely want to get the book. It’s worth noting that for much of our early history—colonial period, early republican period, even into the common-schooling period—there wasn’t a separation people would recognize if you say, well, this is a public school and this is a private school. There were schools. There was education.
Government was sometimes involved in assisting private schools. Going back to British traditions, someone would provide—usually from the proceeds of owning land—funds to help maintain a school. In America, land was the one thing in superabundance, so that wasn’t as profitable. Governments would sometimes say, look, you’re running a school here; we’ll give you a little money to do it. There was often cooperation between government and schools.
The first voucher program that we’ve at least been able to catalog was in 1802 in Pennsylvania—specifically in Philadelphia. So this is not new. Go back more than two centuries and you had people like Paine and John Stuart Mill talking about helping people to consume education by funding parents so they can choose, not by funding schools.
Even as we have common schools, they were extremely localized. Think of the one-room schoolhouse—it was also the meeting house and often the church—serving pretty homogeneous communities. Even within what eventually became common schooling, there was a lot of differentiation where people could get the schooling they wanted. It’s only as progressives consolidate control that we move far away from that community-level, very small schooling.

Susan Pendergrass (12:13)
I thought it was so odd that Maine and Vermont have had town tuitioning of high schools for a couple hundred years. Where the town didn’t want to build a high school, they just paid tuition for their high school students to go to a different school the student picked. In some cases it’s a boarding school, even overseas. They were challenged in the Supreme Court within the last couple of years, even though those programs have existed for hundreds of years.
All of a sudden, people who don’t like the voucher idea went after Maine for town tuitioning, even though that program has been in place for so long.

James Shuls (12:53)
That radical right-wing bastion in Maine.

Susan Pendergrass (12:55)
—decided at a town meeting to do it. I think as you get into the earlier or middle part of the last century, you start building up this industrial education complex: we’re going to be the great equalizer; everyone’s going to have the same kind of school; 20 kids and a chalkboard and teacher; separate kids by age, not ability; common standards; and we’re going to be in charge of it.
Anyone who disagrees with what’s being taught there is seen as a radical who wants to break the system and doesn’t understand the importance of it. That’s what I feel has been happening lately, where any parent—my own experience: I homeschooled one of my kids and was considered a radical because why wouldn’t I accept that the public school to which he was assigned would be best for him? The idea that uniformity is what we need.
I still think there are a lot of people within the public education establishment who say uniformity is the key. We are clearly seeing a backlash, but the uniformity principle—maybe 75 years, maybe the 1950s—would you say?

Neal McCluskey (14:15)
It depends. In the early republican period, people like Benjamin Rush said we need schooling for everybody to make them into good citizens—into “republican machines,” his term. Horace Mann certainly wants to standardize people. Not because of Catholics at the beginning—they hadn’t come in at great numbers—but because he saw people coming in from the countryside.
New England industrialized first—relatively poor farming area, but lots of rivers to run factories. These early factories with big water wheels. Mann saw parents coming from the countryside and thought they were all idiots. He thought we needed to take their kids away from them and standardize them. So we started it even at the very beginning.
It gets even more standardized as more immigrants arrive and people get scared of them. One overarching theme of the history of school choice: it’s about people who do not fit into whatever mold the elites decide. Catholics didn’t fit the Protestant mold. In my research, Germans were most disturbing for people because they spoke German—people said, they really need to speak English. We have a thread of fear of Germans going back to colonial Pennsylvania.
The chapter on African Americans is particularly powerful: it talks about a system that never wanted to incorporate them. They needed freedom to get the education people were denying them. That’s the big theme—people who don’t want to be standardized or who are refused help need school choice to get something out of education.

Susan Pendergrass (16:13)
I’ll only say that’s true today. It’s ironic that the kids with the least options—the most disadvantaged kids in the worst schools—are the ones people openly talk about denying options to. Even in Missouri, when public school choice is considered, some of the lowest-performing districts say, okay, but not us. We can’t let kids out of our district because we’re one of the worst in the state and everyone will leave and take money.
They want to draw a line and say, whatever unfortunate child got assigned to this school, we cannot let them leave. That’s flipped on its head. That child needs choices as much as every other kid. They say, no, we have to lock those kids in and strap them to the deck of a Titanic. Why do you think that is, James?

James Shuls (17:07)
I’d say Ron Matus’s chapter on the progressive movement toward school choice is terrific for the points you’re making. There was a tremendous progressive move for school choice in the ’70s and ’80s that culminated in the early voucher programs.
They were making exactly the cases you’re making: we should not assign students to failing schools; school choice was progressive in that it allowed disadvantaged students to opt out and get the type of school that would meet their needs, and to bring competition into the marketplace. The progressives were making the case for school choice exactly because the most disadvantaged students needed it the most.
That’s why the recent idea that school choice is a MAGA movement is off. The progressives got there first, as Ron and others explain.

