Susan Pendergrass speaks with Chad Aldeman, education policy researcher and founder of Read Not Guess, about Missouri’s early literacy crisis and why the legislature has struggled to address it. They discuss what it means for a fourth grader to be below basic in reading, why three-cueing may be harmful to early readers, the science of reading and what it actually prescribes, the case for third-grade retention policies, and more.

Learn more about Read Not Guess at www.readnotguess.com.

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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00):
Looking forward to this conversation with you, Chad Aldeman. I just want to give you a little background on why I want to talk to you today. Missouri just wrapped up its legislative session in late May. This is the second year in a row that we have tried to make some inroads into what I consider to be a crisis, which is that 42 percent of our fourth graders are below basic in reading. We have tried to force the state education agency, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, to improve how reading is taught and to create a system of guardrails around kids being promoted without knowing how to read, all of which have failed. What does it mean for a fourth grader to be below basic in reading? Given that more than four in ten Missouri fourth graders scored below basic, what does that mean?

Chad Aldeman (00:59):
Below basic is a very low level. It means that kids cannot read an unfamiliar passage and understand what it means. In fourth grade, maybe you’re not super worried about those kids, but you probably should be, because that is a key milestone. If you’re not reading in fourth grade, you’re really going to struggle with everything that comes next. You’re not going to be able to understand social studies and science. You may not be able to read owners’ manuals or instruction manuals when you’re trying to build things at your house. You’re really going to be dependent on other people interpreting words and language for you. YouTube is helpful, lots of things are helpful, but we’re still in a written culture, and there’s lots of information that’s written that if you can’t pass even the basic level you’re going to struggle with in life going forward.

Susan Pendergrass (02:02):
Yeah, so this is kind of the problem, which I consider to be basically a crisis. Forty-two percent of our kids are below basic. What we call it when we’re trying to fix it goes by a bunch of different names: early reading, early literacy, read to learn. But when my kids were little, about thirty years ago, I think it was called whole language, this language-rich environment where kids would just learn to read. But now there’s a thing called three-cueing. What is three-cueing? I assume it means that kids are supposed to look three different places for cues, but what specifically is it?

Chad Aldeman (02:37):
Three-cueing and whole language have a lot of similarities. They’re basically trying to get people to memorize words. Rather than sounding out, like my name is Chad, which is pretty phonetic, rather than understanding that the CH combination makes the ch sound, they want you to just memorize the picture in your head of what the word looks like. Really good readers do have a lot of memorized words. I don’t have to sound out my name. There are lots of words that my brain just goes to instantly because I’m so familiar with them. But taking what expert readers can do and using that as a method to teach kids is actually really harmful. Kids develop those skills by learning the core elements. The CH combination makes the ch sound, and they need to practice that when they’re learning to read. Over time they’ll just see it and recognize it quickly. English is quirky. English is not entirely phonetic, but it’s still quite phonetic, and phonics is still the building block of reading. There are cases when CH doesn’t make the ch sound, when it makes the hard C sound. Kids need to understand and recognize those as well. They need repetitions, and they need to understand what the normal rule is and what some of the exceptions are.

Susan Pendergrass (04:04):
So would three-cueing be considered part of the science of reading or not?

Chad Aldeman (04:08):
Three-cueing is not part of the science of reading. Three-cueing is saying, rather than teaching kids the building blocks of the language, have them guess at the words based on a picture they see. So there’s a picture of a horse, and they see a word, and they just guess horse. The text may actually say pony, and sometimes those differences really do matter.

Susan Pendergrass (04:29):
Ha.

Chad Aldeman (04:38):
The second cue is the first letter of the word, and the third is other context clues. So if it’s a story about horses, you might guess horse. And those cues are actually detrimental to learning how to read, to knowing what the words and letters actually translate into.

Susan Pendergrass (05:02):
Why? Why is it detrimental?

Chad Aldeman (05:04):
Because it leads to guessing. It might be harmless for a four-year-old to say pony when the word actually says horse. But as kids get older and start reading more complex texts, those types of mistakes really do matter. And if you haven’t learned the phonetic skills, you’re not going to be able to read a word like ribonucleic acid or something like that. When you start reading more complex words, all of a sudden you can’t break them down. Your mind doesn’t have the ability to understand how to break down a word that you’re not familiar with.

Susan Pendergrass (05:33):
Mm-hmm. So two years in a row at least, the legislature has tried to ban three-cueing so that teachers would not be allowed to use it. They punted a little bit and said it can’t be the first thing they use, but could still be a tool in their toolbox. They’ve gotten a lot of pushback. In Missouri, legislators are sometimes former teachers, sometimes married to a teacher, sometimes their best friend is a teacher. And they’ll just say, you know what, we’re a local control state, so we can’t tell these teachers what to do. When they’re in the moment in the classroom, they know best, and that’s how we roll in Missouri. But what I hear you saying is it can actually be harmful.

