We’ve got a new article up by Steve Bernstetter about a promising bill by two Saint Louis-area Democrats to implement some common-sense education reform ideas:

The proposal would offer incentives for teachers to specialize in the most needed areas, particularly science, math, special education, and English as a Second Language. It would also offer bonuses to teachers for student performance. By the same token, those teachers that do not meet performance standards would receive professional development training; those failing more than once would be fired. Setting benchmarks that reflect a teacher’s performance and are not tied solely to the performance of each individual student is the key to making this system of compensation work. Such a rubric would reflect the unfortunate reality that some students simply don’t want to learn, and avoid blaming the teachers for those student’s failures. This will create a pay structure that acknowledges the reality faced by teachers in the public system; a structure that encourages innovation and emphasizes performance.

The plan also calls for state-funded pre-kindergarten education for all children between the ages of three and five, as well as tax credits to private donors who fund after-school enrichment programs. Both of these ideas are good on the surface, but the devil is in the details. A robust pre-school market already exists, and any attempt to require such additional schooling should take advantage of that market. It would be highly inefficient to build separate infrastructure for a network of new, state-funded, state-administered preschools. Rather, a practical approach would be to give every child a voucher to attend the existing preschool of their parents’ choosing. This method would place responsibility for kids’ educations squarely on the shoulders of parents, getting them involved in the education process early and hopefully keeping them involved throughout. If necessary, minimum performance standards could insure that preschools are optimally preparing student to enter kindergarten in the public system.

Just as Richmond Heights and Clayton near the end of their joint study on merging the cities, legislation has been introduced in Jeff City allowing for the consideration of merging the governments of the City of St. Joseph and Buchanan County.  Kudos to the local officials Buchanan County and St. Joseph for their desire to at least consider the idea.  I was in St. Joe once, about seven years ago, for the wedding of a close friend, and I recall thinking at the time about what a wonderful place it was but that it could use some local government consolidation.  This government consolidation idea could be a great example to the rest of Missouri if it goes forward, which the optimist in me hopes it does and the realist in me doubts it will.  Lord knows we have way too many counties in Missouri, with 114 (+ 1) we have the 4th most counties of any state.  As at least 100 of those counties have small populations by any normal standard, we could certainly use some tax-saving consolidation at the county level. 

The English-language cartel is pushing for more regulations:

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”?

Most Saint Louis County taxpayers have by now received their reassessment notices.  It is hard not to think of the entire process as a lottery, even though I know the assessor’s office does a very good job, too good of a job in most people’s opinions, of assessing property in Saint Louis County.  Their system works as well as any system can that has to assess 365,000 properties every two years, but you can’t help but wonder about the system when your house goes up 5% and your neighbor’s very similar house goes up 21%.  I think my wife and I benefitted from comparison sales mostly from later in 2005, by which time the housing market had cooled somewhat.  People who had comparisons from 2004 and the first half of 2005 probably saw higher increases.  In our school district, the average increase in value was 20%.  Since we live in a muni with the same boundaries as the school district, our city council and school board should roll back the tax rates 20%, resulting in an unexpected tax decrease for us.   That is how we have won the lottery.  Yes, I owe you all a beer in celebration.   

Taxpayers need to know the average numbers for their area and pressure local government entities to roll back the rates to correspond with the assessment increases.  Reassessment is supposed to be revenue neutral at all levels.  Some entities, such as St. Louis County, have current rates so far below the maximum allowed (which they deserve thanks, or ‘props,” for) that they are not legally required to roll back the rate further.  These government entities need to roll back their rates even though they are not legally required to, just as St. Louis County did in 2005.  Not surprisingly, considering the nature of the beast, most government entities are at or near their cap and as such will be required to roll back rates.  So don’t panic if your increase is 20% if your entire area is around that level – while you will still probably see a tax increase it will not by anything like a 20% increase.

When should you appeal and or panic?  You should base your appeal not on the level of increase, as strange as that seems, but on the simple question of whether or not you feel your property is assessed too highly by the assessor’s office.  Even if you only go up 8%, if you truly feel that the assessment is too high, and you can get some evidence to support you, then by all means appeal.  As for panicking, if your increase is at least 10% more than average for your area (or 30% for most of St. Louis County) you should prepare for a sizeable tax increase and take steps now to appeal your assessment or, if you are a senior citizen or disabled, use the two programs available to you. 

I agree with my colleague Steven Bernstetter that helping children escape the failing St. Louis Public Schools is imperative. But I beg to differ about the success of the busing program. My experience during a semester at Parkway Central High School was that racial integration happened only on paper. In real life, the suburbanites were segregated in all-white "honors" classes, rarely seeing the city kids during the day. I had a little more interaction with students who were bused in, but only because of a glitch in my schedule that put me in Remedial Computer Skills 100.

