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.

The city of Arnold (which has graced this forum before for alternate reasons) is now the first municipality in Missouri to face a federal lawsuit regarding the legality of the red-light cameras that it has installed at certain busy intersections. The lawsuit, according to an article in the Post-Dispatch, questions the constitutionality of the cameras based on the presumption of guilt that they impose on the owners of automobiles that are photographed:

The ordinance forces you to come forward and "basically declare your
innocence," says Washington University law school professor Peter Joy, who reviewed the suit at the request of the Post-Dispatch.

"In essence, it sort of compels you to finger your wife or child or someone else you loaned the car to," he said.

Additionally, the plaintiff in the suit has alleged that the city of Arnold has gone as far as committing mail fraud by attempting to extort money from innocent citizens victimized by the cameras.

With red-light cameras spreading as a method of traffic control (the attorney for the plaintiff indicated that he may be interested in expanding the lawsuit to include more of the 20 communities in Missouri and Illinois that use red-light cameras) it will be interesting to track the progress of this case on a federal level. In line with some opinions expressed here before, the plaintiffs are to be commended for attempting to highlight an injustice that Missouri municipalities were presumably planning on expanding until someone called them on it, but it will be interesting to see if their line of reasoning stands up inside the Eagleton.

Either way, it gives me some ammunition with which to complain the next time I get angry at the "No Right on Red" sign at Delmar and Skinker.

Thanks, Combest, for linking to an article about this excellent legislation:

Sen. Luann Ridgeway, R-Smithville, sponsored a bill to give the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence the authority to certify professional people looking for careers in education in Missouri. [...]

Through ABCTE, a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., and funded through federal grants, people can obtain a teaching certificate without having a bachelor’s degree in education.

This alternative certification program could help relieve teacher shortages at the middle-school and high-school levels. (ABCTE doesn’t certify elementary or special-education teachers.) That would be a big help to the districts that currently struggle to fill math and science positions.

This might not be as big as the initiative in California, but it’s a step in the right direction.

USA Today has a new poll out detailing today’s sad state of educational affairs.

Educators have proudly pointed out that while U.S. math and science scores have continued to slide, a record number of students are taking and excelling in college-level advanced placement history and literature courses. The defense is that students are at least performing well in these critical subject.

Yet according to the USA Today poll of 1,200 17-year old students:

• 43% knew the Civil War was fought between 1850 and 1900.
• 52% could identify the theme of 1984.
• 51% knew that the controversy surrounding Sen. Joseph McCarthy focused on communism.

In all, students earned a C in history and an F in literature.

How can fewer than half of graduating seniors not be able to pinpoint a 50-year window in which the Civil War was fought? That is absolutely inexcusable.

Here’s another situation in which economists are wrong and your vote does count. You might someday want to run for office:

Public records show Olivo, who is now running for Congress, has never voted in an election, in Missouri or elsewhere. [...]

"I got caught up in the wave of apathy that has affected many of my generation," Olivo, 31, said. "I’m the first to admit that I was wrong for not voting."

Edspresso links to an article in the Washington Post about how to choose the best school for your child. Anybody who thinks there’s no problem with the public education system needs to take a look. The first recommendation is to buy a really, really expensive house. It doesn’t get any more encouraging as you read on. Elite high schools don’t guarantee admission to the Ivy League. Middle schools are universally bad. And as for elementary school, just close your eyes and let your finger fall on a map, because it doesn’t matter anyway:

All the studies show that you are going to have much more influence over your child’s academic achievement through sixth grade than the elementary school you choose. So as long as the school is safe and you like it, it really doesn’t matter whether its test scores are not the highest.

There’s some sensible advice here — for example, talk to other parents, and don’t stress out if your kids don’t get into the top magnet school — but the article reveals the difficult situation many parents find themselves in. If you don’t have a lot of money, you don’t have much choice about where your kids go to school. Not everyone has the financial means to follow that all-important first step.

Even for those who can afford the priciest neighborhoods or the steepest tuition, a largely monopolistic education market doesn’t offer them many attractive choices. Middle schools are all bad? Elementary schools are irrelevant? No, of course not. But in the public system, they all look about the same to a newcomer. They just come in neighborhoods with different price tags. How can you tell if you’re getting the best sixth-grade teacher or the most enthusiastic principal? It’s a gamble. There are some charter schools and private schools that specialize, that have well-defined goals, and that attract parents. But they’re vastly outnumbered by the plain-vanilla public schools.

