Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns!” he said.

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

From “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

On a warm evening at the end of May, I sat in a cramped office in an industrial park. It was after work hours, so there wasn’t much commotion at the truck rental or plumbing supply businesses located across the street. The building was not much to look at, but what was going on inside was priceless.

The room was packed full of parents and school children who were itching to get out of the uniforms they had been wearing all day. We were gathered that evening for our school’s “spring sharing,” where students display their artwork and offer recitations. Hearing my four-year-old and six-year-old recite poetry from memory filled my heart. But nothing could top my feeling of pride when my 13-year-old took the floor with his classmates.

They began with the “St. Crispin’s Day Speech” from Shakespeare’s Henry V. That speech has long been one of my favorites. Next, in a choral performance, the students recited “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The poem depicts a military blunder from the Crimean War, a battle few today know anything about. There was my son, reciting every word.

Weeks earlier, my three boys and I went on a school trip to Kansas City. While visiting the World War I museum, we stood on the glass walkway above the 9,000 poppies, each representing 1,000 military personnel who died in the war. The children, led by their teachers, joined together in reciting “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae.

Some may ask, “What’s the benefit of having children memorize poems and speeches such as these?” Anyone who heard the voices of 30 children honoring the fallen soldiers understands the importance.

At our kid’s previous school, they attempted to teach kids character skills directly. Our first grader once brought home a coloring sheet with a superhero wearing a cape emblazoned with the word “Yet!” They were trying to teach perseverance and grit.

While these are wonderful traits to teach to children, we learn much more from the lessons of history, from the beauty of poetry, and from the trials of those who have gone before us than we will ever learn from a coloring page. Our new school is exactly what my wife and I had been looking for. To us, this is what education should be.

Few, however, will get to experience this type of education in our state—our school is a private school.

Indeed, many in the public education lobby have been patting themselves on the back for preventing school choice policies from passing this past legislative session. Charter school expansion never received a vote, and Empowerment Scholarship Accounts legislation was filibustered on the Senate floor.

It’s sad that people are excited about denying parents a chance to find a school that is the perfect fit for their family.

It still isn’t clear today who was responsible for the failure in the charge of light brigade—it seems that miscommunication led 600 men into the valley of death. We have no doubt, however, who blocked school choice legislation in Missouri because they won’t stop applauding themselves.

The post School Choice Legislation and “The Valley of Death” appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The Tax Foundation reported last year that 32 states exempt food purchased for consumption at home from tax. It reports that six other states tax food at a lower rate,

Food sales tax rates in these states are as follows: Arkansas: 1.5 percent, Illinois: 1 percent, Missouri: 1.225 percent, Tennessee: 5 percent, Utah: 3 percent, and Virginia: 2.5 percent.

This is true but incomplete. The Missouri General Assembly did in fact reduce its sales tax on food, but local sales taxes are still collected on food and beverage purchases. In St. Louis’s Central West End, the tax rate on groceries adds up to 7.4 percent; in Kansas City’s Power & Light District it is 7.6 percent.

What makes this the most unkindest tax of all, as Shakespeare might say, is that it is regressive, meaning it weighs disproportionately on the poor as everyone must buy food. Because Kansas City and St. Louis charge additional sales taxes on top of the state rate, any intention by the General Assembly to spare low-income consumers this tax is undermined.

To make matters worse, both Kansas City and St. Louis charge a flat and regressive 1 percent earnings tax on every dollar earned. The earnings tax is levied on the first dollar earned, and there is no exemption for lower-income workers. Adding insult to injury, the earnings tax is not levied on types of income enjoyed by wealthier citizens such as investment income or retirement.

Kansas City and St. Louis have a large number of low-income residents. Unfortunately, the cities’ taxes only add to the problem. The first order of business for any city leader who wants to help low-income workers should be to take less of their money away from them.

The post The Most Unkindest Tax of All appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

That which we call an unaccredited school by any other name would perform as well.  William Shakespeare spoke of roses, but his four-century-old logic applies to Normandy Schools Collaborative’s “nonaccredited” status.  The Missouri State Board of Education’s decision to give Normandy a “nonaccredited status” allowed the Board to take control of operations.  It essentially gave the district a do-over, but left many with questions concerning the legality of subsequent decisions:

1. Can the Missouri State School Board set a tuition ceiling?
2. Can receiving schools reject transfer students?
3. Can Normandy prohibit new students from transferring?