Susan Pendergrass (18:12)
One last thing. I have a hard time articulating to folks who believe there’s an ironclad connection between property taxes and school assignment that goes back to the beginning of time and must continue until the end of time: if you pay property taxes here, your kid goes to school here; if you don’t, your child doesn’t get to go to school there. I don’t want any kids coming into my kid’s school if their parents didn’t pay property taxes.
I think that is particularly strong in Missouri. In St. Louis County we have dozens of school districts within one county. People feel very strongly—even supporters of school choice—about this property tax/school assignment idea. They can’t get past it. What would you say to that? You lived in St. Louis, James; what do you say?

James Shuls (19:13)
We didn’t write the book through this specific lens, but if you read closely you see this: the system evolved over time. You had a radically decentralized system. Horace Mann and the common school movement advocated for state structures and more organization. Over time it evolved to the system we have today.
From the founding, the idea of residential assignment where local property taxes only follow the kids—and the high level of state and federal regulation—was not anyone’s early vision. It’s not the system most people would advocate if they could design it from scratch. We get wedded to the structures we have.
What we have to do is step back and ask, is this the way it should be? I think the answer is no. We shouldn’t have systems that restrict resources to small local communities and assign students, because we get the problems we all see: high-poverty districts with struggling schools and students assigned to terrible schools with little opportunity for the types of coursework and experiences that lead to success. The system we have isn’t inherently good just because it’s the system we have.

Neal McCluskey (20:57)
We probably needed a chapter on the history of taxation to answer this directly. My suspicion is that for a lot of our history we didn’t have a lot of income tax or other taxes, and drawing on the English tradition, we probably funded things at the community level with property taxes—very local and democratically controlled.
It’s not until the industrial era, with consolidation, that communities stopped running their own schools. My guess is that’s the history of a lot of this property-tax and local-tax funding. But things have obviously changed.
My colleague Colleen Hroncich always points out: it might have made sense to have local public schools when nobody had a car and most people walked places. You couldn’t travel 10 or 20 miles every morning to drop your kid off. That doesn’t make sense now—we have modern transportation—so we don’t have to be shackled to the school a mile or two away.

Susan Pendergrass (22:04)
See you next time. I also think that starting in the 1950s—partly because of Brown v. Board—states and then the federal government started tinkering with the distribution of tax dollars to districts to give more money to poorer districts and less to wealthier districts. That’s been going on with funding formulas. I’m not sure any of them have had an impact on poor kids or reducing achievement gaps, but they thought that moving levers at the state and federal level would get a different outcome.
In my opinion, wealthier districts with higher property tax bases and more local funding aren’t really impacted by those. Now they say, you can move kids around—but not from us—because we’re not part of that system where you move money around. We’re happy with what we’ve got. If you can afford to live here, fine; but they want to be left out of it.

James Shuls (23:10)
Sorry to interrupt you. I wanted to weigh in on that last point, because—reason to listen to the podcast and get the book—this is not in the book, but Virgil Blum had some correspondence with Milton Friedman back in the ’50s and ’60s. They weren’t closely associated; they were operating in different circles. But Blum sent Friedman something he had written and asked for feedback. Friedman responded.
One thing he said was, when it comes to the voucher idea, he thought it should start at the higher education level, not K–12. Then he said it should be at the level where the taxation or the money is supplied. So in K–12, that probably means vouchers should come from the local community, not from the state or the federal government.
So to your point: we had a system that relied more on local tax dollars, and Friedman was saying the vouchers should be local. But we’ve shifted over time to a system that provides a lot more money from the state and federal government than it used to. If you look across the country, every school choice program is a state system—very rarely do you have a district creating a voucher system. It almost always comes at the state level. Even Friedman was wrong from time to time.

Susan Pendergrass (24:44)
On that note, I know you have a chapter on this, but what about this explosion of school choice? Now it feels unstoppable. We have more than a dozen states with universal-ish programs. At least five states have truly universal school choice systems. Why now? Why has it picked up steam so fast after barely making progress through the ’90s and early 2000s?

