“Government should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing.”
— Barack Obama, Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies, January 21, 2009

This sort of appreciation for the idea of open and transparent government has been one of the higher points of the new presidency. It’s a principle that we take seriously at the Show-Me Institute, as well. The actions taken by our government officials should be open to public scrutiny. Apparently, however, 81 legislators in Missouri’s House feel that the Sunshine Law should not apply to the state’s General Assembly, while only 79 do. That vote defeated an amendment that would have clarified the existing Sunshine Law.

I have a hard time understanding why it wouldn’t, given that the Sunshine Law applies to all other government officials in Missouri. Some speculate that the measure might have failed because legislators are concerned about the privacy of their constituents, but as this Maneater editorial notes (link via Combest), “Many agencies abide by the Sunshine Law and they still get plenty of calls from constituents.”

The laws surrounding this issue are murky themselves; legislators have different ways of interpreting the Sunshine Law with respect to lawmakers being individually exempted. The movement of House Bill 316 is a step in the right direction, but as this News-Leader editorial remarks, “What’s good for the goose may not be so good for the gander after all.”

On the heels of my post about the excellent lecture series going on in Kansas City, I would be remiss not to mention the upcoming fourth installment of the Show-Me Institute’s Lecture Series on Economic Policy, which is co-hosted by Saint Louis University’s John Cook School of Business.  On Tuesday, May 5, Dr. Caroline Hoxby will deliver a lecture titled “The Promise and Performance of Charter Schools: Drivers of Educational Improvement in the U.S.?”

Dr. Hoxby is the Scott and Donya Bommer Professor of Economics at Stanford University, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, the director of the Economics of Education Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and senior fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. It is extremely exciting that a scholar of her prestige will be presenting here in St. Louis, so I encourage all of you to RSVP today!

This post is belated, but I feel that people should know about the fantastic message offered last week at an event hosted by the Kansas City Public Library and cosponsored by the Show-Me Institute. Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, was the latest speaker to take part in the library’s series on urban education, and her message was inspiring. Put simply, she said that for all the gloom and doom coming from those who preach that racial and socioeconomic background dictates academic potential, Teach for America is demonstrating that bright, motivated, and creative teachers can help children succeed in any setting.

For nearly two decades now, Teach for America has been persuading graduates of the nation’s best universities to commit to spending two years teaching in some of the most challenging classrooms that can be found. These range from urban schools populated almost entirely by the low-income, minority students that some proclaim to be “unteachable” to small rural schools in the Mississippi Delta or on Native American reservations, where students consistently rank among the lowest achievers in academic performance. Regardless of the circumstances, Teach for America’s recruits have demonstrated that a good teacher can make all the difference in the world when it comes to inspiring students to academic success. And, thanks to the experiences they have with the Teach for America program, more than two thirds of the program’s alumni continue to work in the field of education when their two-year commitments expire.

Kansas City has just recently started welcoming Teach for America recruits into its school district, and the preliminary results are very promising. So promising, in fact, that the district is clamoring to get as many of them as possible for the upcoming school year! This is an excellent development, and it gives me hope that the prospects are improving for Kansas City public schools.

This is the part of the session where things happen fast and furious. You might think our job here at the Show-Me Institute is closely related to what happens in Jefferson City, and you would be correct, but only to a point. You can easily run the danger here of focusing too much on the horse race instead of the finish, and the horse race is only interesting to a very small number of people. Plus, there are plenty of people who know the game much better than we do. I’ll put my knowledge of the issues surrounding occupational licensing up against anyone’s, but it you ask me the odds of House Bill X getting out of committee and being successfully meshed in conference committee with Senate Bill Y, well … you get my point.

So, with that in mind, here is a quick summary of things important to me, and to the Show-Me Institute, and how they are going in our beautiful state capital. (Note: That was not sarcasm; I really think Jefferson City is great and the capitol building is wonderful.) Thanks to Combest for most of the following links.

Efforts at reforming the judicial selection process have apparently stalled. This is too bad. I didn’t like the more wholesale changes proposed in the past, but the alterations proposed by Sen. Jim Lembke in the latest bill seemed very reasonable, and would likely have made the system better.

The legislature passed a small but important victory for individual liberty when it approved legislation eliminating the mandate for motorcycle helmet laws. Missourians will be better off if the governor signs this return to liberty.

Distribution of the stimulus funds is still up in the air. The proposed tax refund for Missourians deserves to be seriously debated by the legislature. How is this line, from Missourinet, for a little frying pan / fire commentary?

In another move during floor debate, $12 million dollars was taken from a fund to pay ethanol plant incentives and given to aid the financially strapped Metro transit system in St. Louis.