Speaking of vanilla, and because I want to prove that I have nothing against ice cream, here’s an analogy: Suppose you went to an ice cream store, and you weren’t sure which flavor of ice cream to buy. Would you throw up your hands and say, "Well, it doesn’t matter which flavor I buy, because studies show that ice cream flavor has little effect in the long run," or, "I don’t care whether I get chocolate brownie or chocolate fudge, because chocolates are all bad?" Or maybe you’d think, "Whatever flavor I get, I’m fine because this is an expensive neighborhood." I hope not. You’d probably think about which flavors you’ve personally liked in the past, and maybe you’d ask which ones most other customers prefer. In other words, you’d make a choice.

Parents who can choose consider what their kids are interested in and how they learn best. They read school publications and they ask which schools retain satisfied families. If they try a school but find it’s not the best for them, they can switch schools without hiring a U-Haul truck.

But those are the lucky few — for now. Parental choice policies could give that freedom to all parents. That would be good, because matching students with the schools where they’ll learn best is much more important than matching people with ice cream flavors.

Today’s Kansas City Star has a very good and detailed look at Kansas City’s projected budget problems. I believe it was Harry Truman, fittingly enough, who said something along the lines of how he never saw a budget that could not be cut. With that in mind, I will give credit to the mayor for his quote at the end of the article:

Funkhouser said the city can’t duck the budget problem or it will only get worse next year.

“You can’t wait for a better time,” he said. “The consequences of not acting will be worse than the consequences of acting.”

So now that I see the mayor at least intends to address the issue head-on, let’s discuss the suggestions as laid out by the article (all bullet points below are direct quotes from the article, and all emphasis is added):

• Cutting the $2 million city contribution to the Truman Sports Complex or subsidies to other regional assets such as Liberty Memorial, Starlight Theater and the zoo. Funkhouser says he’s not advocating a stadium cut in the next budget, but he does think regional assets should be funded regionally.

Why doesn’t Kansas City consider a zoo-museum taxing district, along the lines of what Saint Louis has, to fund these things regionally? That is one thing that works well here.

• Closing the city jail, saving about $4.8 million, or privatizing the service to save part of that amount.

This deserves careful consideration. In Saint Louis County, the privatization of the jail’s pharmacy services has worked well, but the use of entirely privatized prisons for Missouri has not fared as well. I am referring here to the infamous video of Missouri convicts getting the crap beaten out of them by guards in a Texas private prison, for no reason except to torment the prisoners. And trust me, I am not one to normally side with the prisoners, but those scenes were terrible.

• Cutting part of the $2 million that Kansas City spends on bulky-item pickup.

Bulk pickup is highly overrated. It’s easy enough to borrow a friend’s truck or just hire a hauler. This sounds like a good cut to me.

• Reducing spending on city planning services and things like dangerous-building demolition.

Amen to the first part. Government central planning is a waste of time and money on anything beyond the basic levels of zoning, and similar areas. If anyone in Kansas City government is working feverishly at "transforming Kansas City into (insert hyperbole here)," which they are, that can be cut out. Markets and investors should be making these decisions — not government planners who can’t even be trusted to know what it is that they don’t know. The dangerous-building demolition should be kept in full, though. Those abandoned places that nobody except the curious ever go can be dangerous.

• Reducing spending on youth initiatives or neighborhood mediation efforts, which could save about $1 million.

I have to guess there are both things that need to be maintained in full and some options for cuts in this list, but I can’t say which are which without seeing more information.

• Reducing spending in the City Council and mayor’s offices.

I am sure there is plenty of opportunity for cuts here, but in the end it would probably add up to a small portion of the projected deficit. It should still be done, though. The mayor stated in the article that the Council needed more legislative analysts, rather than fewer. If the Council can’t trust the information from its own city manager, who is supposed to be non-partisan and unbiased, and needs more legislative analysts, that is a problem with the city manager — not a legitimate call to grow staff. (Please note, I said "If"; I am not making a judgment in the dispute between the mayor and the city manager.)