The program put pressure on minority students who lived in the suburbs, because teachers expected them to act just like the students from the city. And the bused-in students were inevitably made to feel like unwelcome guests who might be bused back out if they didn’t behave.

Those who participate in the busing program have higher graduation rates than those who don’t, but I imagine they would graduate at the higher rates even in the absence of busing. Only students who are already very motivated would get up early in the morning and spend long hours on the bus for a chance to navigate a tense day at a racially divided school.

Of course, implementation of the program varies between districts, and my brief experience at Parkway might be anomalous. Still, I can’t help but notice the contrast between Parkway and the private schools I’ve attended and worked in, where even students on scholarships are treated like they belong there.

The Post has an update on one of the most outrageous abuses of eminent domain in recent years: the blighting of a block of prosperous businesses in downtown Clayton:

On Jan. 19, St. Louis County Circuit Judge James R. Hartenbach agreed to allow Centene to use condemnation to acquire the properties. The owners say their properties are not blighted and should not be condemned. In a nonbinding referendum, Clayton voters expressed opposition to the use of eminent domain to benefit a private development.

Robert J. Schenk, a spokesman for Centene, said, “The properties that are the subject of litigation are still a critical part of the overall project. Without those properties, the project will not occur.”

Schenk said, “The developers are busy working to ensure that the project can move forward as quickly as possible as soon as the litigation question has been addressed.”

The properties in question are just a couple of blocks from our offices, and I’ve walked by them numerous time over the last two years. If they’re “blighted,” then every neighborhood in the state is blighted. Even more outrageous, these properties aren’t even essential to Centene’s new headquarters, they’re slated to be used for upscale retail establishments. Apparently Centene simply didn’t feel that the businesses currently occupying the space were high-class enough for its employees and clients to patronize, so they asked the city to bring in new, ritzier businesses.

In short, what is happening is precisely what Justice O’Connor predicted in her dissent in Kelo:

The logic of today’s decision is that eminent domain may only be used to upgrade–not downgrade–property. At best this makes the Public Use Clause redundant with the Due Process Clause, which already prohibits irrational government action. The Court rightfully admits, however, that the judiciary cannot get bogged down in predictive judgments about whether the public will actually be better off after a property transfer. In any event, this constraint has no realistic import. For who among us can say she already makes the most productive or attractive possible use of her property? The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the State from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory.

But what about last year’s eminent domain legislation? Wasn’t it supposed to protect property owners? The legislation did substantially increase protection for farmers. But for the rest of us, all it had to offer was modest increases in compensation. The legislation left in place the absurdly lax standards for “blight” that essentially allows municipalities to condemn any property they want.

The Arizona Republic, the state’s largest paper, has a great editorial defending Arizona’s new scholarship tax credit program, which is quite similar to the proposals that we’ve been considering here in Missouri:

This myopic battle is anchored in fear. Its proponents fear that perfectly defensible programs for poor kids may metastasize into something bigger. But dread of what the future may hold is a mighty poor argument for denying a quality education to kids right now. It is not just the corporate tax credit they are fighting against. Last year, the state Legislature approved, and Napolitano signed, bills creating education voucher programs for disabled kids and children in foster programs. Those programs also are tied up in court by many of the same opponents.

Voucher programs traditionally have had a tougher time in the courts than tax-credit programs, so the future of these valuable tools may be more in doubt.

It would be a shame to see such programs flounder on the specious fear that if you give vouchers to disabled kids, or to kids at the rocky bottom of life’s well, that public education itself will crumble.

Simply put, it won’t. Education choice strengthens the underlying system. Someday, with luck, opponents of reform will figure that out.

Sadly, defenders of the status quo here in Missouri seem to be even more entrenched than they are in Arizona.

Hat tip: Cato

Amidst the state takeover of the St. Louis Public Schools, education reformers are tossing around a number of ideas for improving the beleaugered district. Longer school days, stronger teacher accountability measures, and mandatory preschool education are just a few of the worthy proposals receiving attention. However, there is one program currently being phased out that has already been quite successful, though perhaps not to the degree one might realize at first glance: the Voluntary Interdistrict Transfer program.

Currently, as a remnant of court-mandated desegregation efforts originating in the early 1980s, the state of Missouri has a program enabling students in SLPS to transfer out of their neighborhood school and into a participating county school. The state pays the transportation costs and the receiving district’s average per pupil cost for the student, and the city school gets to keep the funding it would have otherwise spent on the transferring student. The program was originally intended to racially integrate previously homogenous districts, but has had a far more profound ecomomic effect on the city and state.