It is also still in dispute how much we will subject the rest of the Midwest to those “Wake Up to Missouri” ads that air during sitcoms. I say cutting those funds is a smart idea. I don’t imagine that even one person in the history of the world has said, “Hey, I just saw an ad for South Dakota while watching Friends. Let’s go there next month!”

When I checked out the Post-Dispatch’s website today, I fully expected the top stories to include President Barack Obama’s visit yesterday. Nope. Instead, I find a story about Brewster McCracken. an Austin, Texas, mayoral candidate, whose ad (available on YouTube) positively slams the city of St. Louis for losing its turn-of-the-century stature.

The statistic quoted by McCracken, that St. Louis was once the fourth-largest city in the United States, but is no longer among the top 50 cities, likely comes from the same statistical source used in this wikipedia list. There, it is plain as day: Austin: #16 (pop: 743,000); St. Louis: #52 (pop: 356,000). Never .mind the footnote in the list indicating that, like Baltimore, St. Louis is an independent city that is not a part of any county. More relevant is the fact that a city’s true population rarely comprises only the people who reside in its boundaries, but also the people who live and work within the vicinity.

There’s a standard measure of such population groupings, called “metropolitan statistical areas” (MSAs). Here’s a list of the top 25 MSAs and their populations. St. Louis is listed 18th now, with a population of 2.8 million. That’s more like it. Notice that Austin is not in the list? I found it here, listed 48th (2002 population: 1.3 million).

It’s true that the Austin MSA is growing fast, much faster than St. Louis’, but it’s unlikely that it will overtake us soon. What can residents of St. Louis and the state of Missouri do to ensure that we remain significant and grow strong? The Show-Me Institute has definitely covered some of this ground before. Here are some reminders.

Critics of parental choice in education sometimes claim that poor people will be taken advantage of in a market system. In particular, I have heard this in St. Louis regarding proposed charter schools. Choice opponents fear that poor parents won’t be able to tell a good school from a bad one, and that they could be taken in by unscrupulous charters looking for state money.

This article by James Tooley shows how baseless those worries are. Very poor parents in Kenya are able to evaluate the quality of various schools, and to act on their observations. Tooley quotes several parents, who explain their reasons for preferring private schools to government-run schools:

We asked parents to elaborate on what particular features made the private schools preferable. One mother told us: “People thought education is free; it may be free but children do not learn. This makes the quality of education poor and that is why many parents have brought their children back here.”
[...]
Parents, it turned out, actively compared children in the government schools with children in the private schools in their neighborhoods.
[...]
Finally, parents were learning from the experience of those who had moved between the two systems.

As you can see, parents are able to exercise choice in Kenya; I think St. Louisians are capable of doing the same.

Maybe that title is a bit of an exaggeration, given that there are plenty of opportunities for rent seeking in other sectors. But the amount of wealth that goes into the public schools, to pay increasing numbers of people to produce a product that doesn’t improve, is staggering. You’d be hard-pressed to find examples of comparably widespread waste in other industries.

Over at Cato@Liberty, Andrew Coulson estimates the extent of the lost wealth. Here’s his conclusion:

So if we’d managed to ensure that education productivity just stagnated, we’d be saving over $300 billion EVERY YEAR.

This inefficiency is a problem by itself; it also stands in the way of potential reform, which compounds the damage. For example, Susan Graham argues convincingly that extending the school year won’t help students in traditional public schools:

What concerns me most is this—if we are going to keep kids in school for longer days, weeks, and years, exactly what will they be getting more of during that time? More of what they’ve been getting? Because that hasn’t been working all that well, has it?

Long school years are a component of some successful schools, like KIPP charter schools, and various Asian school systems. Unfortunately, this potentially beneficial reform doesn’t stand a chance to work in the U.S., where more school would be more of the same. This line from Tertium Quids about the prospect of real reform sums it up best:

Regrettably, the political class is utterly cowed by that prospect, preferring instead to do whatever is necessary to prop-up the tottering government school monopoly or timidly fiddle at the utmost edge of reform.

This column is a few days old, but it is still poor enough to warrant criticism. The Star’s Steve Penn writes up all the wondrous things that the stimulus package will provide for job seekers in Kansas City. It really is startling how someone can so brazenly promote a political initiative in the newspaper without even remotely considering the other side of the argument.

As he goes through a laundry list of jobs, training, and scholarships that the funding will provide, he does not even consider that the taxes that would need to be raised in order to pay for these programs will make it harder for people to find good jobs in the future. It is like the issues of taxes and debt don’t even matter. The article reads as though money grows on trees, to put it mildly. This really is not surprising, however. Far too few people have any comprehension or concern about the debt being created by this administration and the last.