• Laying off up to 100 people, which could save about $5 million. Some council members recoiled at that idea. Funkhouser and Ford said they want to streamline city departments and reduce the number of middle managers, but focus more on empty positions than actual people.

We finally get to the real solution. Way too many people in government think there is some sort of right to a government job. This question should really be asked before even talking about money and budgets. First of all, do the government workers you have all work solid 40-hour weeks of actual work? If they don’t — and there probably isn’t one government in the world where they do — then many of them should be let go. I am very familiar with the history and role of political machines in government, and I would be stunned if a city such as Kansas City did not have far more city employees on the payroll than are actually needed. Some councilmembers want to protect their own employees first, whether or not they are needed or can be afforded. That is not surprising, but it is exactly the type of governance that gets a city into a budget problem in the first place.

Anytime you can put "Municipal League" and "TIF Commissions" in the same headline, you know you have an exciting story! (To me, at least, which may say a lot about me.) Today’s Post-Dispatch has the story of a recently filed lawsuit challenging the new state law that puts more authority for the use of TIFs in the hands of a countywide commission, rather than municipal commissions. I can see you are getting more interested with each passing word. …

As they are currently established, TIF commissions are dominated by representatives of the municipality the TIF is proposed for, people who generally only care about that particular municipality. However, the tax decisions they make affect entities beyond municipal borders. I strongly feel that having a county commission make these decisions, while taking into consideration the effects the TIF will have on the county as a whole, is a much better way to debate and consider tax-increment financing.

The municipalities are screaming that this is an infringement on their rights, as though the residents of a certain city are not also residents of the county, too. They claim (emphasis added):

The suit noted the law adds the county commissions to municipal panels, opening the door to legal challenges to projects with tax increment financing. Investors would not put money into such projects because the of the risk of suits, the plaintiffs say.

So investors might not finance projects that get to kick people out of their homes and are guaranteed to succeed by the government because they don’t have to pay the taxes other businesses pay?  That would really be terrible. …

Almost all abuses of TIFs and eminent domain (which are related, but not the same thing) have occurred at the municipal level — particularly in St. Louis County. The record of municipalities making responsible decisions about the use of TIFs does not generate confidence. I believe that the lawsuit has at heart the interests of municipal government and developers — not the interests of residents of St. Louis County. As such, I hope it is thrown out of court and County Executive Dooley gets to appoint a countywide TIF commission that has final say on ALL TIF proposals within the county.

It’s good to be back blogging after some time focusing on other things here at Show-Me!

After last night’s Academy Awards, it feels appropriate to reiterate a story closely related to the eventual Best Picture Winner With an Incomprehensible Ending That I Understood But Obviously Didn’t Appreciate.

According to an article printed earlier this month in the Riverfront Times, the Missouri Department of Conservation unanimously approved a proposal that would allow hunters to use high-caliber air-powered rifles (not unlike the weapon used by a certain antagonist) at the start of regular-weapon deer season on November 15.

These weapons (which must be powered by compressed air or a hand pump with a minimum of a .40 caliber) came at the request of a small group of enthusiastic hunters whose logic led one member of the regulatory committee to comment on the nature of the weapons:

"These firearms are not Daisy air rifles. They are high-powered,
large-caliber, generally very expensive firearms that carry the
foot-pounds of energy necessary to take down large game."

Although I realize that any extension of firearm legalization is likely to lead to an outcry from someone, I feel that anyone who wants to use an expensive (retail prices for the rifles start at around $500), short-range (about a quarter of that of a traditional rifle) and slow-loading weapon to make their hunting experience more difficult can go right ahead. After all, who are we to stop the Missouri Outdoorsman from making his hunt as difficult as that faced by Lewis & Clark?

Just as long as we keep them away from certain people.

Over at Cato-at-Liberty, Andrew J. Coulson tells it like it is:

Trying to “fix” the education being provided by a monopoly school system is like trying to “fix” a command economy. While occasional improvements will certainly be possible, ultimately, the effort is doomed. Even when excellent, proven methods or curricula are adopted in state schools, the incentive structure of the system provides no support for retaining  them.

Coulson mentions old vs. new math debates and tells the story of Jaime Escalante, who developed a highly effective math curriculum and was kicked out of his school. There are good curricula out there, but public schools have little incentive to find and use the best ones.