An excellent paper on the cost of highschool dropouts to the state demonstrates the fact that every student that doesn’t graduate represents significant economic costs to the state, costs much higher than the actual cost of education. The students who participate in the transfer program are roughly twice as likely to graduate from highschool as those who remain in the program. The long term economic costs to the state resulting from the lost tax revenue, lost economic activity, higher safety net costs, and higher incarceration rates associated with those dropouts far outweigh the short term costs of financing the program.

Citizens and politicians outside of St. Louis will surely balk at the idea of spending more state money on the failing SLPS, but the economic effects associated with the district’s failure to educate it’s students will be shared by the whole state. With that in mind, it is in the best interest of all Missourians to insure the continuation of this valuable and effective choice program, and let as many kids as so desire escape from their failing school.

My latest article points out that mayoral control of the Saint Louis school districts could be a good way to put control over our schools back in the hands of an official who is directly elected by Saint Louis voters, while still giving the district the stable, coherent leadership it so desperately needs. However, I also emphasize that mayoral control will only work if the mayor and other civic leaders are committed to making it work:

Critics point out that Sullivan is not a city resident, and that the new governance arrangement will provide parents with little influence over the direction of the district. Moreover, there is no guarantee that this three-person governance panel will show more leadership coherence than the school board it replaces. In 2000, the Washington, DC, school board was re-shuffled to include four members appointed by the mayor and five members directly elected by voters. This fractured leadership structure has not worked very well. DC Mayor Anthony Williams described it as “trying to drive a car with one pedal.” Similarly, under the state take-over plan now under way, control over the district will be fractured among the governor, the mayor, and the president of the board of aldermen—three politicians who may have divergent views on how the district should be governed. Mayoral control could address both of those concerns, giving the district unified, coherent, and stable leadership under an elected official chosen by Saint Louis voters.

However, mayoral control will only make sense if Mayor Slay is willing to step up to the plate and make education reform a focus of his administration. And given the structural limitations on the power of the mayor in Saint Louis, the business community and other civic leaders must be willing to provide strong backing for the mayor’s reform efforts as well.

Here is the PDF of our recent study on mayoral control by Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute.

A Post-Dispatch editorial describes the tragedy of public education in St. Louis:

Public education can be an avenue to unlimited opportunity. Yet tragically, far too many young people in St. Louis, especially African-American males who drop out of school, find themselves stuck on a dead-end street.

That sad fact often gets drowned out in the political uproar surrounding the state intervention now underway in the running of St. Louis public schools. It’s worth reflecting on as the new leaders set their goals and strategy.

The consequences of poor schooling are devastating for black children, for the neighborhoods where they live and for the community at large.

This is why we need to allow St. Louis children to attend better schools, right now. A tuition tax credits program would do just that. Improving public education is a process that takes many years–and so far we haven’t seen much improvement. In the meantime, children in St. Louis are losing the chance to get an education. The conflicts between students and government officials show how desperate the situation is for the students and how few alternatives they have.

MODOT engineer Judy Wagner thinks that police have nothing better to do than harass motorists about wearing their seat belts. She claims that “wouldn’t cost anything.” It “doesn’t cost anything” in precisely the same way it “wouldn’t cost anything” to pass a law requiring the St. Louis police to clean my bathroom. The cost is in the form of police time, time they could be spending dealing with actual crimes like speeding, drunk driving, or murder.

Beyond the waste of police resources, the proposal also worries me because it gives undue discretion to police officers. There are far more people not wearing seat belts than the police could possibly pull over, so the police would have a great deal of discretion about who to target. Moreover, even if someone is wearing a seatbelt, it’s not that easy to see it in a moving car, so a police officer could easily claim he thought someone wasn’t wearing a seat belt and pulled them over to check. That, in effect, means that the police would have an excuse to pull over anyone they like. That kind of arbitrary discretion in the hands of government officials is worrisome because it opens the door to abuses of power like racial profiling.

The Springfield News-Leader has an insightful editorial arguing that Missouri should be allowed to opt out of No Child Left Behind. They correctly point out that the law puts too much power over the education of our kids in the hands of Washington bureaucrats.

But for some reason, they still insist that the federal government should continue providing funding to the states even after the other red tape is repealed. This doesn’t make any sense to me. The money came from Missouri taxpayers in the first place. What’s the point of sending it to Washington, where the federal bureaucracy can skim off a share, before sending it back here? That doesn’t make sense. Instead, Congress should repeal NCLB entirely—funding included. It can use the savings to cut taxes or reduce the deficit. And then, if Missouri policymakers decide that Missouri’s schools need more money, we can levy taxes here at the state level for that purpose. That way, every dime will stay here in Missouri, and Missourians will have complete control over how it’s spent.

