Ed in ‘08 came to St. Louis this week to promote education reform. Follow the link to watch KTVI interview Adam Thibault about the campaign’s goals.

I liked the mention of merit pay and rewarding teacher quality. But the next suggestion — that we create more positions for teachers like "mentors" and "leaders" — doesn’t seem like it could transform the profession as radically as Ed in ‘08 hopes. Some schools already have programs that allow teachers to mentor each other, which is nice but hardly innovative policy. This would be a good time to bring up charter schools, tuition tax credits, or another policy that would allow families to choose schools and allow schools to compete, but once again Ed in ‘08 lets the opportunity slip.

Ed in ‘08 in asking, "How do we improve American education?" and doing a good job of calling attention to this issue. Sadly, the conversation doesn’t go very far because the policy change it throws out for discussion are too cautious. If this were a multiple-choice test, I’d have to answer, "None of the above."

There are two editorials in today’s Wall Street Journal that discuss and highlight the proper solutions (read: abolish needless government regulations) to the worsening health care situation in the United States. Both editorials are spot-on in their assessments, and should be read by all those who are looking for a solution.

The first editorial focuses on the Florida legislature’s unanimous passage of a health care reform bill during this last session. The bill was aimed at kicking the government out of our health care decisions, rather than trying to further regulate and manipulate the free market. Gov. Charlie Crist signed the bill in an effort to combat the notion that health care coverage has to be an all-or-nothing decision. Before this bill was signed, health care coverage plans were littered with state mandates and regulations that often drove up the price of the plan beyond the reach of average individuals. As the author points out, these erstwhile mandates included such "necessary" procedures as the age-old practice of acupuncture, not to mention chiropractic visits (I searched a long time for a clip from the Simpsons episode where Homer sort of becomes a chiropractor, but had no luck). All kidding aside, this is quite an accomplishment for those free-market advocates who think the government would only worsen the problem (jeez, who could think something like that!).

The second editorial also focuses on a bill that is working its way through the legislature in New Jersey (yeah, I know, New Jersey is ahead of Missouri — uh oh) that will allow residents to cross states borders to buy an affordable health care policy. By opening out-of-state markets, it allows competition to flood the New Jersey market, which can only benefit that state’s consumers. Rather than being held hostage by existing health care companies in the state that are able to coordinate and charge higher premiums, consumers will be able to select from a number of approved health care providers (don’t even get me started on what approved means, but that is a topic for a different day) throughout the United States.

Because New Jersey’s average health care costs are almost double the national average, this bill should be welcomed with open arms. Nevertheless, opponents of the bill say policy buyers will only be able to get "bare bones" coverage. That is simply not true. Even if did happen to be true, it is not like policy holders would switch to a lesser plan than they originally had; this would simply allow those who had nothing before to have something.

Let’s all hope this bill succeeds, and Missouri legislators take notice.

Alright, that is all for now. I have to get home so I can make it home for the two-hour "Lost" finale.

A precocious high school student criticizes the accuracy of Missouri MAP test score results in today’s Springfield News-Leader, arguing that such scores are a biased metric of student performance. She explains that because MAP test scores are not perceived by students to have a direct impact on their future academic success (which seems to me to be pretty true), students have little incentive to prepare for it — in some cases, they actively strive to do poorly on purpose in order to reflect negatively on their teachers.

I have no doubt that this student is correct about MAP test student incentives. I remember my own experience with the Texas TAAS test, which I actively worked to either fail or skip and encouraged my peers to do so as well (oh, I was such a punk at age 14).

We can argue about whether standardized tests are an appropriate measure of student learning. Any performance metric will ultimately be biased, though, because learning can’t be summarized in a single number. And although I would disagree that incentives alone are responsible for low MAP test performance scores, I do wholeheartedly agree with the aforementioned student’s statement about the role of incentives in general:

At the root of this problem lies the real challenge for MAP test-takers: motivation. Students do not perform as well as they should on MAP tests because they simply do not care.

Students without incentives have little reason to care about academics in general, not just the MAP test. If a family is stuck in poverty, in a miserable school system, with little opportunity for upward mobility, then it is no surprise to find students there who find little reason to care about their academic performance.

This is one of the reasons to support school choice — to break the barrier of stagnation. If students don’t have an opportunity to learn, and are stuck in a system in which violence rather than learning is the primary concern, even the brightest and most motivated will fall behind. If offering families the opportunity to choose their school helps even one additional student break that cycle, school choice is a success. And think of the benefits to Missouri.

P.S.: By the way, according to our grade report, the author of the piece linked at the beginning of this entry goes to a school (Glendale High School) that is ranked among the top 25 percent of public schools in the state (and even higher among high schools alone).

The Post-Dispatch published a great article today about Confluence Academy. These successful charter schools have seen enrollment skyrocket, so that now nearly 2,300 children attend the three schools. You can see why the St. Louis Public Schools feel so threatened by charters. They’re getting really big:

Confluence is now larger than many public school districts — nearly the size of the Clayton and Affton districts.