Read the whole thing!

Margaret Spellings spoke about alternative teacher certification in Jefferson City yesterday:

She pointed to federal programs such as Teach for America to recruit more college students and alternative certifications for people with other careers who want become teachers.

"We’re going to have to figure out how to recruit mid-career professionals into our classrooms," Spellings said.

Both Teach for America and alternative certification are good ideas, but I think alternative certification has the potential to be more effective. Teach for America is popular, but graduates generally teach for just a year or two and then go on to something else. Whereas, if you help people switch careers — say, from working as a scientist in a lab to teaching high school science — they may stay in their new career for 15 or 20 years. This could be a particularly attractive option for older people who want to cut down on their work hours but don’t want to retire completely.

However, alternative teacher certification is much more controversial than Teach for America. I’m not sure why; neither program requires extensive education coursework. But many people seem to think that older people need more theoretical training than recent graduates. The NEA criticized Spellings’ alternative teacher certification idea, not her mention of Teach for America:

Chris Guinther, Missouri president for the National Education Association, said the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence checks whether people know a subject, not whether they can teach it.

"As we hold our students to higher standards, it seems incongruous that we’re willing to lower teacher standards," said Guinther.

Here’s a video clip about a plan to prevent new charter schools from opening in St. Louis. The proposal would allow only charter schools sponsored by the city or state boards of education. That would mean no KIPP schools and no new versions of Lift for Life. The clip includes a quote from Eric Hanushek, who recently spoke at a seminar cosponsored by the Show-Me Institute. Hanushek suggests that the district stop worrying about charters and focus on spending its money more efficiently.

SLPS’s response to Hanushek’s criticism is that they’re working on making the traditional public schools "more attractive." That’s a positive step — and one that I’m sure was prompted by the large numbers of students leaving the district every year. Limiting new charter schools would remove this incentive for SLPS to try to appeal to parents.

“Public, four-year colleges (possibly because of the restraints of taxpayer financing or larger student bodies) have not made the same effort to reduce the financial burden of higher education for low- to middle-income families.”

I don’t know what planet my colleague is from, but if he honestly thinks that public university tuition isn’t heavily subsidized by taxpayers already then he has spent way too many years in the ivory halls of Washington University.

A college education is just about the safest investment one can make. It essentially guarantees that you’ll recoup your initial costs through higher lifetime earnings.

Nick’s argument would be equivalent to claiming that Fannie Mae hasn’t done enough for middle-class home owners because it hasn’t "given away homes for free."

Maybe it’s because a wintry mix has shut down every major St. Louis roadway, or maybe it’s because I’m still disappointed by a scholarship offer from a legal institution I’m going to elect not to identify, but yesterday seemed like the single biggest day of collegiate financial news in years, and it would be remiss of me not to comment.

We start, as all things should, with the alma mater: Washington University announced yesterday that it would be eliminating loan programs for students whose families annually earn less than $60,000. Financial aid for these students will instead come in the form of University-sponsored grants that will not have to be repaid.

However, this news was upstaged later in the day as the little junior college that could, Stanford University, announced that it would eliminate tuition entirely for all students whose families earned less than $100,000 a year (students would, however, still have to contribute on their own behalf through work-study programs).

Both of these programs are designed to ease the financial burden of a top-tier education so that such an education is accessible for all those who desire it and have proved themselves worthy. While tuition breaks and loan forgiveness may not reach the benefit of Yale’s financial aid extension to undergraduates whose families make up to $200,000 annually, they do make college considerably more affordable to the middle and lower classes of American society. However, one glaring truth comes to light when I look at these programs from an objective standpoint: All of these universities are private and exorbitantly wealthy (Wash U’s endowment is $4.4 billion, Stanford’s is $12.4 billion, and Yale’s hovers around $15 billion).

So why can’t public universities compete?

Public, four-year colleges (possibly because of the restraints of taxpayer financing or larger student bodies) have not made the same effort to reduce the financial burden of higher education for low- to middle-income families. Granted, resident tuition at the University of Missouri is a quarter of that at Wash U, but that doesn’t mean that Mizzou isn’t competing to attract the same bright students in every round of the admissions process. Why can’t state educational institutions, which don’t exactly have measly endowments themselves (MU’s stands at $511 million), offer breaks on loans?