As the editorial puts it:

Next week, voters all over the Ozarks will practice the ultimate in accountability when they go to the polls and elect school board members and say yes or no on various bond issues. Some school districts and school boards will get a pat on the back for a job well done. Others will be told to go back to the drawing board.

It’s a system that puts accountability in the hands of those who know the most about what’s really going on in schools.

I couldn’t have put it better myself. Congress should cut the federal education budget so that Missourians will have full control over education spending in Missouri.

One area where pure free-market ideology has long reigned has been trash pick-up in unincorporated St. Louis County.  Other than requiring you to have it, county governnment has not been involved in it at all.  Homeowners contract with a hauler and the entire thing is handled privately.  Now however, the system is going to change somewhat.  St. Louis County is planning to have haulers bid on providing trash services to the residents of soon-to-be-established trash districts.  The winning bid will then have the monopoly on doing the trash hauling for that area and contracting with the residents and neighborhoods within it.  I think this change could be good for St. Louis County, especially because trash hauling will still be handled entirely by private companies.  The changes will decrease the number of trash trucks on unincorporated roads, which all County taxpayers pay for.  Better to have one company serve an entire neighborhood once a week than four companies serve one-forth of a neighborhood at four different times each week.  The economies of scale produced by a firm serving households closer together than before should reduce costs for all involved.  My only concern is that new start-up companies be allowed to compete fairly for the residential bids, (commerical hauling is still unregulated) without favortism shown to established, union companies.  We will have to wait and see on that.               

Outstate Missourians are annoyed that so many of Missouri’s tax dollars have gone towards education in St. Louis, with poor results:

Last Thursday, the Missouri Board of Education voted 5-1 to take over control of the St. Louis School District and its 33,000 students. The district was stripped of its accreditation because it met only five of the state’s 14 standards on its last state report card. The district has piled up huge debt while graduation rates and test scores lag. The district has had six superintendents in the last four years.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that an outside entity has had to step in and manage the St. Louis School District.

Even if less state money went to the district, the rest of the state wouldn’t escape the cost of St. Louis’ educational crisis. There remain the costs to the criminal justice system and the costs of offering remedial courses at the college level.

But this op-ed is right that the money is not being spent effectively. It’s time to try something different, like tuition tax credits or another parental choice policy. However, considering the St. Louis Public Schools’ obsession with educational fads, I’d guess they’re more likely to try archery:

"Students can learn the physics behind it and read novels about famous archers," said Knauer, adding that she plans to study whether learning archery in the classroom can help improve Missouri Assessment Program test scores as well. "We want it to be as relevant to schools as possible."

Ticket scalping is in the news due to the discovery that tickets taken by police from scalpers in last year’s World Series were used by family and friends of the police before being turned over as evidence.  This is of interest to me on this blog because I can’t think of another crime that should be removed from the books faster than scalping.  A ticket is a commodity in the purest form.  It has a value to the people who sell it, who are in most cases trying to sell a large number of them which influences the initial pricing decision.  It has a value to the person who first buys it.  Like many commodities, it has different value to different people.  An opera afficianado values tickets to the opera more than someone who has never been to the opera.  If someone else values that commodity – the ticket – more than the person who buys it first, there is no reason it should by forbidden to be resold, like a used car or garage sale furniture.  There are many silly crimes, many of which made sense at some time in the past.  But there is no other crime like scalping which so clearly violates the basic laws of economics.  And for the record, I have no intention of scalping my tickets to the NCAA tourny Sunday, and fear of police has nothing to do with it.         

Yesterday the state Board of Education voted to take control of the St. Louis Public Schools district. In the process, the district also lost its provisional accreditation, failing to meet the necessary 6 of 14 requirements to maintain it. Meanwhile, in Kansas City, a nationally recognized charter school has been approved by the state, and is likely to open in July somewhere in the city’s downtown area. KC leaders hope this development will help attract residents with children to the area, diversifying the downtown population beyond young professional couples and singles, and ensuring its enduring viability.

The disparity between the two cities couldn’t be more stark in this light. Though education in KC certainly has its problems, it at least seems to be making progress, whereas the situation in St. Louis seems locked in a perpetual downward spiral. The difference is in the willingness and ability of KC to try new things, like expanded charter and magnet schools; whereas St. Louis prefers to stay the same misguided course in fear of change.

As I noted in a recent post, charter schools are not a cure-all for the many problems faced by our public school system. However, any measure that gives parents an option beyond their local failing public school is a step in the right direction. Mayor Slay seems to at least recognize this point, as he has asked for the authority to authorize and hold accountable new charter schools in the St. Louis area. As a lifelong St. Louisan, it pains me greatly to say this, but St. Louis and mayor Slay would do well to follow KC’s example and expand its charter school program, enabling city residents to choose an education for their children beyond their failing, unaccredited public school.