Neal McCluskey (25:17)
Jason Bedrick has a particular take on it—which I think is probably right—but I think it has deeper roots. Generally, the idea is people are unhappy and increasingly unhappy with how they’re being served by public schools.
My theory—and I think a lot of people hold this—is that COVID made people realize that in a public school system, if a powerful minority or majority wants X and you want Y, someone loses. Many parents who wanted in-person school—generally well-heeled and used to getting what they want—suddenly couldn’t get it. They realized the system didn’t work for them even if they liked it in theory.
Anecdotally, in rich places like Montclair, New Jersey, people were at each other’s throats because many wanted mutually exclusive things. Then you had ideological battles over vaccination and mask requirements. Many say that virtual school let parents see what their kids were learning, and they didn’t like it—books like Gender Queer, how African American history is taught, etc. We haven’t shown concretely that anger was because of peeking into the classroom via Zoom, but it certainly coincided. People were angry.
Jason argues that, yes, people were unhappy, but it wasn’t really COVID; it was the strategy of reaching out to red-state parents in environments where you could get school choice, saying: public schools are teaching stuff you don’t like; you don’t want your kids trapped in that. All the big school-choice gains were in red states—the red-state strategy worked. Now the future is moving into purple and blue states. I think that’s right too, but the underlying driver is people realizing one system can’t fit everyone.

James Shuls (28:32)
I’ll weigh in here too. Friedman made the free-market case for school choice in the ’50s, and that case continued to today—choice, competition, rising tides lift boats. You also had the progressive case in the ’70s and ’80s—students shouldn’t be trapped in failing schools; create programs to help the most disadvantaged. Those arguments kept creating small, targeted programs, but not a wider audience.
A third element—cultural, right-leaning values—added a new coalition. It layered on top of the free-market and progressive cases. I wouldn’t say the movement is completely going to the right; it’s making arguments that appeal to those individuals.
If you go to a rural Missouri voter and say “choice and competition,” with one local public high school and one elementary school, that doesn’t land. If you say the most disadvantaged students in St. Louis and Kansas City need choice, the rural voter may not care. But if you weigh in on some conservative values, you reach a new audience. Maybe that’s part of what’s happened.

Susan Pendergrass (30:24)
Just a bigger tent. It’s clear we’ve only scratched the surface of your book—this is only a 30-minute podcast and there’s so much more in there. A lot of it is so intriguing—going back to the history of this country and realizing the system we have now is relatively new compared to the various systems we’ve had.
Parents don’t really care what the name is on the outside of the school. They care about how their kids come home at the end of the day—how much they appear to be learning. They want them challenged; they want them safe. That’s universal. Whatever system gets them there, they don’t care what it’s called or what it looks like. If they thought they’d get it out of a uniform system and now they don’t…
There’s so much in this book. You picked a lot of great authors—12 leading education scholars. When will folks be able to buy this book and read it themselves, and where?

Neal McCluskey (31:37)
It comes out November 11th. I think it’s available online—online bookstores everywhere—as well as the Cato website, Cato.org.

Susan Pendergrass (31:43)
And can folks reach out to you guys if they have any comments or questions?

Neal McCluskey (31:53)
As long as it’s nice stuff, they can reach out to me.

Susan Pendergrass (31:55)
I can’t promise them.

James Shuls (31:55)
The nice stuff can reach out to me; the negative comments go to Neal.

Susan Pendergrass (32:00)
Well, it’s great. Thank you so much for coming on and talking about it. It’s a fantastic book, and I highly recommend folks get it and read it themselves.

James Shuls (32:09)
Thank you.

Neal McCluskey (32:09)
Great, thanks.

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The post The Long Fight for Educational Freedom with Neal McCluskey and James Shuls 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.

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The post What the Media Gets Wrong About School Choice with Matthew Ladner appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

For more than a decade, Kansas City leaders treated Sun Fresh at 31st and Prospect as both a grocery store and a public policy tool to address food access and economic development. According to KCUR, the city has invested  $17 to $21 million since 2015, plus a $750,000 operating and security appropriation in May 2025. Yet customer traffic reportedly fell from about 14,000 a week to roughly 2,000–4,000 by mid-2025 (sources differ by date and estimate). According to The Washington Post, the store’s insurance costs rose 45% year-over-year, thefts mounted, and by this summer the store’s shelves were bare. Less than three months after the latest infusion of taxpayer money, the store closed.

This should not have been a surprise. I wrote as early as 2015 that the effort would fail. I saw this not because I’m imbued with a mystical power of prediction, but because I’m roughly familiar with some basic economic principles.

Friedrich Hayek described the price system as “a mechanism for communicating information” that enables millions of separate decisions to coordinate without central control. Prices, sales, and profit margins signal what customers want and whether a business can supply it sustainably. Subsidies blur those signals. Falling sales normally push owners to change their product mix, improve service, or close. If government funds fill the gap, a business may avoid—or delay—those choices until the underlying problems are too great to fix. This is exactly what happened with Sun Fresh.