These questions stem from the transfer law’s wording regarding unaccredited schools.   The law refers to a “district not accredited”.  According to the state board, Normandy’s new unclassified status of “nonaccredited” is somehow different than “unaccredited” (even though, non is Latin for not, non making this up).  Because of the new classification, schools like Francis Howell decided not to allow transfer students to return.   Using the same rationale, Normandy Schools Collaborative might not receive extra money from the 2015 state budget.  The additional funding is earmarked for intensive reading instruction and pre-K programs, programs meant to help low-performing, unaccredited schools like Normandy.

Normandy has a history of low-performance—low-achievement, high drop-out rates, and low college readiness.  If the goal of the state Board of Education is to give Normandy students access to high-performing, quality schools, calling the district by another name is not the answer.

The post What’s in a name? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In college track and field, the NCAA sets both provisional and automatic marks for athletes to qualify for the national competition. The marks are set very high and often, not many athletes qualify automatically or even provisionally. In contrast, the state’s board of education has set the bar for accreditation and provisional accreditation very low; so low, in fact, that the distinctions are essentially meaningless.

The distinctions are also inconsequential because they change very little for the district besides the label. And as Shakespeare noted, “a low-performing school district by any other name would smell like a low-performing school district.” OK, maybe Shakespeare did not say that exactly, but you get the point; call the district what you will, the label has no real impact on students.

The state is moving to a new accreditation system this coming year. While the new system will be an improvement, it still leaves much to be desired. Both the old system and the new system accredit school districts, not schools. This was very important in the accreditation decision of Saint Louis Public Schools, where magnet schools drove up the district’s average performance. District level evaluations, especially in large urban districts, give parents very little information when they are deciding where to send their children to school.

Missouri’s current method of accrediting school districts does little more than give grown-ups something to argue about and has few real implications for schools or students. The state would be doing a real service to families if it moved to a school report card format, where schools are graded on a scale from “A” to “F.” A school grading system would allow families to be more informed, hold their local school more accountable, and express choice more wisely. Isn’t the goal to have parents become informed and engaged?

The current system pre-supposes that the state can hold schools accountable by accrediting the school district, when in reality, school accountability is best achieved when families are allowed to hold their child’s school accountable. The state can help in this effort if it makes school performance more transparent at the school level. If the reclassification of the Saint Louis Public School District proves anything, it is that the state’s standards are much lower than parents’ standards.

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

The post A Low-Performing School By Any Other Name . . . appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Hyperbole aside, the piece does make some good points about the lack of transparency in the hearing. Only representatives of the industry were allowed to speak, and the chairman of the committee does own a payday lending business — a clear conflict of interest. Although I happen to agree with the industry in this instance, the political process should be an open one. In the long run, legislative stalling and one-sided presentations will not preserve a healthy democracy or the free market. (It is worth pointing out, however, that town hall meetings on the issue also presented only the opposing side of the debate. Admittedly, those were not official government hearings, but the principle remains the same.) An open market produces better outcomes than a monopoly, and I believe that rule applies just as much to ideas as to physical goods and services.

Finally, I think this phrase shows a misunderstanding of my argument: “Mr. Payne’s point that usury today is not as bad as it was in Shakespeare’s time provides little comfort to the working poor and to those trapped in a spiral of debt.” My point is that if payday lending is regulated out of existence, people who currently rely on those loans for short-term credit will be forced to seek out loan sharks every bit as brutal as Shylock, who will demand a pound of flesh from those who cannot pay up.

The post In Which I Am Compared to the Devil appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Since the Internet hit the big time in the mid-1990s, Amazon and eBay have changed the way we shop, Google has revolutionized the way we find information, Facebook has superseded other ways to keep track of friends and iTunes has altered how we consume music. But kids remain stuck in analog schools. Part of the reason online education hasn’t taken off is that powerful forces such as teachers unions — which prefer to keep students in traditional classrooms under the supervision of their members — are aligned against it.