Chad Aldeman (06:39):
Yeah, and there actually is a science about how kids learn to read. It’s been well documented for a long time through empirical researchers looking at whether kids do better under method A or method B. What they found is that teaching kids the building blocks of reading, the phonetics, is more helpful, particularly for students who might struggle, or who are dyslexic, or have other language issues. If you teach the three-cueing strategies, you’re teaching them the wrong thing and leading them down a side road. It can lead to bad habit formation, which is then really hard to kick later on. The other thing that’s relevant here is that reading is somewhat sequential, and kids need a lot of practice in the early grades in order to be proficient readers. If you use the three-cueing tactics, you will not be giving them the building blocks they need to develop. And it’s a challenge to get kids back on track if they’re off. There’s all kinds of data about delays in reading, and kids who aren’t proficient by third grade will struggle in the short and long term. So it’s really important to catch those issues as early as possible in K through two.

Susan Pendergrass (08:14):
Well, on that note, another component to the legislation that’s been considered and that we have been supportive of is that if a child at third or fourth grade has demonstrated that they are substantially behind in learning to read, they should not be promoted to the next grade. What do you think about that policy?

Chad Aldeman (08:34):
Some people may hear that policy and think it’s punitive and it’s going to be bad for kids, but it’s not really about what happens at the end of third grade. I see that policy as more of a threat to the adults in that student’s life about making sure that doesn’t happen. In K through two, those students are being flagged and identified as being at risk of potentially being held back.

Susan Pendergrass (08:39):
Mean.

Chad Aldeman (09:04):
And they’re given interventions and supports so that they’re ready to take and pass the assessment in third grade. That’s really my read of the evidence. In the states that have these types of policies, kids who are flagged as needing more help get the help. That is the key: this sort of threat of being held back, and then the interventions and all the adult behaviors it changes. Teachers then know which kids need extra help. They then communicate to parents, hey, your child is behind and they need to catch up, and here’s what we’re going to do to help them. I wrote about this in Mississippi. They have learning plans, specific, tailored, individualized instructional plans for children who are at risk of being held back. And parents are brought into the conversation. It’s pretty scary that your child may be at risk of being held back, and here’s what we’re going to do in the interim to get them ready. That is the key for me. It’s not what happens in third grade. It’s all the stuff that happens before and what the adults can do to make sure kids are ready.

Susan Pendergrass (10:19):
Yeah, because if I understand it correctly, Mississippi has that policy, but they don’t actually retain that many kids.

Chad Aldeman (10:26):
Yeah, that’s right. In state after state, the states that have these types of policies, the number of kids who are ultimately retained is not that high. There are screens that are identified earlier in K through two, and then interventions are put in place. There are oftentimes some exceptions for students with severe disabilities or English learners who are newly arrived, and chances for retakes if there’s something about stress on the day or they go through a summer program. There are other ways to get students ready. It’s not just the third-grade cut point.

Susan Pendergrass (11:07):
Yeah, it seems like one of those situations, and I doubt it’s unique to Missouri, where people in charge of teaching young children to read feel threatened or feel like they’re being criticized, because we have a real problem with 42 percent of our kids being almost illiterate. And the adults are taking it personally, and therefore they’re resistant to any policy that would force the hand of these districts or teachers. And to me that’s just a shame.

Chad Aldeman (11:47):
Yes, I agree. I think part of it goes to the culture in education where every teacher is supposed to create their own idea and method for how to teach. We don’t really give teachers the building blocks of here’s a well-scripted curriculum, and if you follow this your kids are likely to be successful. Some of the highest-performing schools, school districts, and countries do a much better job of being clear that here’s a well-defined, articulated curriculum, and we’re going to support teachers to do it. There’s still the question of how it gets implemented, but the what is pretty well articulated. And this goes back to the science of reading idea: there is a science. It is evolving in the sense that there’s still more research being conducted and we’re still learning new things, but we know a fair amount about how kids learn to read. So teachers, schools, and teacher preparation programs should be equipping their teachers to use those things.

Susan Pendergrass (12:58):
So you have spent a lot of time studying and writing about this, and you decided to take a leap and start your own company?

Chad Aldeman (13:06):
Yes. I got interested in this because my own child was taught to read using three-cueing. He came home during the pandemic and I was oblivious. I kind of thought my son could read. We had been to school and celebrated his reading superpowers that the teachers had taught, and they were things like guessing at pictures, picture power.

Susan Pendergrass (13:26):
Yeah.

Chad Aldeman (13:33):
During the pandemic, he was a kindergartner and he came home, and we sent him up to his room to do silent independent reading. It turns out he was just guessing. He hadn’t been taught how to sound out words. After working with him, I came up with a program called Read Not Guess. It’s designed for parents to work with their kids, both to build early literacy building blocks like phonetic skills, and also as a way that they can spot early reading issues with their own children. It gives parents the tools to work with their kids, support them from home, and be an advocate by their side.