Ludwig von Mises argued that without real market prices, decision-makers cannot allocate resources rationally. A subsidized store like Sun Fresh is insulated from these tests. Are prices too high? Is the product selection wrong? Are operating costs out of line? In a subsidy environment, these questions may go unanswered because survival depends more on political approval than on customer satisfaction.

And what do politicians want?  Ribbon cuttings and pretty pictures. Sound economics doesn’t photograph so well.

Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, warned that the interests of producers and the public often diverge. A subsidized grocery may fulfill a political need to “do something” about food access, but it may not deliver what shoppers actually want at prices they will pay. If a store cannot sustain itself even with taxpayer support, the model—not the market—is the likely problem.

Supporters of the subsidies might argue that they were necessary to correct a market failure, and that the store’s closure proves even more support was needed. But the record suggests the opposite: prolonged subsidies masked underlying weaknesses, delayed inevitable closure, and diverted resources from other food-access efforts such as mobile markets, independent co-ops, or smaller-scale grants. Subsidies likely harmed other grocery stores as well, such as an ALDI on Prospect within about 1.5 miles.

Markets provide important information that no city hall central plan can replicate. Public funds cannot replace this information; they can only distort it. It’s true of sports stadia, entertainment districts, and the hotel industry. When those signals are ignored, the cost falls not only on taxpayers but also on the communities policymakers aim to help.

Lastly, and perhaps more importantly, this debacle is an example not only of the city doing what it shouldn’t, but also failing to do what it should. Many of the challenges the shopping center endured—theft, prostitution, open drug use, and violence—were the result of the city failing to do something we (should) all agree is a basic function of government: public safety.

Even if one believes subsidized stores could work, nothing can succeed amid the bedlam surrounding this store.

I wrote of this project in 2015: “When [the grocery store] fails, the city and its residents will be no better off than before, just poorer. And the infrastructure, crime, and education issues that really need to be addressed will be that much worse.” This is exactly where we are now.

The post Sun Fresh Failed Because of Subsidies, not Despite Them appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Patrick Tuohey, co-founder and policy director of the Better Cities Project, has been critical of the Sun Fresh project. He says the store looks “great on paper” but does not have demand to support it. Plus, he noted, the neighborhood has other options because of a nearby Aldi store and the independent Happy Foods Center.

Kansas City officials hoped that subsidizing the grocery store would revitalize a long-neglected corridor. Ten years later, with the store on the brink of closure, city leaders are asking what went wrong. But they needn’t look far: the answers were visible from the start—and many of them were detailed in the very Show-Me Institute blog posts I wrote at the time.

Since 2015, I’ve chronicled the Sun Fresh project and argued that its shortcomings were structural, not situational. Here are the key arguments made then, all of which remain relevant now.

• In May 2015, I wrote that “Kansas City government is going into the grocery business,” a move I called “a stunning development.” I noted that the city would lease the property to Sun Fresh for just $1 per year and that the entire project was heavily subsidized—a sign that market demand alone wasn’t enough to support it.
• In the same 2015 post, I argued that grocery demand was already being met in nearby areas: “people who make a living running grocery stores by investing their own money do not think this [Sun Fresh investment] is a good idea.”
• The next week, I conducted some shoe-leather reporting by driving around the supposed food desert. I found several grocery stores with well-stocked produce aisles, and marveled about how, due to the city’s use of various taxing jurisdictions, food in some of the city’s poorer neighborhoods was more expensive than in wealthier areas.
• In May 2016, I updated the story of the subsidized grocery store, noting costs were ballooning, ending with: “In short, it appears that city leaders are planning to lose money investing in an already-failed venture in order to pursue a policy that has no evidence backing its effectiveness.”
• The next month, I wrote that the USDA was becoming skeptical of the “food desert” idea itself. I also noted research showing that the mere availability of healthy food was not sufficient to solve the problem of unhealthy diets.
• In March 2017, I pointed out that project costs continued to rise.
• In December 2017, I summarized new research showing that the “food desert” premise was deeply flawed.
• In October 2018, I highlighted a Kansas City Star piece indicating grocers are in the business of giving people what they want, not what someone else thinks they ought to have. The Sun Fresh store director told the paper, “You can pick apart any store that you want to on what they have or don’t have, but it’s about if people request these things or not . . .  We’re going to give our customers what they want. Not just what looks good.”
• In July 2019, I wrote that there were signs the project was already failing. “Despite city-funded construction and dramatically subsidized rent, the store cannot pay its bills. The question now seems to be whether taxpayers should further fund this failing enterprise.”