So children continue to learn from blackboards and books — the kind made of dead trees! no hyperlinks! — rather than getting lessons the way they consume virtually all other information: online. Putting reading materials and lecture notes on the Internet, like many teachers do today, is just the first step; it’s like when, in the early days of movies, filmmakers pointed a camera at a stage play. Kids are still stuck watching those old-style movies, when they could be enjoying the learning equivalent of “Avatar” in 3-D. Thousands of ninth-grade English teachers are cobbling together yet another lecture on the Globe Theatre in Shakespeare’s day, when YouTube is overflowing with accessible, multimedia presentations from experts on Elizabethan theater construction, not to mention a very nice illustrated series on the Kennedy Center’s ArtsEdge site. […]

How do we know online education will work? Well, for one thing, it already does. Full-time virtual charter schools are operating in dozens of states. The Florida Virtual School, which offers for-credit online classes to any child enrolled in the state system, has 100,000 students. Teachers are available by phone or e-mail from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. seven days a week. The state cuts a funding check to the school only when students demonstrate that they have mastered the material, whether it takes them two months or two years. The program is one of the largest in the country. Kids who enroll in Advanced Placement courses — 39 percent of whom are minority students — score an average of 3.05 out of 5, compared with a state average of 2.49 for public school students…

Moving lesson planning and delivery online can provide students with more supervision, not less, says Michael Horn, one of the co-authors of “Disrupting Class.” It would free teachers, Horn says, “to do hand-holding and mentoring, something which is pretty much impossible in the current model.” After all, where is it written that the babysitter, disciplinarian, lecturer and evaluator must all be the same person? Or even that they all have to be in the same building?

Some online learning models eliminate human interaction, but the vast majority do not. Instead, they connect students and teachers via polls, video, chat, text and good old-fashioned phone calls. The Virtual Virginia program focuses on offering Advanced Placement classes to every student in the state, bringing college-level courses to rural districts and inner-city Richmond, where high-level instruction is difficult to get. Rocketship Education, in San Jose, Calif., brings at-risk elementary students together in a safe, cheap, modular space along with a small staff and hands their studies over to online curriculum for part of each day.

Online education has already become a boon for kids with special needs, the students least served by the traditional system. Education entrepreneur Tom Vander Ark launched Internet Academy, the first online K-12 establishment, in 1995 in part to serve kids with unorthodox education requirements, from serious athletes to children with health problems or learning disabilities.

One of the most successful areas of online education so far is helping kids who have fallen off the educational grid. Companies such as AdvancePath Academics scoop up students classified as unrecoverable by traditional schools and help them complete their education. Some dropout-recovery programs can be found in shopping malls and gyms.

Online education is no silver bullet for Missouri’s educational problems because there is no such thing. Each student is different, and although the traditional models may work well for most (a point I think is debatable), others may experience far more success in a more structured online program that still allows students to move at their own pace. Others could benefit from more independent learning styles like Montessori schools. All these options have their places, and we will be most successful when we allow parents and students find the pedagogical methods that work best for them instead of trying to force hundreds of thousands of individuals into the same boxes.

Sarah Brodsky has written about online schooling several times, and Caitlin Hartsell has also blogged about the issue.

The post Celebrate Educational Diversity appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Washington state’s Department of Licensing takes the high jinks seriously. Earlier this month, it classified the performances as “sports entertainment.” The ruling means the spoofers must meet safety regulations and could force the league to post a $10,000 bond, station medical personnel at events and buy a regulation wrestling ring.

The justification given for harassing them is that professional wrestling, which is subject to regulations, is also fake!

People sometimes ask, “What’s the harm in a regulation if it’s reasonable and all the relevant people agree to it?” Besides keeping out competition, these requirements end up being applied more broadly than was originally intended, in cases where they just don’t make sense. The group’s lawyer points out that if the regulations include them, they should also include a wide variety of activities, including swordfights in a Shakespeare production. Think of all the high school plays that would be shut down if every drama teacher had to pay thousands of dollars to the state.

The post Regulators Go Overboard appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Yesterday, I intended to link to this excellent Post-Dispatch piece about recent controversy over Poole, written by David Nicklaus — but I just didn’t have the time to say anything substantive about it. The article is still worth highlighting, though, because it makes a few points that deserve ongoing public attention:

When people start calling Bill Poole names, you know things are getting rough in the financial markets sandbox.