The interesting thing about this situation is that nothing is preventing SLPS from running its own Confluence Academy. This is a good time to review Caroline Hoxby’s remarks about charter schools. She points out that charter schools are not doing anything that it’s illegal for public schools to do. Nobody ever said traditional public schools couldn’t imitate the best charters, or pioneer their own innovations. They just don’t do those things.

So if SLPS really wanted to replicate Confluence Academy’s success, they could: teach Spanish to kindergartners; spend extra time on reading; offer more opportunities to study chess, poetry, and African step-dance; and teach a different character value each month. (At Confluence, this month’s value is compassion.) But SLPS isn’t looking for innovations like these, because in the past, its students have had no other school to choose. It didn’t need to attract students and show results.

Maybe SLPS will start trying new things as it faces more competition from charters. But even if it doesn’t, at least families will have options besides SLPS.

To piggyback on Patrick’s earlier post, I stumbled across this interesting chart from the Wall Street Journal last night.

We forget how low fuel taxes are in the United States (particularly in Missouri). The recent rise in energy prices have had a much smaller impact on European wallets, where taxes account for a much larger share of total fuel prices.

This only underscores the need for significant transportation reform as cars become more fuel-efficient and gas tax revenues level off. 

I spotted an interesting article today in the Post-Dispatch discussing frustrations that many parents are having with a school in Arnold, Mo. The article describes how several families had become disillusioned with a particular private school that they had chosen for their children, and how they were going about finding schools that would better meet their children’s needs.

The piece is a nice portrait of school choice in action, where parents recognize that their current school is failing their kids and take the initiative to find a better educational option. These are the choices that relatively affluent people have at their disposal, and it’s a significant part of the reason that children of wealthy families are far more likely than their financially-disadvantaged peers to attain educational success and economic prosperity.

Seeing the way that educational choice benefits these families, we, as a society, should be outraged that so many public school districts flatly refuse to offer even the smallest degree of choice to as many children as possible. Ideally, all families would be able to choose from among both public and private options, but even if private options were not included, shouldn’t students be able to attend any school within their district? After all, these families’ tax dollars are paying for the operation of all the schools in the district, so it’s only fair that they should have the chance to benefit from the best that the district has to offer. Yet even so modest a pro-student reform as this recently drew opposition from the Missouri
Council of School Administrators, the Missouri Council of Administrators of Special Education, the Missouri School Boards’ Association, the Cooperating School Districts of Greater Kansas City, the Missouri National Education Association, the Missouri State Teachers Association, the Kansas City Missouri School District, St. Louis Public Schools, and the Cooperating School Districts of Greater St. Louis.

Because those who have the financial means have
already left the public schools, the only ones left are those without
the the economic and political power to make an impression on the
legislature. And the concerted opposition of the aforementioned groups is what leaves the economically-disadvantaged (and predominantly minority) children of the state at the mercy of schools and districts that, to put it bluntly, aren’t interested in offering them the best opportunity to succeed if that opportunity would mean changing the educational status quo.

Yesterday afternoon, Sen. Kit Bond outlined his energy bill, which somehow faltered in the Senate. It seems that typical politicking got in the way of a bill that could have substantially lowered our rising gas prices. Shocking. I know. This bill would have helped combat the ridiculously high gas prices in several different ways. It called for environmentally friendly drilling in places such as Alaska and oil shale deposits in the Rocky Mountains, which would have relieved some of our dependence on foreign oil while increasing the supply. This spike in gas prices may be attributable partly to speculating, but mostly to simple economics. I don’t care how many econ courses I take, it all comes down to supply and demand. With the increase in world demand, something needs to be done to increase supply.

Sen. Bond also called for "Streamlining the oil refinery permitting process, without relaxing any requirements." Hooray! I am OK with taking baby steps to get the the free market, as long as we get there. The U.S. government has put up so many regulations, it has become nearly impossible to build refineries. Hopefully, this "streamlining" can lead to some deregulation, and we can see a substantial drop in gas prices. All in all, I think Sen. Bond summed it up best when criticizing a colleague who actually suggested the oil industry be nationalized (no joke, albeit that is funny):

"I can tell you, you don’t want the government running energy. The free
market may not be perfect, but it doesn’t screw things up like the
government does."

Oh, and of course we can talk about the taxation issue as well, but Justin has already covered that aspect.

In case you haven’t read it, I highly recommend David Boaz’s (of the Cato Institute) op-ed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal about the hypocrisy of the current presidential nominees’ calls for Americans to "do something noble" like "public service":

The real issue is that Messrs. Obama and McCain are telling us Americans that our normal lives are not good enough, that pursuing our own happiness is "self-indulgence," that building a business is "chasing after our money culture," that working to provide a better life for our families is a "narrow concern."

They’re wrong. Every human life counts. Your life counts. You have a right to live it as you choose, to follow your bliss. You have a right to seek satisfaction in accomplishment. And if you chase after the almighty dollar, you just might find that you are led, as if by an invisible hand, to do things that improve the lives of others.

Who is John Galt?

