The 97th Missouri General Assembly did nothing about school choice. However, the legislature was not completely inactive regarding education issues. On the topic of teacher tenure reform, for instance, the legislative body looked much like Bill Murray’s character in the 1991 film, “What About Bob?”— taking baby steps.

As Dr. Leo Marvin (Richard Dreyfus’ character) tells Bob about baby steps, “It means setting small, reasonable goals for yourself. One day at a time, one tiny step at a time — doable, accomplishable goals.”

Bringing Saint Louis’ tenure laws in line with the rest of the state was a very “doable, accomplishable goal.”

As we have documented, the laws governing teacher tenure were much more restrictive in Saint Louis than they were in the rest of the state. In a presentation at the Show-Me Institute, Saint Louis Public Schools Superintendent Kelvin Adams said it took 100 days to remove a low-performing teacher. Throughout the rest of the state, administrators only have to provide teachers 30 days to improve.

I am glad that the legislature was able to achieve this baby step in the right direction. As a result, ineffective teachers will be removed from Saint Louis classrooms more rapidly. Yet, in the grand scheme of things, this is a very modest improvement, especially when much more could have been accomplished.

Twice, teacher tenure reform bills were defeated on the House floor. In my opinion, the bills simply went too far —replacing the current teacher tenure mandates with new prescriptive mandates for teacher evaluations.

We do not need overly prescribed teacher evaluations any more than we need antiquated tenure laws. What we need are school leaders who actually have the power to lead.

So instead of celebrating true tenure reform, we are left to celebrate the baby step of Saint Louis teacher tenure laws falling in line with the rest of the state. Baby Steps.

Do you like riddles? Here is one for you: What is comprised of 197 members, is active for approximately five months, and is full of inertia? If you answered the Missouri General Assembly regarding education legislation, give yourself a gold star. The state’s legislative body just concluded the general session. In terms of education reform, they achieved very little.

The goal of the legislature should be to improve educational options for Missourians. They could accomplish this with meaningful school choice legislation.

As I noted in my recent essay, “Public Dollars, Private Schools: Examining the Options in Missouri,” greater school choice would be a net positive for Missourians. School choice puts the power back into the hands of the parents and it can save taxpayers money.

This year, however, the topic of school choice was rarely discussed in the House or Senate halls. Few school choice bills were even proposed, and the ones that were rarely received much attention.

A bill that would have fixed many of the problems in the current inter-district school transfer law never even received a hearing in the House Education Committee. The bill would have made it possible for many students to escape failing schools.

A bill that would have made it possible for students to enroll in a virtual course from another district or charter school never made it out of either the House or the Senate.

Even a bill targeted at helping autistic children failed to gain traction for most of the legislative session. It was finally folded into a conference committee substitute at the 11th hour. If the governor signs Bryce’s Law, it will establish a small, targeted scholarship program for students with special needs on the autistic spectrum.

It took eight years of continually pushing for Bryce’s Law to be passed — a small, targeted school choice program.

So here is another riddle: When will the legislature realize that all students could benefit from increased educational options? That riddle is truly puzzling.

Last night, I conducted an experiment to test the impact of the Common Core State Standards. When my kids were asleep, I placed a copy of the standards under their pillows. I was hopeful that they would be “college- and career-ready” when they woke up, but to my dismay, they had not learned anything from the standards.

You might not be too surprised about the results of my experiment because you know, as do I, that standards do not teach kids; parents and teachers teach kids. That is part of the reason that state and national standards have had very little effect in improving student achievement.

For standards to have any effect, they have to change the behavior of teachers. The only way to accomplish that is with heavy-handed government coercion and intrusion into school systems through test-based accountability. These accountability systems restrict the freedom of local schools and teachers to effectively meet the needs of their unique students.

It is not that we should not have standards, it is that one set of standards centrally imposed does more harm than good. Absent state or national standards, there would still be rigorous content standards for students. As Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute writes, “standards are ubiquitous in free markets.”

Proponents of state or national standards might say “math is math, it shouldn’t matter where you learn it.” That is true in the sense that 2 + 2 always equals 4. But it is not true in the sense that we have discovered the exact right sequence or method of teaching math. On this, there is considerable disagreement.

