I agree with Justin’s comments on the Wall Street Journal article about Finnish education. One point I’d like to add is that individual teachers have more flexibility in Finland than their counterparts in other countries do:

Finnish teachers pick books and customize lessons as they shape students to national standards. "In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs," says Mr. Schleicher, of the Paris-based OECD, which began the international student test in 2000.

Finnish teachers are encouraged to improve the curriculum and try new things; contrast that with the SLPS’ ambivalent reaction to a math teacher who brought up his students’ MAP scores with a creative approach.

That’s not to say we should adopt all aspects of the Finnish system. I don’t think cheerleading, school bands, and competition to get into colleges are necessarily bad. But it wouldn’t hurt the U.S. public schools to give teachers a little more leeway.

The release of our most recent study, about transportation in MIssouri, was accompanied by a very successful media tour through southwest Missouri. Please check out this interview on KY3 NBC. We also did an interview with KSPR ABC in Springfield, but can’t find a link to it on the station’s website. 

We also did some great radio shows, and we’d like to thank Mark Kinsley and Kara Marxer at AM 1310 KZRG in Joplin for having me on his show along with Len Gilroy from Reason, and Dan Vaughn of KWTO 560 AM in Springfield for hosting us as well. We had an enjoyable, full-hour discussion with Mark and Kara on KZRG. To the many callers we had on KWTO with great questions: Thank you for your calls. To the couple of callers who accused us, more or less, of being part of a conspiracy to destroy our borders and create a North American Union: You are insane.

Finally, we were able to meet with some newspaper editors about the study, including Tony Messenger of the Springfield News-Leader, and we aprpeciated all of their time.

The Wall Street Journal asks this question. Finnish students consistently outperform the rest of the world on international tests, yet Finnish high school students rarely have more than 30 minutes of homework per night. So what’s working?

The article seems to think it’s because Finnish schools focus only on academics. There are no sports teams, band classes, or other extra-curriculars. In addition, Finnish schools “teach to the bottom,” believing that brighter students will learn from helping those that are less fortunate.

How deliciously Eastern-European circa 1984.

I would argue that Finnish students perform well because they have one of the most homogeneous populations in the world. It’s easy to teach to the middle when all of your students are the same race, ethnicity, and socio-economic status. The U.S. may have more variance with results, but diversity is a strength in and of itself. I’m not sure that the Finnish model should be the model we adopt here.

Not that this means we should ignore our international standing. I just mean that we need to control for additional variables.

I don’t want to beat a dead horse, so I will be brief.

While I certainly agree with many of Eric Dixon’s points, direct democracy is not as rosy as he seems to think.

Surely, Mr. Dixon recognizes the potential for fraud with a paid signature-gathering initiative approach. The bill under consideration in the General Assembly does not limit the initiative process. It only outlaws this particular type of signature-gathering technique. How is preventing fraud an assault on democracy?

And the initiative process has been responsible for terrible legislation, particularly in California, where direct democracy is king. California passed Propositions 39 and 98 through teachers’-union-led initiative processes that mandated minimum K–12 education funding (40 percent of the state budget!) and eliminated the supermajority requirement for passing new school bonds. Most tax increases in California have been passed through initiatives, because the state requires a supermajority legislative vote (only three states have such beneficial requirements) for all tax increases. And while many people seem to love Proposition 13 (also an initiative bill), I would argue that the bill did far more to insulate existing homeowners than it did to lower property taxes across the state (making the state impossibly expensive for an outsider like me).

In Missouri, the initiative process also tends to be the path of choice for social conservatives (and progressives) with controversial ballot issues.

Should Missouri get rid of the initiative process? Not necessarily. But we should definitely make sure that the signatures that are collected are valid.

In a study highlighted by the New York Times and every other major news publication in the country, the Pew Center on the States released data today stating that more than one in every 100 Americans is currently incarcerated in some kind of state or local correctional facility. Hearing this information initially made me stop and question that math (it’s actually one in every 99.1 Americans) but then forced me to question whether Missouri faces a similar problem.

According to data made available by the Missouri Department of Corrections, there are 30,685 inmates (as of February 2008) incarcerated in Missouri penitentiaries, along with another 71,000 under some alternate form of corrective state supervision. Thus, with Missouri’s population hovering around 6 million, this means that about 1.6 percent of Missouri’s population is currently restricted by the DOC.

This information means nothing, though, without context. Last summer, the DOC and state officials were quick to brag about how well the state’s new recommended sentence system was doing at lowering the prison population and reducing recidivism, stating that the 2.1-percent drop from 2005 to 2006 was one of the best in the nation. However, since that time, inmate populations have begun to increase yet again, with 2007 seeing a .5-percent increase, according to the Pew Center Study.