Over at our main website, Steve Bernstetter has a great article about the need to ditch monopolistic “certificate of need” laws. If you want to open a laundromat or a Chinese restaurant, you don’t have to fill out paperwork demonstrating that your services are “needed.” The decision of which businesses are “needed” is made by consumers in the marketplace, not government bureaucrats. But in Missouri’s dysfunctional health care marketplace, you can’t enter the market until you’ve gotten approval from the state. Check out Steve’s article to learn more.

Metro, via the Post-Dispatch, is reporting that MetroLink ridership is exceeding expectations since opening six months ago.  This is a good thing, obviously, but major fiscal troubles still face Metro in the near future:

Metro faces a $28 million operating deficit next summer, partly due to the $14 million to $15 million in operating costs associated with the Shrewsbury line. Fares cover only about a third of that cost.

Metro has asked that state for a significant increase in funding, and that is not going to happen.  They may get a gasoline tax exemption, which would save Metro a few hundred thousand dollars a year, but that is likely the most Metro can realisticly expect from Jefferson City.  In order to make up the shortfall, St. Louis County voters can expect to see a tax increase on the ballot late this year or early next year.  I predict the tax increase will fail – though I will probably vote for it, and I vote for tax increases about as often as Tom Niedenfuer comes through in the clutch.  If and when the tax increase fails, serious cuts to bus service can be expected, and that cycle will more or less continue until bus service is a shell of its former self.  My generally positive opinion toward Metro and MetroLink could change drastically though if the train is late Sunday and I am late to the tournament game at the Dome, though.  Go Salukis!, and yes, I am a complete fair-weather fan when it comes to Southern Illinois.

I’m not too worried about the coming of the antichrist, but I think the drive to opt Missouri out of the REAL ID Act is a great idea. Here’s a good YouTube clip of my co-blogger Jim Harper facing off against a national ID advocate on MSNBC last month:

It’s important to keep in mind that if Missouri refuses to implement REAL ID, there’s very little chance of negative repercussions for Missourians. In theory, we won’t be able to use our drivers’ licenses to board airplanes, but it’s extremely unlikely that the Department of Homeland Security would actually blacklist an entire state from air travel. More likely, if Missouri refused to implement REAL ID, it would provide a powerful signal to Congress that the American people don’t want a national ID card.

There’s been an interesting debate going on about school choice. A persistent theme of the school choice critics is that a free market in education is a pie-in-the-sky fantasy that’s never been tried in the real world, and that the private schools couldn’t expand to meet the increased demand from a wide-spread choice program. Over at the Cato blog, Andrew Coulson sets the record straight:

There are two well-established nationwide school voucher programs, one in the Netherlands, the other in Chile. The first was created in 1917, the second in 1982. In both cases, the supply of private schools rose dramatically to meet demand. Roughly three quarters of Dutch students are now enrolled in private schools. In Chile, private sector enrollment doubled within the first decade and passed the 50 percent mark in December of 2005.

Sweden and Denmark enacted voucher programs more recently, and both are seeing the creation of new private schools as a result. Swedish private sector enrollment rose from 1 percent to 10 percent of the student population in a decade, and continues to rise. I discuss this issue at greater length in my chapter in the Cato book: What America Can Learn from School Choice in other Countries.

Turning to Mr. Rotherham’s assertion, I pointed out at our forum that there are vibrant, unregulated, rapidly growing education markets all over the world. In some areas, such as the U.S., Japan, and South Korea, these are niche markets – mainly after-school tutoring. In other parts of the globe, particularly South Asia and Africa, they are mainstream elementary and secondary schools.

It’s frustrating that special interest groups in Missouri spend so much money opposing a school reform strategy that worked so well around the world.

Some parents are upset that grades 6 through 8 are left out of Missouri’s new online education program for the first year:

Garry Jones, of Kansas City, has a 12-year-old daughter who is home-schooled by her parents because of her asthma and allergies. She will be in seventh grade next year., falling into the gap in the virtual education program.

He said his family and many others with middle school students traveled to Jefferson City to advocate for the bill and now aren’t reaping its benefits.

Online classes are a good idea for children who live in remote areas or who have health problems. But Missouri’s plan is more complicated than it needs to be. Some states, such as Arizona and Florida, pay for students to enroll in privately run virtual schools like k12. Private programs like this have already developed courses in all subjects, at all grade levels. Rather than reinventing the wheel and creating online courses from scratch, Missouri could allow students to choose from existing online courses. That would be easier and less expensive. Most importantly, there would be less chance of the online courses replicating the mediocrity that plagues many of Missouri’s brick-and-mortar public schools.