The city’s logic was clear enough: offer fresh food options in a historically underserved area, and hope it drives neighborhood investment. The Star quoted then-Mayor Sly James as saying the Sun Fresh Market would be the “beginning of the revitalization of this entire corridor.” He was wrong. The policy approach ignored fundamental questions of market feasibility and safety. Even when intentions are noble, taxpayer subsidies cannot manufacture demand where it doesn’t exist.

Supporters may argue that this was an experiment worth trying. But experiments should come with contingency planning and humility—not endless subsidies. The city’s willingness to absorb risk that private firms declined should have been a warning, not a point of pride.

The real tragedy is that Kansas City could have directed those resources toward improving public safety, supporting neighborhood-scale entrepreneurship, or partnering with existing grocery providers willing to operate without public subsidy. All of those approaches would have been more fiscally responsible and, most likely, more sustainable than what the city did.

As policymakers consider next steps, they would do well to revisit the early warnings and lessons from Sun Fresh. The problem was never just about food access. It was about how we define, diagnose, and address the challenges facing our neighborhoods.

This was a foreseeable failure. Hopefully, our policymakers learn from it.

The post Sun Fresh’s Struggles Were Predictable—and Predicted appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, executive editor of Education Next, editor in chief of the Education Gadfly Weekly, and host of the Education Gadfly Show podcast. An award-winning writer, he is the author of The Diverse Schools Dilemma, editor of Education for Upward Mobility, and co-editor of How to Educate an American and Follow the Science to School. An expert on charter schools, school accountability, evidence-based practices, and trends in test scores and other student outcomes, Petrilli has published opinion pieces in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Slate, and appears frequently on television and radio. Petrilli helped to create the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement and the Policy Innovators in Education Network. He lives with his family in Bethesda, Maryland.

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Chad Aldeman is the Policy Director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. Prior to joining the Edunomics Lab, Chad worked at Bellwether Education Partners and the U.S. Department of Education. He has published reports on K-12 and higher education accountability systems; school choice; and teacher preparation, teacher evaluations, and teacher compensation. He also served as the founding editor for TeacherPensions.org. His work has been featured in the Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. Chad holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Iowa and a master’s of public policy degree from the College of William and Mary.

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Questions may be submitted prior to the event by emailing them to Zach.Lawhorn@ShowMeOpportunity.org and during the event via the Q&A feature on your Zoom screen.

Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior fellow at National Review Institute and a senior editor at National Review, where he has covered national politics and policy for 25 years. He is also a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, which syndicates his articles in newspapers across the nation. He is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and he serves as a contributing editor to National Affairs, the quarterly journal of conservative ideas. His articles are frequently published in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. In 2015, he was included in the “Politico 50,” Politico’s list of “the thinkers, doers, and dreamers who really matter” in American politics.

In 2014, Ponnuru contributed to and (with Yuval Levin) edited the book Room to Grow: Conservative Reforms for a Limited Government and A Thriving Middle Class. New York Times columnist David Brooks called the book “the most coherent and compelling policy agenda the American right has produced this century.” Ponnuru was subsequently featured in a New York Times magazine cover story about reform-minded conservatives. In 2013 he was a resident fellow at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics. He is a regular speaker on policy, politics, and constitutionalism at the nation’s leading college campuses and law schools. He also appears regularly on television programs about public affairs. He is the author of a book on the sanctity of human life and American politics and of a monograph on Japanese industrial policy. Previously he has been a columnist for Time magazine and WashingtonPost.com. Ponnuru grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, and graduated from Princeton University. He now lives in the Washington, D.C., area with his wife and three children.

The post Wednesday, May 12 – Ramesh Ponnuru: The Case for a Conservative Economic Agenda appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The general message of both books is that there are a small number of things that parents should be very concerned about, but that the risks of many other things are overstated, often because people let emotion take precedence over empirical evidence.

It shouldn’t surprise us that when the coronavirus hit, Emily Oster would try to cut through the noise and the fear and get to the data. She partnered with the nation’s school administrator organizations to create an anonymous survey and then distributed it to school principals so they could report how many of their students and their staff have been infected by the coronavirus.

The first round of data has been released, and the numbers are promising. As of September 25, administrators report a confirmed infection rate of 75 cases per 100,000 students and 140 per 100,000 staff members. Expressed as a percentage, that is 0.075 percent of children and 0.14 percent of staff.