More important than the amount of increase, though, is that inmate numbers are increasing at all in a corrections system that, like most others around the country, is becoming more and more overcrowded. Missouri’s 20 penitentiaries currently boast a capacity of 29,988 — a capacity that has already been blown past and is looking to be stretched even thinner in coming years, with the looming threat of recession.

Granted, a half-percentage-point increase in prison population isn’t as bad as that seen by Kentucky (12 percent) or Iowa (8 percent), but Missouri’s lawmakers should be looking for new methods to reduce the prison population itself — especially when, according to the report, Missouri spends only 67 cents on higher education for every dollar it spends on corrections.

I wonder: If that ratio was switched, would more than one problem be solved?

I want to follow up on Justin Hauke’s and David Stokes’ entries about the initiative process. Primarily, I take issue with Justin’s worry that "The initiative process tends to encourage interest-group politics. If a small group of committed people band together, they can pass some pretty stupid laws." While this is certainly true, I have to point out that committed groups of legislators pass laws that are far more stupid, with much greater regularity. So, while the initiative process certainly doesn’t guarantee good results, the real question is how those results stack up to the record of legislators themselves.

And, all things considered, the track record of initiative and referendum throughout the nation is great. For every misguided minimum wage increase and tax hike that voters pass, there are dozens of initiatives that have cut taxes, slashed spending, passed term limits (on legislators who wouldn’t have done it to themselves in a million years), and generally made elected officials more accountable to the public in many ways.

I also disagree with David Stokes’ good-government optimism — the notion that if we don’t like how our elected officials govern us, we can always replace them. Luckily, that’s more true in Missouri than in many other states, thanks to our legislative term limits that help break the stranglehold of incumbency. It’s not enough, though. The initiative process acts as a check on both legislative excess and timidity — and as a check on the initiative process itself (many times, citizens have struck down laws that they later recognize to be bad choices).

I have a background that’s liable to give me my own biases in favor of initiative and referendum laws — after all, I spent years working with the venerable Paul Jacob, who founded Citizens in Charge (not to mention Dane Waters, who I helped to relaunch the Initiative & Referendum Institute website a few years ago, before the group was affiliated with USC; check out the nifty U.S. image map I made). Really, though, I believe the initiative process is valuable not because of personal loyalty to friends and colleagues, but because the data is so convincing.

There tend to be other objections to the initiative process: Don’t wealthy people sneak in from out of town and "trick" local voters to pass something they don’t really want? Well, there may be a lot of spending going on, but there is no evidence that these efforts have tricked anybody. Voters have repeatedly shot down initiatives with the biggest funding. Don’t initiatives stand in contravention of our representative republican form of government? Nope, not at all.

The initiative process is, by far, more a tool for good than for mischief. By all means, petitioners should be held accountable for the signatures they collect, but laws that prohibit out-of-state petitioners or paid signature-gathering are blatant violations of the First Amendment (in conjunction with the Fourteenth), and encroach on the spirit of the Full Faith and Credit Clause, if not its most common interpretation.

I’ll end with the wise words of my pal Paul Jacob, who last year wrote his own take on Missouri officials’ efforts to pare down initiative rights:

Raising the bar to make citizen initiatives more difficult impacts the powerful groups the least. They can spend to overcome such hurdles. It’s the grassroots groups that get cut out.

And that’s no accident.

With so much of politics locked up by powerful career politicians and special interests, the voter initiative process is the one area they just can’t quite control. Voters are liable to think up all manners of reforms — from term limits to state spending caps. And no matter how much special interests spend, voters manage to enact critical reforms.

With government as big as Goliath, the initiative hands David a slingshot.

Dave Stokes has blogged about the gun buyback programs that St. Louis periodically tries. Now Cafe Hayek links to an op-ed by Alex Tabarrok (of Marginal Revolution fame) on the same topic. He explains why gun buybacks don’t deter crime or rid the streets of weapons:

Imagine that instead of guns, the Oakland police decided, for whatever strange reason, to buy back sneakers. The idea of a gun buyback is to reduce the supply of guns in Oakland. Do you think that a sneaker buyback program would reduce the number of people wearing sneakers in Oakland? Of course not.

All that would happen is that people would reach into the back of their closet and sell the police a bunch of old, tired, stinky sneakers.

Gun buybacks won’t reduce the number of guns in Oakland. In fact, buybacks may increase the number of guns in Oakland.

He goes on to explain that gun buyback program make buying new guns more attractive. Once people are done with the gun, they can get some of their money back. So they’ll be more eager to buy guns in the first place. It’s like college textbook buybacks. Students are more willing to buy textbooks if they can sell the books back to the bookstore at the end of the semester.

Just something to keep in mind the next time St. Louis tries it.

The initiative bill Dave Roland commented on several weeks ago has been “perfected” in the House and is nearing passage. Apparently its Senate counterpart is also on the fast track for passage.