Susan Pendergrass (14:12):
And your son was in what’s considered to be one of the top school districts in the country, Fairfax County, Virginia.

Chad Aldeman (14:17):
Yeah, Fairfax County Public Schools. People move here for the schools, and yet we were using a balanced literacy three-cueing approach to teaching reading. To the district’s credit, partly because the state forced them to change, they have now moved to a more phonics-based approach and are using something called content knowledge building. So they’ve adopted a curriculum that’s also trying to build

Susan Pendergrass (14:22):
Yeah. Sure.

Chad Aldeman (14:47):
content knowledge along the way, which I’m supportive of. I’m sure there are people within the district who are upset, but the state said this is what we’re going to do, and so they’ve moved in that direction.

Susan Pendergrass (15:01):
You’re certainly not anti-teacher. You’ve been working on teacher issues for as long as I can remember, right?

Chad Aldeman (15:06):
No, I’m very pro-teacher. I’m pro-good policy. I’m pro-helping kids learn to read, and I think that’s one of the basic things that schools can do and that they should be doing.

Susan Pendergrass (15:08):
Yeah. Yeah. It really is frustrating to me that when something’s not going well in our state, we have 520 school districts, not county-based like Virginia’s, and it just feels like a throwaway line to say, well, we’re a local control state. As a matter of fact, somebody in our state education agency said out loud in a recorded meeting, it’s not our fault the kids can’t read, we’re local control. Everyone passes the buck and no one takes any responsibility. Some of them actively work against retaining third graders who can’t read or banning three-cueing. The last thing we were looking for was just that every student in the state would take essentially the same test with the same cutoff score so we could know consistently across districts which students are in that at-risk group so that we could identify them early. We got pushback on all of it. It’s baffling to me. We’re not trying to be mean to teachers. We’re trying to help little kids, because I see it ultimately impacting the Missouri workforce and everything else. We are graduating kids from high school who cannot really read.

Chad Aldeman (16:30):
Yeah, there’s a reason that the state created an education system in the first place, and the districts are entities of the state. They’re state standards, and so they should be teaching kids to those standards, and reading is a big essential building block of that. How far they get down into curricular choices is something that people can still debate, but the ultimate goal of teaching kids to read, and the argument that here are some methods that have been fundamentally disproven that we should as a state abandon, I think is a good and valid argument.

Susan Pendergrass (17:09):
Mississippi seemed to lead the way with this with the Mississippi Miracle, and then we have Louisiana and some other states. Do you see this spreading nationwide, this idea of forcing schools to use the science of reading?

Chad Aldeman (17:25):
Yeah. More states have science of reading laws, and they vary in their components. Last I saw it was 42 states. So Missouri is one of the last stragglers to not have one of these laws. The laws vary across the country in terms of how strict they are, what the state does versus what they put on districts, in terms of the third-grade retention policy versus state mandates on curriculum, whether they’re giving districts a menu of

Susan Pendergrass (17:37):
Right.

Chad Aldeman (17:56):
options or just saying they can’t use three-cueing. There are also other things around screening what happens for students in K through two, how much parents are notified, and what they’re given to help their children. All those things vary, but I think the most interesting point for Missouri is that most states have now adopted one of these laws and are pushing in this direction because they see the crisis as you’ve articulated it and the urgency for it. There’s still some important implementation work to get right if Missouri wants to see strong outcomes. Being focused on third-grade reading is very important, building it into accountability systems, building it into everything the state does, trying to simplify that and keeping it a priority. If the state is saying we don’t really care if it happens, then you’re not going to get outcomes. But if you focus on it and think about ways to drive it, there are levers that can be used.

Susan Pendergrass (19:03):
Yeah. Well, I hope we do it. Read Not Guess, where do folks find out more about that?

Chad Aldeman (19:10):
Read Not Guess is a website. It’s an email-based program. Parents can sign up for free at any time. There are three levels, starting with a beginner level, level one, then level two and level three. They’re all 30-day sequences. When parents sign up they receive

Susan Pendergrass (19:17):
Free, right?

Chad Aldeman (19:32):
a sequence of 30 emails for each of the levels. I also have one for slightly older kids who just need more practice, called a daily decodable program. There’s an app version of that program as well, or a workbook if parents want it in print form.

Susan Pendergrass (19:43):
Well, that’s great. Way to jump in and try to solve the problem yourself. I appreciate that. Thanks so much, Chad. Always great to talk to you. This was fairly narrow. We might need to have you come back and talk about school finance and teacher pipelines, but I’m going to reserve you for early literacy today. Thank you so much.