In a free market, schools would still have standards; officials would just have more latitude to choose the standards for their school. Parents would also have more options in a free market to choose the school that they believe is the best fit for them. Choice is the best method of accountability.

McCluskey sums up the argument very well: “Only a free market can produce the mix of high standards, accountability, and flexibility that is essential to achieving optimal educational outcomes.”

We need to stop trying to standardize education and start trying to personalize education.

This past weekend, I was featured prominently in a story by Elisa Crouch of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about the Common Core State Standards.

Crouch summarized my position on content standards like this: “Shuls of the Show-Me Institute would prefer parents and schools to set their own standards, rather than states.” She also quoted me as saying, “Ultimately, there’s absolutely no evidence that content standards improve education.” Both of these are true, but they deserve a little more explanation. In this post, I will address the evidence on content standards.

Proponents of national standards often point to some of the top-performing countries and note that they have national standards. These proponents often fail to point out that some countries that perform better than us do not have national standards and many who perform worse than us do have national standards. We could just as easily point to those countries at the bottom and say, “look, national standards don’t work.”

Even at the state level, the evidence that rigorous standards improve student achievement is very weak. The Fordham Institute, one of the biggest supporters of the Common Core, has issued grades for state standards for some time now. Using these grades, the Brookings Institution examined the correlation between the rigor of each state’s standards and performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The authors concluded that there is no relationship between standards and performance. Moreover, they predict that the Common Core will have very little impact on student achievement:

What effect will the Common Core have on national achievement? The analysis presented here suggests very little impact. The quality of the Common Core standards is currently being hotly debated, but the quality of past curriculum standards has been unrelated to achievement. The rigor of performance standards — how high the bar is set for proficiency — has also been unrelated to achievement.

Believing that rigorous standards will increase student achievement may be a fine theory, but it simply has not panned out in practice. There are several reasons for this, which I will address in my next post. I will also explain why I think parents and schools could do a better job of setting standards than the government.

Last week, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) hosted “information sessions” throughout the state about the new Common Core State Standards. I noted in my last blog post that citizens showed up to these meetings with questions. DESE officials, on the other hand, showed up with scripts and videos. They were not prepared or willing to field questions. If you do not believe me, check out this video from the meeting in Springfield, Mo.

The parents and community members in the video are polite and respectful as the DESE official drones on and on about the standards. I do not care what setting you are in, this is simply a poor presentation, and it happened this way throughout the state.

When people had enough and wanted to go off script, they were denied and told they could leave.

The DESE rep can be heard saying (emphasis mine):

All these questions need to be asked, but they need to be asked in a thoughtful way. So we can come and ask these questions at the end. What we cannot answer will go to the state department’s website and they will be answered there. . . . If you are unable to follow the way we are going to hold this meeting, you’re welcome to go ahead and leave.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we were allowed to “go ahead and leave” when we do not like other things DESE is doing?

Public schools cannot go ahead and leave Common Core.

And most parents do not have the ability to go ahead and leave public schools.

Essentially, DESE was telling concerned Missourians “It’s my way or the highway,” which is kind of fitting. After all, isn’t that what they are telling us by continually pushing these new standards despite mounting concern?

Today, the Show-Me Institute released my new essay, “Public Dollars, Private Schools: Examining the Options in Missouri.” The paper helps clarify some misconceptions people often have about private school choice programs.

Here are some of the misconceptions:

1. All private school programs are the same. The fact of the matter is there are many different ways private school choice programs can be designed. Today, other states are using vouchers, tax credit scholarships, and education savings accounts to expand educational options for students. The paper explains some of the differences between these programs.
2. We cannot afford private school choice programs. Our current school funding formula is not fully funded. Therefore, some argue that we cannot start a new choice program. This argument is really a red herring. Private school choice programs can be designed to save the state money, not cost more. The reality is that we cannot afford to not investigate programs that might save the state money.
3. Students do not benefit from private school choice. The academic literature is clear, students benefit from private school choice. Below is a table I reproduced from a paper that the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice recently released. As the table makes clear, the most rigorous studies consistently find benefits from private school choice programs.