Some proponents of direct democracy see the initiative process as an additional check on legislative power. The argument being that if a majority of citizens aren’t happy with the laws their legislature is enacting, they can ban together to pass laws themselves instead — a kind of “citizen’s arrest,” if you will.

I tend to be more cynical and find myself (shockingly) agreeing with Dave Stokes on the topic. The initiative process tends to encourage interest-group politics. If a small group of committed people band together, they can pass some pretty stupid laws. And the current legislation under consideration does nothing to eliminate the initiative process or curtail "democracy."

But maybe democracy’s just a sham, anyway.

A new study, jointly produced by the Show-Me Institute and the Reason Foundation, examines the relatively new funding paradigm of public-private partnerships and how such arrangements may benefit Missouri’s public transportation infrastructure. The study provides an overview of the types of public-private partnerships that can be utilized for transportation projects, including their benefits and best practices, and responses to common concerns. It also explores how public-private partnerships can be used not only to upgrade, modernize, and expand Missouri’s road and bridge network, but also to improve the delivery of transit services.

As cars have become more efficient, the fuel taxes used to fund the state’s highways have leveled off — but the transportation needs of the state have not. Other states have looked to the private sector to provide transportation infrastructure, as a means of augmenting gas taxes. This new study, titled "Missouri’s Changing Transportation Paradigm," takes a detailed look at the transportation issues that Missouri will face in the future, and surveys the ways in which public-private partnerships have been used as a tool to help solve similar problems elsewhere.

The study’s authors — David Stokes, a policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute, Leonard Gilroy, the director of government reform at the Reason Foundation, and Samuel Staley, Ph.D., the director of urban growth and land use policy at the Reason Foundation — outline the many benefits of public-private partnerships. When undertaken properly, these benefits may include: delivery of tomorrow’s infrastructure today, cost savings, greater access to capital, greater efficiency, performance of quality improvements, changing the incentive structure, enhancing risk management, spurring innovation, and increased flexibility.

The full study is a bit of a lengthy read, as such studies go, so of course we’ve produced a four-page policy briefing that condenses the study’s arguments and analysis into a more easily digestible format.

I know what you’re thinking: "Enough, Justin, we’re sick of you already." I know, but this is the last post for today, I promise.

I attended a St. Louis Regional Education Roundtable discussion this morning, about Missouri charter schools. Although most of the discussion was rather pedantic, focused on the nuts and bolts of charter school accountability, a couple of interesting statistics were discussed that I feel compelled to share with you all.

First, a study by the Friedman Foundation, focusing on the cost of failing to reform Missouri’s public education, has an interesting take on the numbers. The author calculates the annual tax revenue that is lost from Missouri high school dropouts whose earnings are precipitously lower than they would be if they had become high school graduates. For example, the median adjusted gross income of a high school graduate in Missouri is $24,996, compared to $15,373 for a high school dropout. Multiplied by the number of high school dropouts, that difference results in lost annual tax revenues ranging from $158–177 million.

The other quick statistic is more anecdotal than a hard fact. One of the panelists at today’s discussion, Cheri Shannon, is the superintendent of University Academy, a charter school in Kansas City. Commenting on the operating efficiency of charter schools, she explained that adopting a new textbook or curriculum in a public school takes five years on average (from her experience as a public school teacher/administrator). In a charter school, though, because of greater operating efficiency, a new curriculum can be adopted in less than one semester if the current model isn’t working.

Food for thought.

But DailyTech reports today that all four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, and RSS) are showing the largest one-year worldwide temperature drop in history.

New research suggests that solar output has a much larger impact on global temperatures than previously thought. Not that one year of data discredits global warming enthusiasts, but if these records can be trusted, the past year’s temperature drop is enough to wipe out nearly 100 years of warming “trends.”

Graph below.

Faced with a record budget surplus this year (on the order of $14.8 billion U.S.), the territory of Hong Kong announced that it will immediately cut or reduce personal and corporate income tax rates.

What’s amazing is how low Hong Kong’s taxes already are. The corporate income tax rate in Hong Kong is currently 17.5 percent, while the highest marginal personal income tax rate is 20 percent. Compare that to the United States’ 35-percent corporate tax rate, the highest in the world among industrialized nations, and top marginal income tax bracket of 35 percent.

Now consider the Missouri case. Missouri imposes an additional 6.25-percent corporate income tax. That means the total corporate tax burden in Missouri is 41.25 percent. And if you happen to be in St. Louis or Kansas City, the tax bill will be 42.25 percent.

Ask yourself this. If you’re an international corporation, where would you choose to open your doors: Missouri or Hong Kong?

Even among the individual states, would you rather open a new factory in Texas (with no corporate or personal income tax) or Missouri?

These are pretty simple answers. This is how we can bring quality jobs to Missouri.