Chad Aldeman (19:52):
Thanks for having me.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Missouri’s Reading Crisis with Chad Aldeman appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This is also how I would describe the recent Economics of Education Review paper by Dillon Fuchsman, Josh McGee, and Gema Zamarro.  The authors surveyed more than 5,000 teachers about their stated preferences. The 15-minute survey presented teachers with two hypothetical job offers. Would they prefer a higher salary or smaller class sizes? More pay today or more pay in retirement? In other words, “you can go with this, or you can go with that.”

The paper is a good reminder that our policy choices in education are all about tradeoffs and balancing preferences. Lately, we have often heard that teacher pay in Missouri is relatively low. We don’t hear about the tradeoffs that make it that way. For example, as I’ve written before, Missouri has a very low student-to-teacher ratio—11.3 students per teacher. If Missouri increased this ratio, it could increase teacher pay. As I wrote, “If Missouri were to match Illinois’ ratio of 14.3, Missouri teachers could realize a 26.5% increase in their salaries.”

As it turns out, teachers may prefer to be paid more and have higher class sizes. Fucshman, McGee, and Zamarro find more teachers would prefer to add three students to their class and get a higher salary (78% of respondents) than to have three fewer students and lower pay (65%).

The conversation in Missouri has almost exclusively been “We need to increase teacher pay.” A more robust conversation would consider this and other trade-offs we’ve built into our systems.

The post Teacher Pay: You Can Go with This, or You Can Go with That appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As the sub-headline of Catherine Gewertz 2019 Education Week article states, “Through ‘action civics’ lessons, students become activists in their communities.” As Gewertz notes, “The name of this instructional model—’action civics’—signals its mission: not only to teach students how their government works but to harness that knowledge to launch them into collective action on issues they care about.”

This post is the first of three related to the topic of action civics. It is prompted, in part, by a recently released report from the Texas Public Policy Foundation. In their report, Thomas Lindsay and Lucy Meckler lay out important reasons for concern regarding action civics. They note:

In the course of this examination, we will come to see that, in the final count, the debate over Action Civics presents two contrasting views of democracy. Action Civics stems from a communitarian, participatory view of democracy, which finds its roots in Rousseau’s concept of the “general will.” At its philosophic roots, this agenda tends to distrust the checks on popular will offered by the representative democracy crafted by our founders and enshrined in the Constitution.

As this blog series will make clear, the proponents of action civics are clear in their intent—they hope to produce students who are more inclined toward activism. Importantly, the goal is not just to address social ills, but to address them through government action.

Many teachers throughout the country and within Missouri may have adopted an action civics pedagogy for teaching students because of the rich platitudes offered by its supporters. They may agree that students learn better by doing rather than by “sitting and getting” as is often common in social studies classrooms. The problem here, as I have alluded to in my intro, is that proponents of action civics and the teachers that implement this strategy in their classrooms were so concerned with whether they could teach students in this way that they did not stop to think whether they should.

Asking students to “become activists in their communities” or to advocate for collective government action before laying a foundation of understanding regarding political philosophy (including that of federalism and limited government) is a recipe for disaster. It leads to the types of outcomes we currently see in our political landscape where the very people advocating for the rights of one group are quick to trample on the rights of others. It drives students to see their actions as right and noble and those who oppose them as cruel and mean spirited.

Despite what proponents of action civics might say, it is not the duty of public schools to launch activists. Rather, it is the duty of public school teachers to help students understand this great American experiment in self-government. It is their duty to teach students about our institutions and their roles, as presented in our founding documents and the writings of the founding fathers. Furthermore, it is the duty of teachers to help students understand that people today have different views on the role of government and on the best policy solutions to the problems we face. If your goal is solely to create activists (and activists of a particular kind), you might skip some of these essential lessons.

The post Action Civics: Teaching Students to Become Activists (Part 1 of 3) appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

For Missouri families that might be considering homeschooling, I’d like to share a couple of potentially useful resources.

First, and perhaps most important, is the Homeschool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA). HSLDA offers lots of resources on its website, including a state-by-state guide of laws and regulations related to homeschooling. For families worried about running afoul of the law, they can join HSLDA for $130 a year and get access to legal advice and protection as well as a host of other homeschooling resources.

Second, there is Khan Academy. Started as a series of YouTube videos Sal Khan created to tutor his nieces and nephews, Khan Academy has grown into a huge free online repository of lessons and projects for students. It has really stepped up during the coronavirus, creating a fully articulated school schedule for students with all the lessons and supplemental videos and articles necessary to complete it. Again, this is all available for free.

Third, Study Island by Edmentum offers a full self-paced online curriculum for students aligned to state standards. For those families thinking that homeschooling will be temporary and that their children will return to their traditional public school next year, keeping up with state requirements is important. Study Island provides its service for around $180 per student per year (though they do offer a free trial for folks looking to check it out). It is not free like Khan Academy, but is plug-and-play and standards-aligned, two key features that parents under pressure might think are worth the cost.