You can download the essay from the Show-Me Institute website.

In my last post, I noted that I would like teachers to be evaluated based on their ability to improve student achievement and removed if they are ineffective. I also noted, however, that it is difficult to support legislation that mandates these things at the expense of local control. The question then is, how do we square this? How do we ensure that school districts have the ability to evaluate teachers rigorously and remove those who are not performing up to snuff, while at the same time adhering to local control?

In my opinion, there are three things that must happen for our district schools to be able to effectively manage their teacher workforce and for them to have the incentive to do so.

First, we must remove state restrictions that make it incredibly difficult to remove a teacher after their fifth year in the classroom.

Second, the state must make it possible for school districts to develop value-added measurements of teacher effectiveness. After all, these are sophisticated analyses that must be conducted and not all districts have the resources necessary to compute these measures. While the state should provide guidelines and assistance, local districts must have the flexibility to make these teacher evaluation systems their own.

The first two points will be moot if school leaders lack the appropriate incentive to actually evaluate and remove ineffective teachers. This, however, does not mean that accountability should come from on high. The best way to ensure school leaders will put in place effective evaluation practices is through market pressure. Providing families the ability to choose where their child goes to school encourages school leaders to constantly look for ways to improve. If they do not, they risk losing students.

A good example of a bill that attempts to balance these issues is Senate Bill 408. In my estimation, it is much more in line with local control than the current state provisions regarding teacher tenure.

Over my next two blog posts, I examine the issue of teacher tenure reform and local control.

It is no secret that I support reforming teacher tenure, using value-added student achievement to evaluate teachers, and removing ineffective teachers from the classroom. Therefore, you might expect me to completely support a bill that would do these things. Yet, I find it very difficult to support legislation that does these things at the expense of local control.

While it is true that some tenure reform proposals in the Missouri Legislature may not be completely pro-local control, we must remember that the status quo is not pro-local control, either.

Last week, the Missouri House of Representatives voted down a bill (102 to 55) that would have changed the way teachers are evaluated, tenured, and dismissed. In response to the vote, Missouri State Teachers Association lobbyist Mike Wood stated, “We were very excited to see that kind of support for local control of public education.” This sounded very much like comments from former Missouri Speaker of the House Jim Kreider. In a recent opinion piece, he wrote, “We want less government in local schools, not more needless government mandates.” You can read my reply to Kreider here.

The problem with both of these arguments is that doing nothing to reform teacher tenure is not a pro-local control position; it is a pro-tenure position or a pro-state restrictions position.

When it comes to tenure, a true pro-local control position would support:

• Removing provisions from state statutes that require districts to award permanent contracts after a teacher’s fifth year.
• Removing restrictions that prohibit schools from laying off low-performing veteran teachers before high-performing novice teachers during a reduction in force.

Local school districts are limited in many ways and the bill that was voted down did not infringe on local control any more than the current policies do; the bill simply infringed in a different manner.

In my next post, I will discuss how we square the circle. How do you get school districts to implement rigorous evaluation systems and remove low-performing teachers, while still giving school districts maximum local control?

Today, the American Federation of Teachers targeted the Show-Me Institute for our work to improve educational opportunities for Missouri’s families.

The public-sector union included Show-Me Institute board members as part of a national blacklist of fund managers that public pension trustees are encouraged to avoid.

According to a Wall Street Journal article, the union’s goal is to “strong-arm pension trustees not to invest in hedge funds or private-equity funds that support education reform.” (Full Article)

“The Show-Me Institute will not be bullied by the American Federation of Teachers into abandoning ideas that are in the interests of the people of Missouri,” Show-Me Institute Executive Director Brenda Talent said. “It is ironic, and sad, that a union which claims to represent kids and teachers is using pressure tactics to defeat proposals that would benefit both groups. We will continue our principled fight for Missouri’s students, taxpayers, and pensioners — whether the AFT likes it or not.”

It seems James Shuls’ ongoing efforts to make our children’s education better and Andrew Biggs’ report on Missouri’s public pension liabilities have struck a sour chord with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), a nationwide public employee union. How sour? So sour that the AFT named the Show-Me Institute on a “blacklist” meant to attack supporters of education and pension reform (emphasis mine).