Eric Mink has an excellent article in the Post-Dispatch today about the proposed Mississippi River bridge.  It is carefully researched and thorough and I agree with much of it, though not all of it.  He quotes from a study funded by East-West Gateway that concluded there will not be enough drivers willing to pay the toll to make a toll bridge a viable option.  On this blog I have previously mused as to whether we really needed the billion-dollar bridge with so many free bridges available and thought that the smaller, MLK-coupler idea could work well, as a toll or free bridge.  In the interest of brevity, I am not going to focus on the many parts I agree with, ’cause that’s boring, but on his comments about Public-Private Partnerships. 

Mink writes about P 3’s that have built other major roads around the US:

In March 2004, the Government Accountability Office issued a report examining six major P3 projects in the United States. (www.gao.gov/new.items/d04419.pdf) Overly optimistic traffic and revenue projections figured in three of the six. In its planning stages, the Dulles Greenway outside Washington, D.C., projected first-year traffic at 33,000 vehicles per day; it got 10,500. Today, after 12 years in operation, it has yet to turn a profit, and, according to a story last week in the Washington Post, "its debt has nearly tripled."

Another P3 project, the Southern Connector toll road in Greenville County, South Carolina, projected first-year traffic at 28,000 vehicles per day; it got about 14,000. Two years after it opened in 2001, Standard & Poor’s downgraded its rating on Connector bonds to "junk" status.

And using a slightly different measuring unit, the Pocahontas Parkway in Virginia, according to the GAO report, projected 840,000 transactions per month (one vehicle passing through one toll point) for 2003 but got only about 400,000; its bond ratings were downgraded. Both the Pocahontas and Dulles roads have since been bought out by Australian companies.

What Eric’s article is missing is why this is such a bad thing that some of these projects, and we should carefully note that 3 of the 6 measured projects are apparently doing very well, are not doing as well as projected?  To my, this is nothing but capitallism at work.  The roads are not going to disappear because the bonds have been lowered in status.  Who cares if the highway bond is junk if the road is in good condition, and I see nothing in this article or elsewhere that says the roads in question are in disrepair.  In fact, a new compnay just purchased two of the roads above, so someone thinks they are a good investment.  A P 3 is formed, it invests in roads, some of them dont’ generate as much traffic as expected, the P 3 needs to decide what to do now: lower the toll, etc.  This happens in capitalism and the communities still have the roads that private money financed.  So that is my main question about an overall great article from Mr. Mink.

USA Today has a news story on mayoral control over urban schools that covers our study on mayoral control, although they unfortunately don’t mention that we commissioned the study. Still, it’s a good write-up of an important issue:

Education specialists continue to debate whether kids really get a better education under such arrangements, whether any academic gains will be permanent, and how much credit mayors should get for the successes.

Kenneth Wong, a Brown University education professor, examined test scores of the 100 largest school districts from 1999 to 2003. He found that students in mayor-controlled school systems often perform better than those in other urban systems. Test scores in mayor-run districts are rising “significantly,” he says.

However, Wong says in his study that “there is still a long way to go before (mayor-controlled) districts achieve acceptable levels of achievement.”

On the other hand, Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, says his review of previous studies finds that it’s “inconclusive” whether mayors can raise test scores more than elected school boards.

Solid data on student achievement have not been collected long enough, Hess says. And test scores also are up in Houston and other cities with elected school boards, he points out.

The story also highlights an important point about our study: some people have inaccurately described the study as a strong endorsement of mayoral control, but in fact, the study’s findings are more nuanced. Hess concludes that given the chaos now plaguing the school district, mayoral control is likely to be better than the alternatives. However, he makes it clear that how mayoral control is implemented is a lot more important than whether to implement it. Switching to mayoral control carelessly, or without the strong backing of the mayor and civic leadership, would be worse than not switching at all, as the examples of Washington DC and Los Angeles illustrate. The point of Hess’s study was not that we should switch to mayoral control at any cost, but rather that we should only switch to mayoral control if the city’s civic leadership are committed to expending the political capital required for it to be effective.

Governor Blunt has been on tour recently, promoting a new system for cataloging and sharing patient information between doctors and hospitals. According to Senate Majority Leader Charlie Shields, R-St. Joseph:

"The amazing thing, if you listen to the hearing and the testimony," is that "there’s widespread agreement that we need to do this. This is about changing the health-care system to focus on patient needs, to focus on wellness, prevention and be patient-centric. That’s not a Republican issue. That’s not a Democratic issue. That’s a Missouri issue."

The idea is pretty simple: keep track electronically of a patient’s past medical history, current ongoing treatments, potential future problems, etc., and make those records accessible to any doctor in the state treating that patient. This will ensure a continuity and consistency in treatment, making it easier for doctors to anticipate and react to problems quicker, catching and preventing illness earlier while its easier to manage. 