The fourth resource is Carol Topp, the Homeschool CPA. “Pandemic pods” are cropping up as a popular option for families to link together and share resources as they homeschool for the upcoming year. How can families set one up and potentially hire a teacher or set of tutors without running afoul of non-profit or employment law? This is where a knowledgeable CPA can help. Even for those who are homeschooling independently, tax questions can frequently arise. Her website has lots of free content, and she also offers one-on-one consulting services to help families navigate the homeschool landscape.

If you’re thinking seriously about homeschooling in Missouri this year, you are not alone. There are lots of families in the same boat, and lots of resources out there to help.

If you know of any other resources, particularly Missouri-based ones, please feel free to share them in the comments below.

The post Thinking About Homeschooling in Missouri this Year? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The general public has largely been shielded from the challenges green energy faces, with much of the debate being left to behind-the-scenes energy analysts. By bringing these matters to the forefront, Moore’s documentary reminds us that while green energy has its place, it also has its limits.

For those wanting a closer look, I address these matters in more detail in a recent op-ed for Real Clear Energy.

The post More on Moore’s “Planet of the Humans” appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

You can watch the full discussion here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BorO19ELMc

You can listen to the podcast here: https://bit.ly/2L5qkql

The post Virtual Town Hall with Art Laffer appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

There are some great NFL press conference moments. Jim Mora’s incredulous “Playoffs? Playoffs? I hope we can just win a game.” Herman Edwards’ punctuated “You play. To win. The game.” Mike Ditka’s forlorn “If I was fired, I’d quit right now.”

But perhaps the most emotional press conference moment came from Arizona Cardinal’s coach Dennis Green, who, after losing a game to the Chicago Bears, angrily pounded the press conference podium and shouted “They are who we thought they were, and we let them off the hook!”

I was reminded of this exhortation last week when NCES released the results of the 2015–16 Private School Universe Survey, an exhaustive analysis of the landscape of private schooling across America. I spend a lot of time in Missouri and across the country talking about private school choice programs, and hearing people’s opinions about private schools and their potential as options for children. Based on people’s perceptions, I’d like to invert Dennis Green’s shouts and say that private schools aren’t what you think they are.

When they hear the words “private schools,” many people think about toney suburban campuses speckled with lacrosse fields and tennis courts. Others think about single-sex Catholic schools run by the Christian Brothers or Sisters of St. Joseph.

Neither of these images is fully representative of the diverse set of private schools in our nation today. So what do we know about private schooling in America today?

The 34,576 private elementary and secondary schools are, on average, quite small. The average enrollment was only 142 students across all schools, 100 students in elementary schools and 263 students in high school. Forty-six percent of private schools enrolled fewer than 50 students.

Single-sex schools are extremely rare. Only 4 percent of private schools in America were single-sex, evenly split between 2 percent all girls and 2 percent all boys.

Catholic schools only make up 20.3 percent of all private schools, though it should be noted that they enroll 38.8 percent of all students. A full 32.7 percent of private schools are nonreligious.

Perhaps surprisingly (though not as surprising if you read this great Brookings Institution paper on the geography of school options across the country), 30.2 percent of private schools were located in rural areas or in small towns.

As to racial demographics, private schools do differ from traditional public schools in meaningful ways. While public schools are roughly 50% white, 16% Black, 25% Hispanic, and 9% all other races, private schools are 69% white, 9% Black, 10% Hispanic, and 12% all other races.

One last data point worth mentioning; private school enrollment is on a serious decline. In just 15 years, it has dropped from 6.3 million children (in 2001–12) to just 4.9 million (in 2015–16).

I’d offer three short reflections.

1.It’s time we update our understanding of what private schools looks like. There is an incredible amount of variation within private schools. On average, they are small, more likely to be religious, and are probably located within a city or suburb. But that’s about all we can say. If you have a mental picture of what a private school looks like and assume they all look like that, you’re probably guessing wrong.

2.School choice risks being too little, too late. As I have argued for years, private schools, and particularly the urban Catholic schools that have a proud tradition of serving low-income and minority students, are closing by the hundreds. School choice is a way to stanch the bleeding—but without a greater sense of urgency, there will be no schools left for children to choose. We cannot be surprised to see private schools serving fewer and fewer minority children when all of the schools that have served them in the past are closing.

3.Private schools should do a better job of reaching out to minority communities. If private schools want to grow, reaching out to growing populations is the way to make it happen. I’m heartened by efforts like Notre Dame’s Task Force on the Participation of Latino Children and Families in Catholic Schools, but we need many more organizations working to connect minority children to educational opportunities in private schools. School choice is also an indispensable part of this effort, as it is perhaps the only tool that can help bridge the gap between what people can afford and where they can go to school.

Private schools are not a monolith. They are a part of the diverse landscape of education in America, and their decline should trouble all of us.