The amiable, bearded president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis makes an unlikely villain, but he’s become a regular whipping boy for market commentator James Cramer, and now Sen. Kent Conrad is calling for Poole to resign.

His sin? All Poole has done is to advocate the same careful, data-driven approach to monetary policy that has served the nation well in recent years.

Being cautious with Federal Reserve policy is no small thing. Any good student of 20th century economics knows that Fed policy was one of the largest factors (among many others) contributing to 1929’s Wall Street crash and the onset of the Great Depression. Any number of books on the subject reveal variants of this extreme example of cause and effect — the important thing is, the people running the Federal Reserve today understand the damage that irresponsible Fed policy can bring. Ben Bernanke, current Fed chairman, outlined the role of the Federal Reserve in spurring the Great Depression in a 2004 speech:

The market crash of October 1929 showed, if anyone doubted it, that a concerted effort by the Fed can bring down stock prices. But the cost of this “victory” was very high. According to Friedman and Schwartz, the Fed’s tight-money policies led to the onset of a recession in August 1929, according to the official dating by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The slowdown in economic activity, together with high interest rates, was in all likelihood the most important source of the stock market crash that followed in October. In other words, the market crash, rather than being the cause of the Depression, as popular legend has it, was in fact largely the result of an economic slowdown and the inappropriate monetary policies that preceded it. Of course, the stock market crash only worsened the economic situation, hurting consumer and business confidence and contributing to a still deeper downturn in 1930.

Bernanke acknowledged the Fed’s role in causing the Great Depression even more explicitly in an earlier speech from 2002:

The best thing that central bankers can do for the world is to avoid such crises by providing the economy with, in Milton Friedman’s words, a “stable monetary background”–for example as reflected in low and stable inflation.

Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.

Current Fed leaders tend to credit economist Milton Friedman as the intellectual source for much of today’s practical monetary policy. As Bernanke said in yet another speech:

In preparing this talk, I encountered the following problem. Friedman’s monetary framework has been so influential that, in its broad outlines at least, it has nearly become identical with modern monetary theory and practice. I am reminded of the student first exposed to Shakespeare who complained to the professor: “I don’t see what’s so great about him. He was hardly original at all. All he did was string together a bunch of well-known quotations.” The same issue arises when one assesses Friedman’s contributions. His thinking has so permeated modern macroeconomics that the worst pitfall in reading him today is to fail to appreciate the originality and even revolutionary character of his ideas, in relation to the dominant views at the time that he formulated them.

And Bill Poole, of the St. Louid Fed, gave the keynote speech at a July 31 event honoring Milton Friedman’s legacy, co-sponsored by the Show-Me Institute:

Although Milton did not prevail in his quest to have the Fed maintain a constant money-growth rate, he did prevail in his insistence that policy be apolitical and rely to the maximum possible extent on market judgments. He lost a battle but truly did win the war.

It’s remarkable the extent to which Friedman’s views have influenced today’s Federal Reserve, but Friedman himself was so acutely aware of the potential danger Fed policy can cause that he’s on record as wanting to abolish the Federal Reserve altogether:

[… T]hough I want to know what my ideal is, I think I also have to be willing to discuss changes that are less than ideal so long as they point me in that direction. So while I’d like to abolish the Fed, I’ve written many pages on how the Fed, if it does exist, should be run.

Bill Poole and other Federal Reserve leaders deserve tremendous credit for standing up to demagogues who call for intervention by central banks in every momentary fiscal crisis. As David Nicklaus said in his Post-Dispatch column:

Someone needs to remind Conrad what the Fed’s real job is. As the nation’s central bank, it’s supposed to keep inflation under control while creating a climate that allows for steady employment growth. It’s not, or at least it shouldn’t be, in the business of propping up stock prices or bailing out hedge funds that invested in subprime mortgages.

[…] Poole’s point was that the Fed shouldn’t act rashly just to placate Wall Street, and it was a point that needed to be made.

This is exactly right. Bailing out market players who face the prospect of financial loss only reinforces the poor decisions that led to economic crisis in the first place. The Fed is there to help stabilize the economy as a whole, not smooth out bumpy rides for particular investors.