Let me preface this post by saying that I appreciate the attention that Henry Waters, publisher of the Columbia Daily Tribune, pays to educational matters. He has written several columns in the past with which I wholeheartedly agree. But he missed the mark in a recent column advocating that public schools should be given responsibility for providing universal preschool.

While there is some evidence (thanks to Janese Heavin for the links) suggesting that preschool might be useful in helping low-income and minority students keep pace with more well-to-do classmates, it would be a terrible idea to make preschool mandatory — especially if the task is given to public schools. The communities that would seem to benefit most from exposure to preschooling live predominantly in Missouri’s urban centers. It is no secret that the public schools in those areas are at the same time among the most expensive and the least effective in the state. So why would Mr. Waters ever want to give failing school districts such as Kansas City’s or St. Louis’ even more control over students’ lives?

While not perfect, a far better solution was proposed this past legislative session by state Senator Jeff Smith, whose bill would have granted scholarships for disadvantaged children in unaccredited or provisionally accredited school districts to attend preschool at licensed facilities, at least half of which would not be operated by public schools. Senator Smith’s bill did not go into detail about the degree of choice that parents would have under his program, but the idea has a lot of promise if it could be properly structured.

Detailed commentary will follow, but I wanted to get Mayor Funkhouser’s new regional Kansas City transit plan up on our blog. Here is the Kansas City Star’s story. Here is some typical boosterism. Here is some blunt critisicm. Here is the Show-Me Institute’s contribution to the discussion. I do like how the mayor’s plan includes some less expensive and efficient parts, like bus–rapid tranit, express buses, and even commuter rail, assuming there is enough demand for the commuter rail. But $600 million for 11 miles of light rail sounds low, considering it cost St. Louis that same amount to do just seven miles from 2004 to 2006 — although that included two miles with significant tunnelling. As I said, much more analysis of this to come.

Missourinet covers the continuing drama of the pre-need funeral scandals (seriously, what a bizarre thing for a scandal). It seems the summer will be spent in a series of investigative hearings designed to disentangle the issue:

The state has gotten an agreement with National Prearranged Services to suspend all sales of pre-need contracts in Missouri….and has gotten a consent order with the parent company, Lincoln Memorial Life, to stop manipulating the trust funds without telling those buying the plans.

For a quick refresher, prepaid funerals allow households to set aside money for funeral expenses with an insurance broker. Brokers are then legally required to set aside the money in a trust fund, but they maintain rights to 20 percent of the total amount, in the event of cancellation or other changes. Apparently, unscrupulous insurers haven’t been doing their duty and have skipped town with large sums of their clients’ funds. In April, Nick, our former-intern-turned-law-student, argued:

While we advocate free-market solutions here at the Show-Me Institute that shy away from extensive government interference, I don’t think anyone can reasonably claim that a market with a definite and defined end is truly free, and I hope stronger legislation can be put in place to protect consumers of these unique services.

First of all, better laws aren’t the problem. Enforcing the existing laws is the problem. Whenever a scandal erupts, the gut reaction is to legislate because at least it creates the pretense of doing “something.” But if insurers broke the existing laws, what makes anyone think that they won’t do the same thing with news laws? Not only will we face the same problem, but we’ll invite greater government intrusion into our lives.

Second of all, prepaid funerals are a colossally stupid idea. You could just set aside $1,000 in a savings account for 40 years and have more than enough to pay for a funeral. Plus, you’d have the freedom to do whatever you wanted with that money, without penalty, in the event that you decided not to use it for a funeral. Unless there’s some kind of great tax benefit or significant funeral discount for a prepaid plan, I see no reason not to use a savings account instead. Really, I think David said it best in one of his previous posts:

If agreements are not being honored, then the companies should be prosecuted. But that should not serve as a jumping-off point for more laws or more control. [...]

Just because something may be a bad deal [...] should not automatically be a reason for the government to jump in to protect us from ourselves. This is the type of reaction that leads to the ever-expanding role of government in our lives.

Indeed.

Check out this new website.  The Missouri Foundation for Health set it up to educate people about insurance coverage and collect ideas for policy solutions.

Giving people information about health care options is a great idea. And this website is easy to navigate, and has lots of information. Unfortunately, I don’t think it will be as effective as it should be because it’s more focused on insurance than on health care. The question we should be asking is: Can everyone pay for health care? (There are different ways to pay for care, like using a regular savings account, an HSA, catastrophic insurance coverage, traditional insurance, or some combination of the above.) Instead, this website asks, "Is everyone enrolled in a traditional insurance plan?" and then panics when the answer is no, without considering whether that kind of plan would be appropriate for everyone. Surely, we can all agree that a billionaire doesn’t need traditional insurance to cover routine check-ups, even though he or she might want long-term care insurance or a designated savings account.

This feedback form offers a humorous illustration of the website’s misplaced priorities. Along with basic information like your name, zip code, and email address, you’re supposed to check off whether you are "insured" or "uninsured." But without detailed information about someone’s financial and medical situation, a simple yes-or-no answer to to the "Are you insured?" question doesn’t mean very much.