The post Private Schools Aren’t What You Think They Are appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

JJ first stopped into the restaurant after smelling the food. “I could smell the smoke from Louisiana.” JJ tells me. [Louisiana is a street several blocks from Sister Cities.]

When JJ and his girlfriend went inside to check out the place, Pam needed someone to help out in the back of the house. She asked him if he’d like to make some extra money. “I was like, sure, why not?”

After starting washing the dishes, JJ quickly worked his way to the front of the house. Pam told him, “You have a good smile. You have a good personality. I need you in the front. You can’t be nice to the dishes anymore. They’re clean now.”

Now JJ seats customers, takes orders, takes care of checks, and works as a back bar man. Sister Cities put up a chalk board, so JJ taught himself chalk art from a Youtube channel. He now does much of the signage for Sister Cities.

JJ’s story is a common one. When I was a teen I got a restaurant job under similar circumstances; the manager needed someone to wash dishes. I got my foot in the door cleaning, bussing, and earning minimum wage, but soon moved up to a position where I took orders and prepared food.

Minimum wage mandates are so dangerous because they threaten people like JJ who don’t already have formal work experience. If Pam had been forced to pay a starting wage of $11, she probably wouldn’t have taken a risk on someone without previous restaurant experience. If you remove the bottom rung of the economic ladder, it’s harder for people to get the skills they need to move up.

Minimum wage laws can also keep businesses from operating altogether. “I’m afraid I’ll ultimately have to close my doors,” Pam tells me when I ask her about the impact of the minimum wage hike. If Pam has to shut down Sister Cities or move out of the city, JJ will be out a job.

The post Minimum Wage Harms the Workers It’s Meant to Help appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The library put Sanders's talk on YouTube. Sanders's talk starts at about 19:10 and runs for about 30 minutes, not including questions and answers. Please consider taking the time to watch the talk. Sanders presents valuable and substantive information and does so entertainingly.

The post The Video Kansas City Doesn’t Want You to See appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Does the Super Bowl have any positive net economic impact on a host city?

The answer is it can, but it probably won’t. In a 2009 study, Michael C. Davis and Christian M. End found that hosting a Super Bowl has no economic impact on a city’s real per capita income, and in some cases it can have a negative effect. Robert A. Baade, Robert Baumann, and Victor Matheson examined the economic impact of mega-events (including the Super Bowl) in Southern Florida from 1980 to 2005. During that period, three cities (Tampa Bay, Miami, and Jacksonville) hosted the Super Bowl a total of seven times. The Super Bowl had a statistically significant positive impact on the city’s economy in only one instance (Tampa in 2001). Dennis Coates found that Houston saw increased sales tax revenue because of the Super Bowl in 2004. But the next year in Jacksonville, the Super Bowl was found not to have had an economic impact.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJiVdo5GV_U?rel=0&w=600]

This takes us back to the Kansas City Super Bowl task force. Why is the state in the business of trying to lure the Super Bowl to Kansas City? Couldn’t a private group of interested residents and businesses sell the city as a Super Bowl destination just as well? Possibly, but the state can offer the NFL subsidies. However, just because the state can do something, doesn’t mean it should. Economists in general oppose sports subsidies because, “The large and growing peer-reviewed economics literature on the economic impacts of stadiums, arenas, sports franchises, and sport mega-events has consistently found no substantial evidence of increased jobs, incomes, or tax revenues for a community associated with any of these things.”

It’s true that there could be intangible benefits to hosting a Super Bowl, like increased exposure to the outside world. Yet, is there any concrete measure on what kind of return the city would see from such exposure? Will businesses or residents move to Kansas City because it hosted the Super Bowl? I don’t know, and the burden of proof should be on those arguing for government subsidies.

Kansas City is a great football town, and I agree with Joe Clifford when he says, “The Super Bowl’s tremendous.” However, I don’t think the residents of Kansas City nor the rest of Missouri should pay for the privilege.

The post Is the Super Bowl a Super Boost for Local Economies? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Recently in San Antonio, voters were outraged over their city’s efforts to fund a streetcar without a public vote. As a result, the council is adopting a proposal that

“would amend the city charter so that no money could be spent on streetcar or light rail, nor would the city grant permission to use city streets for those kinds of rail projects, unless a majority of voters agrees to it.”

Opponents in San Antonio echo arguments elsewhere, that transit needs can be met much more efficiently through existing or new technologies such as rapid transit like the MAX bus or through driverless cars. Technology of Tomorrow shows a video summarizing their viewpoint. The video contains a segment of a TED talk by (speaking of creative class) Sebastian Thrun, director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University, in which he says [starts at 16:30],

“If you’re one of these people who argue the only way to solve the congestion problem is to move traffic off the road on to rail, think again. We have the space, we’re just not using it.”