As an associate professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins is quoted as saying in the Washington Post’s coverage of the survey, “We’re not seeing schools as crucibles for onward transmission. It’s reasonable to say that it looks promising at this point.”

It is early days, of course, and Oster will be continuously updating the data dashboard. It is also worth nothing that the first round of data is only from administrators responsible for around 200,000 of the nation’s 55 million schoolchildren. But, in a time of seemingly nothing but bad news, its good to see that least something is going well. Hopefully these trends continue and we can get our kids back in school and back on track.

The post New Study of COVID-19 In Schools Shows Good News 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.

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Milton Friedman warned us about this kind of thinking: “A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither.” Absurd as it sounds, we are approaching that level of thinking.

Take for instance the rise of “pandemic pods” that parents are creating in an effort to educate their children amid COVID-19 school closures. Pandemic pods are taking all kinds of shapes, but generally consist of a small band of parents organizing themselves (and sometimes even hiring private teachers) to oversee the education of their children. These enterprising parents are doing exactly what we would want any rational, thoughtful person to do. Indeed, they are doing the very thing that Alexis de Tocqueville lauded Americans for in “Democracy in America.” After traveling to the United States in the 1830s, de Tocqueville noted, “Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition, are forever forming associations.” They were taking initiative to solve the problems around them.

From that day to today, we have seen this desire to join together for common cause and address societal ills as a good thing. For some, it seems, that view has now changed. Rather than celebrate parents who are finding innovative ways to make the most of the current situation, some are disparaging them and warning that their actions may cause irreparable harm.

In a Barron’s commentary, for instance, R. L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy suggests “Pandemic pods are a classic example of opportunity hoarding.” He goes on to argue: “like other forms of opportunity hoarding,” pandemic pods “tend to look as if individuals are simply making the best choices for their family, when in fact their actions will quickly concretize and widen inequalities.”

Similarly, in a Washington Post piece J.P.B. Gerald and Mira Debs equate pandemic pods to white flight. They warn, “These personal decisions, however, have a collective consequence.”

It seems Lewis-McCoy, Gerald, Debs, and others are viewing this issue through an equity lens only. On one hand, their analysis is right. When some individuals take an action that is in their own interest, it may very well create inequity. Indeed, that is the very nature of action! Any time one individual or group of individuals undertakes an activity that is designed to improve their life, they are by definition going to create some form of disparity between their station and other people’s station. Greater inequity will arise here if only affluent parents are able to organize better learning opportunities for their children.

It is in the solution, however, that these folks fall short. Lewis-McCoy has suggested we should “dissuade” parents from forming these pods. Gerald and Debs argued that instead of trying to address the problem themselves, parents should “stay and fight” for a better educational system.

Like the government handicappers of Harrison Bergeron, their solution is to stifle the creativity and opportunity of some individuals. This is what happens when you look at things ONLY through an equity lens.

Societal change and improvement are made by encouraging innovation and free association, not by stifling them. Our goal should not be to stop affluent parents from attempting to help their children, but to empower less-affluent families to do the same. We do this by increasing educational options, not by decreasing them.

Don’t get me wrong. Equity is important and we should all care about the health and welfare of the least advantaged in our society. To finish the Friedman quote: “A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”

The post The Danger of an Equity Only Lens in Education 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.

Let’s cut through all of that. America has been on a teacher (and other school staff) hiring bonanza for decades. Ben Scafidi of Kennesaw State University has shown that while the total student population in American public schools grew by 100% from 1950 to 2009, the number of teachers grew by 243 percent and administrators and other staff grew by a whopping 709 percent. If that’s not enough, Mike Antonucci wrote earlier this week that since 2008, the American student population has remained essentially stagnant while the number of teachers has grown by 12.4%. He quotes noted researcher Richard Ingersoll stating that the “ballooning” teacher workforce is financial “ticking time bomb.”

Is struggling to keep up rates of teacher growth far outpacing student growth really the same as a “shortage?” I don’t think so.

Since at least the 1950s, America has prioritized reducing class sizes. Pursuing that policy has had consequences. It has meant hiring a lot more teachers, and, generally, paying them less. In other words, the public school system requires more and more teachers each year and has less to offer them. We shouldn’t be surprised when public schools struggle to fill teaching positions. Focusing less on class size reduction and more on hiring the best possible teachers that we can (and paying them accordingly) could help.

How we pay teachers matters as well. It similarly should not surprise us that we see schools struggling to find math and science teachers. Because we pay all teachers equally though step-and-lane pay scales, those who can make more money outside of schools (like those with backgrounds in math and science) are forced to take a financial hit when they decide to become a teacher. Allowing for pay variations that take into account the labor market demands for different skill sets is one way we might attract more math and science teachers.