One part of the article would be hysterical if it weren’t so terrifying (emphasis added): 

 As a result of the new infusion of dollars, the council is prepared to provide 1,500 youths this summer with what are called next-generation jobs. That program will provide participants 16 to 24 with internships with the government and nonprofit sectors.

So, the next generation of jobs to grow our economy will be with the government. That ought to cure all of our financial ills. …

I read this article about the proposed smoking ban in Clayton with dismay. I know, lots of places have smoking bans, and it’s no surprise that Clayton residents want to follow the trend. I take issue with the reasons they give in support of the ban, like this one:

Among the other speakers was Siobhan Jones, a senior at Clayton High School. Jones said that students learn about the health hazards of smoking in school.

“But then we go to the restaurants in Clayton and we are bombarded with secondhand smoke.” she said. She urged the board to “reinforce what we learn in school.”

So, don’t go to those restaurants! This reasoning — that if you learned something is unhealthy in school, then the city needs to “reinforce” what you learned — boggles the mind. It’s also antithetical to the idea of education. Why study health in school, if the government will make all your health decisions for you?

The student has information about the health risks of smoke, but she chooses to go into a smoke-filled restaurant anyway. She wants Clayton to impose a ban so she can enjoy restaurants without facing a choice, and possibly making the less healthy choice. This reluctance to face the consequences of choices is indicative of a worldview that will stop at nothing in requesting government control, and that’s why I find it scary.

I’ve received a request to blog about a Chicago Tribune article, “Arne to Illinois: Shape Up,” specifically this quote from Arne Duncan:

“In too many places, including Illinois, we are lying to children now. [When] we tell a child they are meeting the state standards, the logical implication is that child’s on track to be successful. In too many places, including Illinois, if you are meeting state standards you are barely qualified to graduate from high school and you are totally unqualified to go to a university and graduate,” he said.

I agree that the standards are low and don’t reflect what students need to know for college or life. Many parents are happy when their children do fine on state tests, not realizing that in a few years, their children will be competing with people from China, Singapore, Sweden, and other countries with more rigorous school systems. Another drawback is that school use the low standards as an excuse, saying they can’t teach anything more advanced because they have to prepare students for the (easy) state tests.

I disagree with Duncan’s proposed solution. He wants the federal government to tell the states what to do — imposing his favorite ideas, like a longer school year, with threats like this:

“Illinois has a chance to compete for hundreds of millions of dollars. I would love to see Illinois compete,” Duncan said. “But Illinois has to change its behavior.”

Rather than bringing in the federal government to pick winners, mediocre public schools should get out of the way and let parents act as consumers. Parents with the opportunity have been choosing schools with longer school years, like KIPP schools, long before Duncan decided to impose that reform from above.

You can read my thoughts on Duncan’s charter school remarks here.

Feel free to make more blogging requests in the comments, or to email me with requests at sarah.brodsky@showmeinstitute.org.

Public schools spend a lot of money and face little competition — a rent-seeker’s dream. So, it’s no surprise that the locavores are turning to schools to advance their agenda. The Post-Dispatch reports on schools and local food. Although the article opens with news from the Forsyth School, which is a small private school, it goes on to explain that many large, public districts are attracted to the same idea.

Locavores want schools to give preference to local farmers when purchasing food, even if the farmers charge more than distant suppliers. The 2008 federal Farm Bill allows it, the 2009 economic stimulus pours money into it, and a bill in the Missouri General Assembly would encourage it.

The locavores are acting in the name of “sustainability”:

“Sustainability is at the forefront,” said Kiersten Firquain, owner of Bistro Kids.

It beats me why anyone would think this practice is sustainable. Restricting yourself to food grown in a narrow region puts you at risk of starvation in the event of crop failure. How can a practice be sustainable if it will collapse at the first poor harvest? The locavores can’t even put their money where their mouths are for one year straight, because no food is grown in Missouri’s climate for a significant chunk of the year — during which season children are in school.

Food protectionism doesn’t help food consumers, but it does help the local farmers, who stand to earn a nice profit for doing their job less efficiently than farmers who are far away.

Andrew Coulson of Cato responds to the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data here. The picture is bleak. Students’ skills haven’t changed much since testing began 30-something years ago, but the United States has spent more and more money only to get those same results.

Coulson is absolutely correct about this:

Anyone who points to the slightly higher scores in the early grades as cause for celebration is missing the point.

Nobody hires a fourth-grader. Gains in elementary school achievement are worth something only if they can be sustained until students graduate.