The potential for savings is great, as most diseases, especially cancer, are most easily treated at their earliest stages, eliminating the need for more expensive and risky treatments later in the course of the illness. It will also enable doctors to more effectively collaborate in treating the same patient, avoiding problems with overlapping or conflicting treatments. As described by Sen. Shields:

"Every day you see the elderly person come in with a bag full of prescription drugs in a Ziplock. There may be 12 drugs in there, and three of them interact with each other, and then they wonder why they’re sick," he said.

Electronic records will be an excellent way of overcoming these difficulties, saving patients and taxpayers money by eliminating the need for treatment of side effects from prescription drug-related complications.

With the cost of healthcare in America spiraling out of control, and more and more Americans finding themselves without coverage, something must be done to bring costs down and make care more affordable for everyone. Keeping healthcare systems at the technological forefront by combining Information technologies with medical technologies will help achieve this.

The Post has a write up of one of the most entertaining Supreme Court cases in recent memory, which was argued on Monday. A high school kid in Alaska unfurled a banner that read “bong hits 4 Jesus” just as TV cameras covering the 2002 Olympic torch were passing by. A school administrator ripped down the banner and suspended the kid. He challenged his suspension, and won before the Ninth Circuit.

The case strikes me as a tricky one. Obviously, school officials need some ability to prohibit disruptive behavior by kids under their care. It presumably wouldn’t be constitutionally protected for a kid to run up and write “bong hits 4 Jesus” on the chalkboard in the middle of math class. But on the other hand, it is appropriate to place some restraints on school officials—who are, after all, agents of the state—to ensure that they don’t abuse their authority to quash the expression of views with which they disagree.

The fundamental problem here is that we’ve got government officials running school systems. There’s no good reason to organize our education system that way. If we had government-run grocery stores, we’d have First Amendment cases about whether grocery store employees could talk about politics in check-out lines. Luckily, we don’t do that. We give poor people food stamps and let them shop at the private grocery store of their choice.

Likewise, if we had widespread school choice, in which schools were run by private individuals and parents decided where to send their children with the help of state-funded vouchers or tax credits, the First Amendment issues in education would be far less acute. Schools would have a variety of policies with regard to political speech in school, and parents would be free to choose a school whose attitudes were in line with their own. Sure, there would still be occasional controversy within a given school about where to draw the line, but those controversies would no longer require the Supreme Court to step in and resolve them.

This is a point we’ve made before: the reason public schools invite so much controversy is that we’ve got a monolithic, one-size-fits-all education system. Decisions about how to run schools (whether the subject is evolution, sex education, prayer in schools, free speech in schools, or anything else) should be up to parents and teachers, not school district bureaucrats or the United States Supreme Court. We all have strong opinions about these subjects (personally, I wouldn’t want to send my kid to a school that taught “intelligent design” or abstinence-only education), but living in a free society means respecting the rights of parents to choose schools whose curricula are consistent with their beliefs and values, just as we allow parents to choose what their kids will eat and whether they go to church.

Governor Blunt wants to spend an additional $500,000 on the Show Me Healthy Women Program:

If approved by the General Assembly, the added funding for the Fiscal Year that begins July 1st would expand the program to an additional 1225 women next year. Women who are eligible for this program must meet specific residency, age, and income guidelines.

The current income limits by household size are here. The current limits are already very generous–women can qualify for this program even if their kids aren’t eligible for the Free and Reduced Lunch Program.

Most of the controversy over Governor Blunt’s proposal focuses on the politics of which clinics should provide the services. We should instead consider whether these services are the best target for public health spending. Mammograms are very inexpensive–usually only about $100–so they cost less than many other medical tests and treatments, such as twice-a-year dental cleaning. And mammograms are not equally important for all women, because genetic and lifestyle factors make some women more at risk for breast cancer than others.

A better way to improve the state’s health care programs would be to issue vouchers that poor families can spend on whatever services they need most. We should make state health care programs more flexible, rather than pay for a few specific services that most people can afford already.

Cheryl Fleming is one unhappy commuter:

Fleming said she won’t ride MetroLink partly because it consumes too much time. "I’m going to drive through other people’s neighborhoods and depreciate their roads," she said.