Herbert Stein’s law states that trends that can’t continue, won’t. Continuing to expand the teaching workforce and compensating them through pay schemes out of the 1920s is not going to get us the teaching workforce our children need. Call it whatever you want, but it isn’t good for kids.

The post Is There Really a Teacher Shortage? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The study was noteworthy because it found negative academic results for some of the students who participated in the program, which is a departure from what careful study of the program has found in the past. There is more to the most recent study than meets the eye, and many caveats that readers should take into account, as ably explained by Jason Bedrick and Marty Lueken of EdChoice here.

But I want to highlight how differently these two outlets covered that study. The Washington Post, which serves the city where the voucher program operates, wrote an even-handed analysis titled “Voucher critics are seizing on D.C. test scores. They’re missing the point.”

The piece is worth reading in full, but the second paragraph is key:

With the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program reauthorized by Congress this week, it is important that any assessment be complete, clear-eyed and not formed through the prism of those advancing special interests or narrow political points. What should be taken into account along with test scores is the positive difference the program has made in the lives of thousands of families, and how it and the thriving community of charter schools have enriched school choice and helped improve public education in the city.

The Washington Post piece acknowledges that the study’s findings demand attention, but examines them in the real-world context of an education environment where many factors other than test scores (e.g., graduation rates and demand among parents for alternatives to public schools) deserve consideration.

By contrast, the op-ed in the Post-Dispatch describes the findings as helping to “debunk the notion that voucher-enabled students in private schools produce better outcomes than those attending public schools.” It doesn’t, but that’s beside the point.

What is more surprising to me is the Post-Dispatch’s closing admonition that we should “trust the data, not loosely grounded ideology.”

Where was this attitude when studies of private school vouchers found positive results for students? Like this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one. (I could go on, but this is just a sample of studies that found positive test-score results for students who participated in voucher program or whose test-scores were driven upward as a result of voucher programs. I didn’t even touch the large empirical literature on civic effects or parental satisfaction.)

Even when all of these studies had been published, the Post-Dispatch was still publishing editorials like this one, and this one. Physician, heal thyself.

Those closest to the action in DC see much to admire in the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, and a few recent studies need to be put in the context of the multi-decade literature on school choice. Then, and only then, can we have a real discussion about school choice as part of a solution to vexing problems in education.

The post The Washington Post and St. Louis Post-Dispatch: A Study in Contrasts appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

What is that issue, you ask? Is it that puppies are cute? That apple pie is delicious? That Ken Bone is the hero we desperately need?

Nope, its Charter schools. Specifically that charter schools help low income and minority children.

The research literature is unambiguous. While suburban and rural charter schools are often statistically indistinguishable from their neighboring traditional public schools, urban charter schools consistently demonstrate significant positive results for their students. Yes, there is a distribution, with some performing far better than others. No, they cannot single-handedly solve every social ill of inner-city communities. But on average and in aggregate, they provide a better education for students than those children would have without charter schools in the mix.

This is why lawsuits trying to stop charter schools are bad for poor kids. This is why limiting charter schools to within the boundaries of the Kansas City and St. Louis school districts is short sighted. This is why major advocacy organizations for African-Americans taking stances against them is potentially harmful.

In a time of deep division, charter schools are an issue where we can come together. Let’s get to it.

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Overall, Kansas City redirects $100 to $110 million each year to developers for the various TIF projects in town. That doesn’t include some of the recent ones like Burns & McDonnell, the Kansas City Star, and Cerner. In fact, according to the Washington Post, Cerner is the biggest recipient of taxpayer subsidies in the state of Missouri. Their last subsidy from Kansas City may be the biggest in the city’s history.

When will city leaders decide that we’ve subsidized enough and start trying to reap the rewards of all the previous spending? Given recent news regarding Two Light and the Star, the answer appears to be no time soon.

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Interestingly, a growing body of research is finding that traits like grit might be more important to children’s success in life than traditional academic knowledge.

The Washington Post recently reported:

[Angela] Duckworth, a former middle school teacher [and University of Pennsylvania researcher], is known for helping to popularize the notion that a student’s success is correlated to that student’s level of self-control and “grittiness,” or ability to keep working toward goals.

Her research has shown that grittier students are more likely to graduate from high school, score higher on SAT and ACT exams and be more physically fit. Grittier students also are less likely to get divorced, and they typically experience fewer career changes.