The immediate answer seems to be that the money just isn’t there when taxpayers are involved, but I’m not entirely sure I believe that. Even if public universities simply replaced loans with grants, as Wash U did, there is significant research to suggest that such an investment in human capital eventually yields higher returns for the state economy itself. After all, both loans and grants eventually have to get paid back somehow, and students with "scholarships" have been shown to be more likely to complete degrees and contribute to boosting the economy of the states where their universities were located.

If nothing else, there is a hope that the competition of the free market could help advance this claim. The sooner that state institutions realize they are losing elite middle- and lower-class students to private universities, the sooner they will adapt their financial aid packages to extend offers that turn out better for all those involved.

Every major city that has any problem with homelessness (which, I think, is all of them) realizes that steps must be taken to curb the burden of panhandlers. However, as reported through the Post-Dispatch this morning, St. Louis government officials are taking an unusual approach to correcting the problem in the city’s Central West End.

The St. Louis Treasurer and "parking czar" has donated a decommissioned and refurbished parking meter to the area in an effort to reduce begging. The idea is that rather than give change to the homeless, visitors to one of the fine establishments surrounding the intersection of Maryland and Euclid will drop their change into a meter (if for no other reason to remind themselves that they just waited 35 minutes to find a meter they were required to throw change into).

The funds are intended to help aid homeless service agencies, but more importantly, the presence of the meter will "discourage panhandling by providing some competition for change, while
at the same time giving folks on [sic] alternative route for their altruism."

Really? Competition is going to make beggars go away? I’m aware of the fact that the meter will be an alternative target for quarters, but I really hope no one at city hall thinks that its presence will reduce panhandling. As a matter of fact, if I were a beggar, I’d be even more obnoxious because I’d know if I didn’t annoy you enough, you’d give those coins to an inanimate object. Better yet, I’d do it while standing right next to the meter, so that any joy you get from giving is canceled out by the guilt of not giving to me.

I can see it now: an anti-panhandling meter surrounded by 15 panhandlers. Great idea.

I think my last post failed to convey the drama and danger inherent in a Segway ride through Forest Park. That clip made the Segway riders look happy, innocent — like ordinary people just having fun in the park, who didn’t deserve to be heavily taxed. But with appropriate background music and cinematography, the true nature of Segways in Forest Park is revealed:

Look at these people wreaking havoc in Forest Park with their Segways:

The aldermen would probably be concerned, but I think the Segway riders are just having a good time. You can see that the pedestrian is unharmed.

And over at Urban Review St. Louis, there’s a discussion of the proposed license. In the comments people link to statistics about Segways’ impact on the environment. It turns out they’re much more fuel-efficient than lots of other vehicles people drive around.

Maybe I’m a little late in getting this out, but last week the Miller-Coors merger talks focused on a neutral headquarters for the new conglomerate as the company hopes to take on St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch, which controls just under half of the domestic beer market.

Perhaps Blog KC says it best when they comment that “such a move would give Missouri a monopoly on sh[!#$@] yellow beer.”

Not to mention one more thing to fight about.

Sunday’s Post-Dispatch featured an article reporting that Metro, with the aid of its newly contracted security firm The Wackenhut Corp., will be increasing security on St. Louis’ MetroLink light-rail system. The expanded security force will not just be manpower-based, though, because Wackenhut plans to arm 80 percent of its security personnel in order to better protect the recent influx of riders the Highway 40 shutdown has brought to the 37-station system.

Although MetroLink has had a better security record than other similar transit systems around the country, trains do pass through areas where crime has been a problem, and a number of incidents have been reported since the line expanded in 2006. Metro’s response to the security concerns of citizens could be seen as a reaction to the crime concerns that were first mentioned by Randal O’Toole (and then  were later grossly overexamined by members of the news media).

Without a doubt, a larger and better-armed security force will make riders feel safer, but will this feeling of security be worth $13.1 million in taxpayer money?

On a lighter note, the New York Times has a fun piece up on the unexpectedly correct use of the semicolon in recent subway advertisements. The grammarian in me couldn’t help but share and silently wish that I had a mastery of that most elusive part of punctuation.