The post Trouble … With a Capital T appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — The House voted Wednesday to require commercial drivers be able to communicate in English and take their certification test without translators to get their licenses.

Commercial truck drivers would also need to show they can read highway signs, fill out forms and respond to official inquires, such as about what they are hauling.

The purpose of this legislation is to make it harder for foreignors to get work as truck drivers, which would limit the number of available truck drivers and raise the wages of Americans who hold this job.

“Filling out forms” for the government can be confusing even if English is your native language. Requiring technical writing skills will bar a lot of hard-working legal immigrants from employment. Sure, it could be inconvenient if a policeman pulls over a truck driver who doesn’t know much English. There are a million other situations in which not knowing English would be inconvenient, which is why most people in this country speak English. But a law requiring truck drivers, yard work guys, or garbage collectors to speak English isn’t going to do much to improve the efficiency of our legal system or labor markets.

This legislation is unfair to people who had the misfortune not to be native English speakers. It’s also silly. Languages evolve naturally, so in the long run it’s futile to legislate about them. The English we speak is not the same as the English spoken today in Britain or the English that was spoken by Shakespeare. And English isn’t the same in all parts of our own country. For example, in Missouri I sometimes hear women address each other as “lady”. Try that north of Springfield, Illinois and you’ll get some strange looks.

The legislation also leaves an important question unresolved. Should we require truck drivers to say “Missouri” or “Missourah”?

The post Language, Dress of Thought appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In many schools across the country, students hand in lab reports and math homework to teachers who have no background in science or math. The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education says that Missouri schools suffer from teacher shortages in those subjects. Governor Blunt has pledged to address the problem. He held a Math and Science Summit last month, and he recently named twenty scholars to a Math and Science Alliance.

Such state-wide initiatives are a good start, but we’re unlikely to solve the problem until changes are made at the local level. Unfortunately, when it comes to hiring math and science teachers, school districts’ hands are tied. Under Missouri law, school districts must use rigid salary schedules that apply to all teachers. They can’t offer better pay to teachers of shortchanged subjects, or to teachers with valuable credentials and experience. Those restrictions prevent school districts from hiring the best teachers. Crucial subjects like math and science are the hardest hit.

What causes a teacher shortage? In a recent study, University of Missouri economist Michael Podgursky looked at public school teachers’ wages compared to the wages earned in other professions. He found that teachers as a group aren’t underpaid, but some individual teachers are. Most teachers, if they weren’t teaching, would probably find jobs in nearby fields like social work and library science. Teachers earn more than those professionals on average.

However, math and science teachers might choose to work in architecture or engineering—fields that pay better than teaching. Podgursky found that teaching is an attractive position compared with the other options available to English majors, but that a physics major often has much more lucrative alternatives. Therefore, when school districts offer the same salary to English and physics teachers, physics teachers are in short supply.

A National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) study of biology teachers highlights the problem. Of U.S. secondary-level public school students in biology classes, 39 percent were taught by a teacher who did not have a major or minor in biology. Some of these teachers had studied elementary education, physical education, or English. When science majors go into engineering, preparing the next generation of scientists is left to people who would be better qualified to teach Shakespeare or soccer.

Poor teacher education holds the U.S. back as it struggles to catch up with other countries in math and science instruction. Students in Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, and Singapore consistently score higher than American students on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). The difference between U.S. teachers and teachers in other countries stands out in a TIMSS report on eighth-grade mathematics teachers’ backgrounds. In the U.S., only 41 percent of eighth-grade students were taught by teachers who had majored in mathematics, 30 percentage points below the international average.

In order to solve the math and science teacher shortage, school districts will have to break away from strict salary schedules and offer math and science teachers better pay. This past session State Rep. Allen Icet sponsored a bill that would allow districts to use hiring incentives to attract teachers with desired qualifications or experience. The state of Missouri should give districts the option to reward hard-to-find teachers. If math and science teachers are offered reasonable salaries, they’ll no longer be hard to find.

Timothy B. Lee is a policy analyst, and Sarah Brodsky is a research assistant, at the Show-Me Institute.

The post Better Teacher Pay Would Improve Math and Science Instruction appeared first on Show-Me Institute.