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_T-X4N7hVQ?rel=0]

The advent of driverless cars and their impact on urban transit is nothing new. We’ve written about their impending arrival in Kansas City, and we’ve lamented City Hall’s inability or unwillingness to prepare for it. It’s difficult to know exactly if or when driverless cars will be in every driveway and precisely what effect they will have on a traffic system. But if Kansas City wants to be the city of the future, it needs to prepare to quickly integrate all the opportunities the future presents, not protect the special interests of their cronies or rebuild the infrastructure of the past.

The problem in Kansas City is that government does not appear to respect the will of voters on this matter, unlike San Antonio. Despite tenuous claims of need, despite the cost, despite numerous ballot defeats, despite coming new technologies, City Hall can be expected to try again to come at voters with expensive rail proposals regardless of what better options new technology presents.

The post The Future of Transit appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This is not meant to sound corny, but no matter how you feel about the TIF, it was impressive to see so many people at the meeting participating in their local government.

After all the testimony, the commission rejected (via a tied 6-6 vote) a compromise proposal from the Affton School District that would have capped the property tax funds that the TIF captures at 50 percent — the same as sales taxes. That is not a bad idea, and I commend the school district’s reps for trying to find common ground. However, my guess is that the rest of the board voted it down because that change would have only been advisory to the city while the full TIF would have gone forward with a “yes” recommendation. That means the Shrewsbury Board of Aldermen could have ignored the change and then passed the TIF anyway with just a simple majority.

Next, the commission voted on the primary TIF proposal to give the developer a $15 million subsidy ($11.25 million in TIF and $3.75 million in Transportation Development District or Community Improvement District funding). The commission voted this down 9-3, with only the Shrewsbury-appointed commissioners in favor. Now, in order to pass the TIF, the Shrewsbury Board of Aldermen needs a two-thirds majority vote in favor, which by all accounts, it has. So it goes.

The TIF is dead. Long live the TIF!

It was a good night to see a bad idea defeated. Unfortunately, the celebration is short-lived, as it will likely pass the next test.

P.S. Thanks to McGraw Milhaven for posting the testimony video to YouTube.

The post Shrewsbury TIF Is Dead – For Now appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

* The corporate income tax hurts workers. AEI economists Kevin Hassett and Aparna Mathur have found that “corporate tax rates affect wage levels across countries. Higher corporate taxes lead to lower wages. A 1 percent increase in corporate tax rates is associated with nearly a 1 percent drop in wage rates.”

* As (Bloomberg View) points out, “The current system often amounts to double taxation, since income earned by a business is subjected to the 35 percent corporate rate, then taxed again when it’s paid out as a dividend.”

* “Corporate income taxes have a highly significant and negative effect on long-term growth,” according to the Tax Foundation.

My colleague Patrick Ishmael and I have proposed eliminating the corporate income tax and making up any lost revenue with the elimination of economic development tax credits, which cost the state about as much as the corporate income tax generates. Not only would this have the positive impact of getting rid of an economically harmful tax, but it would reduce the government’s ability to pick winners and losers, distorting investment decisions and imperiling overall growth. Now is the right time to make this change.

The post We Are Not The Only Ones Discussing Corporate Taxes appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Stay up-to-date on Missouri free-market issues wherever you are, and please contact us — from your phone or on this blog — with your questions and comments.

The post Now, Show-Me Your iPhone: SMI Smartphone App Live appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Roberts and Papola are producing another video with the same actors playing Hayek and Keynes, and applying their theories to the present situation. You can catch a preview of the video, along with a short interview with Roberts and Papola from a conference sponsored by The Economist magazine, embedded below.

The post Rapping the Recession appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This panel discussion is our attempt to explore the issues of liberty at stake, as well as provide the opportunity for anyone who is interested to meet the panelists and to ask questions.

The discussion will begin at 6:00 p.m. TODAY at the Show-Me Institute’s office at 4512 W. Pine Blvd in the Central West End of Saint Louis.

The event is free, and snacks will be provided. However, because Liberty on Tour is traveling across the country, we suggest a $5 to $10 donation to help pay for the group’s travel costs.

Our star-studded panel includes:

• Adam Mueller and Pete Eyre of Liberty on Tour, a project to tour 13 cities in 13 weeks to talk about the principles of voluntaryism. Adam is also a founder of Cop Block, an organization devoted to watchdogging police officers who break the law. Pete Eyre currently works for the Future of Freedom Foundation, which advocates for individual liberty, free markets, private property rights, and limited government. Both Adam and Pete were part of the Motorhome Diaries project.
• Redditt Hudson, of the ACLU of Eastern Missouri. Redditt is a former Saint Louis police officer, and part of his work at the ACLU is to lead workshops that educate people about their rights under the law, including practical advice about how to interact with the police.
• John Payne, a research assistant at the Show-Me Institute, will be moderating the discussion. John has argued for greater transparency and recording of SWAT raids in Missouri, and follows issues of civil asset forfeiture closely.