This quote is from a Post-Dispatch article on Rep. Scott Muschany’s town hall forum on the coming I-64/40 project.  It is always a good thing when public officials open listen to the taxpayers, so I commend Scott for holding this forum.  But Ms. Fleming’s comments jumped out at me.  As Ms. Fleming attempts to intentionally "depreciate" the roads around mid-county, she is going to quickly run into one very hard fact of transportation in St. Louis.  There are many east-west routes, but not a whole lot of north-south routes for her to choose from.  I have heard MoDOT discuss this in planning meetings.  There are enough east-west routes available that the commuter traffic during 64/40’s closure might not be as terrible as some think (no doubt it is going to be very bad.)  However, the north-south traffic situation might be far worse than people realize during construction.  Just take Downtown Clayton for instance.  There are only two ways to leave downtown Clayton going south without first traveling east or west: Hanley and Brentwood. (I am not counting I-170 as it ends just south of Clayton and will be partly closed anyway.)  Take one of these routes out for construction and the other one is going to be a nightmare.  If you move east or west to avoid it, you’ll be stuck in east-west commuter traffic before you even have the change to go south.  Ms. Fleming can drive through neighborhoods to "Depreciate" the roads all she wants, but sooner or later she is going to have to cross the closed I-64, and she can’t do that via neigborhood roads.  At that point MetroLink might look like a good option for her to get to work at her Church. 

Students in the St. Louis Public Schools are protesting at Mayor Slay’s office. They’re worried that their diplomas won’t matter:

Among other items, they asked to review the mayor’s "educational plan" and wanted to know if their scholarships and admissions to colleges were in jeopardy under the cloud of the district possibly losing its accreditation. They also asked that Slay keep his promises regarding their educational futures[...]

A press release issued Thursday was rife with nebulous language. Officials "believe" students from an unaccredited district will have valid diplomas and "should" not be disqualified from admissions or financial aid. "However," the news release continued, "it is possible that students could encounter obstacles in some cases."

Whether or not the district’s unaccredited status causes bureaucratic problems for graduates, these students have been cheated out of an education. For years, the district has been unable to bring up test scores or prepare students for college.

This protest probably won’t have much effect on the district’s accreditation, just like a protest wouldn’t raise students’ reading scores or graduation rates. When a private school doesn’t meet parents’ expectations, they take their tuition dollars elsewhere. Tax credit scholarships would give St. Louis students that same level of empowerment–if the district didn’t address their concerns, they could vote with their feet.

Could this ruling be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for City of St. Louis finances?  Probably not, but having to come up with $24 million is going to be very difficult.  And from the article it sounds like even more may be due by the time this all play out.

The decision could force the city to put $23 million more toward the police pension fund for years not included in the court case, said Police Retirement System lawyer James C. Owen, and possibly millions on top of that for the firefighters’ fund.

It seems every election the City is trying to increase the sales tax here or the property tax there.  The tax increase always seems to pass, and is usually a very small one, but it does not take a genius to realize these small taxes add up.  It appears that the City is either going to have to raise $24 million or cut $24 million.  I know which one I would recommend.  I suspect the easiest way for them to raise the money would be to not roll back tax rates in response to the 2007 assessment.  I don’t know where the City stands in relation to its Hancock cap, and therefore what the forced roll back would be, but if City property vales go up substantially this assessment period, as they did in 2005, reducing the roll back would be one easy way to at least get some of the money.  I am not at all saying they should do this, I am just saying they might try to.  The City should do about 100 other things to cut $24 million first, but that is a topic for a detailed study, not a blog post.

My colleague, Sarah Brodsky, blogged the other day about the recent efforts of Mayor Slay to acquire the authority necessary to approve new charter schools in St. Louis. She correctly pointed out that Charter schools are not an education cure-all, but nonetheless a step in the right direction. Today whilst trolling the blogosphere I happened upon this. Ignore the politico for a second and scroll down to the comments section for a lively debate about the merits of charter schools and the larger issue of SLPS. Here’s some of the objections you’ll find:

1) Charter schools are just another step towards public funding of private (religious) schools

2) Charter schools are poorly run, ineffectual, and potentially corruptable.

3) Mayor Slay is part of some deeper, more devious plot to undermine SLPS and institute some undisclosed master plan of a nefarious nature.

The first two objections may very well prove to be true, but we won’t know until we try. Nonetheless, these kinds of problems are exactly what careful public policy debate is intended to overcome. So, instead of listing objections and deciding a priori that Charter schools are a dead end, perhaps we should try and find ways to preserve the positive aspects of charter schools, like the choices they create for parents and students, and mininmize these potential negative factors. As for that third objection, well, I don’t really trust politicians either…

I can understand the strong feelings people may have towards the democratic values embodied in public schooling, but any fool can see that the system is broken and that it is time for something different. Charter schools may be part of this, and Mayoral involvement, as a recent SMI Study suggested, is crucial. However, by limiting debate to charter v. SLPS schools, we’re essentially shooting ourselves in the foot. At this point, all options should be on the table, and we shouldn’t let conspiracy theories get in the way of doing what’s best for kids.