The union report says it wants pension trustees to “take into account certain collateral factors, such as a manager’s position on collective bargaining, privatization [read: vouchers] or proposals to discontinue providing benefits through defined benefit plans.”

The report adds the lovely threat that “The American Federation of Teachers is committed to shining a bright light on organizations that harm public sector workers, especially when those organizations are financed by individuals who earn their money from the deferred wages of our teachers.”

The report goes on to list StudentsFirst, the Show Me Institute and the Manhattan Institute as special bêtes noires that promote school and pension reform. And it helpfully lists no fewer than 34 funds whose “directors, managers, advisors and executives” have dared to support reform organizations. The funds on the blackball list include such well-known names as Appaloosa Management, Elliott Management, Khronos, KKR and Tudor Investment.

The AFT’s national report also appears to have been coordinated with a local AFT affiliate. Today, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a letter to the editor by Byron Clemens that assailed the Show-Me Institute and the pension work of Mike Podgursky, a Show-Me Institute board member and economist. Yet despite all of Clemens’ supposed sleuthing, the author ironically failed to reveal that he . . . is a “union organizer” with AFT. For a letter so intent on establishing “links,” it is curious Clemens did not reveal his own.

But what the AFT and Clemens did get right, explicitly and implicitly, is that if public unions such as the AFT stand in the way of reforms that would protect taxpayers and help kids, they should absolutely worry about the threat the Show-Me Institute poses to them. And to be clear, we will, with great pleasure, continue the fervent, methodical, and fact-based research that has raised their ire.

In light of a recent federal study, which concluded that the Head Start program does not have lasting benefits, there have been increasing calls to cut funding for the program. But in Saint Louis’ KSDK-NewsChannel 5’s recent report, U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said the program is “worth every penny.”

Since 1965, we have spent more than $180 billion on Head Start. That is a lot of pennies! I am not so sure this program is worth the cost.

The KSDK piece does a nice job of presenting the traditional arguments on both sides of this issue. Unfortunately, the traditional debate lines are structured as Head vs. Heart. That is, the academic literature says Head Start is not working, but the heart says that we must serve these disadvantaged students. The proposition is set up as if it is an either-or; either we can serve low-income families through Head Start or we do not serve those families.

I firmly support helping disadvantaged families access quality educational programs. That is why I support school choice. In my opinion, the question is not whether we should help poor families. The question is whether Head Start is an effective way to do that or if there might be a more effective method.

Watch the video and tell me what you think the proper role of government is in this regard.

Additionally, here are some previous Show-Me Daily posts on Head Start:

Early Childhood Education Funding

Choice, Not Early Childhood Education, Is a ‘Smart Investment’

A number of good pieces of legislation have been introduced in the Missouri Legislature this year. But I have decided that my favorite piece of education reform legislation is Senate Bill 408. This proposed legislation strikes an excellent balance between providing good governance and allowing local schools to determine their policies.

The proposed bill essentially accomplishes five things:

1. Establishes school letter grades.
2. Requires teacher evaluations to be conducted annually based in part on increasing student achievement.
3. Removes the state requirement of Last In, First Out when a district is undergoing a reduction in force.
4. Requires school districts to depart from the single salary schedule and develop a performance pay system based on the evaluations.
5. Removes permanent teacher status for newly hired teachers.

What makes this bill stand apart from other bills that deal with letter grades and teacher policies is the flexibility it provides to schools to determine their own policies. The bill would not mandate exactly how a district must evaluate teachers, nor would it mandate how they must award pay increases. It simply provides guidance and a framework with which school districts are free to determine their own policies. Moreover, it does not change tenure or pay policies for current teachers, unless the teacher chooses to opt into the performance pay program.

I submitted written testimony to the Senate Education Committee and concluded:

Senate Bill 408 would remove some restrictive regulations that inhibit schools from making important staffing decisions and would replace them with good governance that provides school districts a lot of leeway to develop their own policies. For all of these reasons, I am in support of this bill.

And that is why I am awarding this bill the James Shuls Favorite Bill Award.