If you have the time, please drop by, and don’t hesitate to bring questions! The panelists will speak briefly about their perspectives on recording the police, and then we will open up the discussion for questions from the general public. After about an hour of discussion, we will move the group to Sasha’s on Shaw for dinner and drinks.

If you can’t make it, you can send questions you’d like asked to info@showmeinstitute.org, tweet them to @showmeinstitute, or post questions on the event’s Facebook wall. Finally, we will film the discussion and post it online for those who cannot attend.

The post Tonight: Panel Discussion on Recording the Police and Your Rights appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

These arrests raise interesting questions of privacy expectations, free speech, differing state laws, and, as Reason Senior Editor Radley Balko has noted, your right to petition the government. This panel discussion is our attempt to explore the issues of liberty at stake, as well as provide the opportunity for anyone who is interested to meet the panelists and to ask questions.

The discussion will begin at 6:00 p.m. on Friday, August 20, at the Show-Me Institute’s office at 4512 W. Pine Blvd in the Central West End of Saint Louis. Please RSVP either by email to info@showmeinstitute.org, by phone to (314) 454-0647, or by commenting on this blog entry.

The event is free and snacks will be provided. However, because Liberty on Tour is traveling across the country, we suggest a $5 to $10 donation to help pay for the group’s travel costs.

Our star-studded panel includes:

• Adam Mueller and Pete Eyre of Liberty on Tour, a project to tour 13 cities in 13 weeks to talk about the principles of voluntaryism. Adam is also a founder of Cop Block, an organization devoted to watchdogging police officers who break the law. Pete Eyre currently works for the Future of Freedom Foundation, which advocates for individual liberty, free markets, private property rights, and limited government. Both Adam and Pete were part of the Motorhome Diaries project.
• Redditt Hudson, of the ACLU of Eastern Missouri. Redditt is a former Saint Louis police officer, and part of his work at the ACLU is to lead workshops that educate people about their rights under the law, including practical advice about how to interact with the police.
• John Payne, a research assistant at the Show-Me Institute, will be moderating the discussion. John has argued for greater transparency and recording of SWAT raids in Missouri, and follows issues of civil asset forfeiture closely.

If you have the time, please drop by, and don’t hesitate to bring questions! The panelists will speak briefly about their perspectives on recording the police, and then we will open up the discussion for questions from the general public. After about an hour of discussion, we will move the group to Sasha’s on Shaw for dinner and drinks.

If you can’t make it, you can send questions you’d like asked to info@showmeinstitute.org, tweet them to @showmeinstitute, or post questions on the event’s Facebook wall. Finally, we will film the discussion and post it online for those who cannot attend.

The post Recording the Police and Your Rights: A Panel Discussion With Liberty on Tour and the ACLU 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.

However, everything the Census Bureau put up on YouTube has been a wild success when compared with the embarrassing event in Jefferson City yesterday. I say “embarrassing” not because I’m scandalized that there were belly dancers there, but because almost no one showed up to watch them. My Two Census picked up the story as an example of ineffective Census promotion.

I actually feel bad for the belly dancers, who had to perform with little clothing on when the temperature was in the low 50s. The poor turnout couldn’t have helped their self-esteem much, either.

I have a better idea for promoting the Census: Promise that if enough people mail back their forms, the Census Bureau will post a clip on YouTube of its director belly dancing.

The post The Census Bureau Should Stick to YouTube appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The Portrait of America video has just over 6,500 hits…which would sound pretty pathetic for a 10 month campaign if only it wasn’t revealed that the other six videos posted 10 months ago each received between 347 and 1,305 hits. In the series of videos posted 6 months ago, the most widely-watched video, about the address-canvassing operations, has been viewed a measly 1,083 times. (This means that only a tiny fraction of the workers involved in this process even watched the video…)

For comparison, 1,700,000 people watched Google’s Super Bowl ad on YouTube. And “How Many Times Must Our Health Care Fail,” the song I linked to in this post, has been viewed 3,700 times.

My Two Census’ numbers don’t reflect the Census Bureau’s full impact on YouTube, because they don’t take into account the separate channel that the Bureau created for its Super Bowl ad. The ad features an imaginary film director named Payton Schlewitt, and it can be found — along with other clips of Schlewitt’s antics — on the Payton Schlewitt channel. There, the numbers are better. The ad itself drew 117,300 hits within five days. Another video of Schlewitt and his cohorts, which highlights the fact that animals are not counted in the Census, is up to 1,400 hits, also after only a few days.

So, the numbers aren’t as bad as they would appear from the Census Bureau’s channel alone. Still, My Two Census has a point. Payton Schlewitt’s viewership pales next to Google’s. And, of the people who watched the Census ad, many reacted unfavorably. Viewers rated it a mediocre two-and-a-half stars, and several comments complain that taxes had to pay for it.

The post The Census Bureau Is Not a YouTube Sensation appeared first on Show-Me Institute.