Dr. Thomas Hoerr, head of New City School in Saint Louis, is the author of Fostering Grit: How Do I Prepare My Students for the Real World? Hoerr’s instructional suggestions echo Duckworth’s findings. “Teachers should embrace teaching the whole child, and should consciously seek to foster the intrapersonal and interpersonal qualities which will make a difference in life—such as grit,” Hoerr said in an email.

Given the fact that grit is important, and it appears that teachers can have an effect on the “grittiness” of students, there is a movement around the country to link measures of students’ grit to the evaluation of schools and teachers.

Even though they both feel that fostering grittiness is important, neither Hoerr nor Duckworth are pushing for tying teacher evaluations to student grittiness.

Why? The biggest issue is measurement. Student self-assessments are commonly used to measure social and emotional factors, requiring students to self-evaluate their level of hopefulness about their future and asking questions like, “Did you laugh or smile a lot yesterday?” Duckworth has noted that grittier students, those who tend to have more self-awareness, are more likely to rate themselves lower. The very thing that makes them gritty drives them to hold themselves to a higher standard. If teacher or school evaluations are based on this measure, they will be inaccurate.

While grit is clearly important, the measures for determining teachers’ impact on it are not ready for prime time. It took decades to be able to link simple math and reading scores, and we’re still working out the bugs on those. It will be some time before new measures are available.

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We’ve written before about how many Saint Louis municipalities get large, possibly illegal, portions of their revenue from zealous enforcement of traffic laws and local ordinances. Twenty municipalities get more than 20 percent of their revenue from fines and fees, with three cities (Calverton Park, Bella Villa, and Vinita Terrace) deriving more than 50 percent of revenue from those sources.

And should one of the many recipients of these citations need to appear in local court because they wish to challenge the citation or cannot pay the fine (or fix their ticket), it is far from convenient. Calverton Park and Bella Villa both only hold traffic court one evening a month. As an in-depth story in the Washington Post described, many residents, especially the poor, have a difficult time navigating the process.

Allowing defendants with outstanding warrants to set things right is a way of relieving some of the built up stress for locals, but a more long-term solution is to make policing about law and order, not revenue collection, in all Saint Louis County municipalities. That may mean combining police or court services with other municipalities, or if necessary disincorporating cities altogether. At the state level, that could mean strengthening and enforcing the Macks Creek Law. If something isn’t done to fix the underlying problem of burdensome municipalities, this holiday amnesty’s impact won’t long outlive the holidays themselves.

The post Warrant Forgiveness: A Step in the Right Direction for Saint Louis County Cities appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

While we would argue that municipality size is certainly not everything, it is undeniable that many cities in Saint Louis County rely heavily on fines and court fees. One way of curtailing this sort of abuse is the rigorous implementation (or strengthening) of the Macks Creek law, which caps the amount of income a city can receive from traffic fines to 30 percent.

Missouri is preparing to audit some North Saint Louis County municipalities (along with cities in other counties) to ensure that they are not violating this law. However, the enforcement (or reform) of the Macks Creek law is up to statewide officials and voters. What’s more, if the law is vigorously enforced tiny municipalities might be forced to turn to large property tax increases or face insolvency. But local residents do not have to wait on statewide actions or accept a parasitic government. Voters can, and in the past did, disincorporate a city.

Under Missouri law, the residents can disincorporate their municipality if they: a. Gather 50 percent of residents’ signatures calling for an election on disincorporation; and b. 60 percent vote for disincorporation. At that point, the city would receive its basic services (including police and courts) from the county, unless they decide to join with another municipality.

Cities in Saint Louis County have disincorporated before, and recently. Just a few years ago, the poster child for a dysfunctional, traffic ticket-financed municipality was actually a middle-class, 95 percent white city in South Saint Louis County named Saint George. Major police scandals resulted in the city disbanding its police force, and residents ultimately voted to disincorporate in 2011. In 2013, the tiny (pop. 447) city of Uplands Park also held a vote on disincorporation, but that bid failed to reach the 60 percent mark.

The strategy of disincorporation is not without controversy. Loss of local representation, especially in areas with high minority populations, might be more worrying to some residents than fine-seeking officers. The approach also has limitations, as a municipality that funds decent public services mostly by fining pass-through traffic may serve voters’ interests while causing wider harm to the metropolitan area.

Most municipalities in Saint Louis County, including smaller ones, do not attempt to run their governments through aggressive police citations and court fees. However, residents should know that a local government that fails to provide for the common welfare (or openly harasses the poor) can be removed. A wider knowledge, if not actual use, of that option may result in more responsible city governance in Saint Louis County.

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