The Springfield News-Leader recently published an article that stated, “It’s a hallmark of childhood — the grade card, hopefully stamped ‘A’ or ‘B’ and not the dreaded ‘F.’ But the ways schools grade their students may soon be the way they are graded themselves.” Legislation has been proposed which would assign each school a letter grade based on the evaluation system currently in place in the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

According to the News-Leader, there are numerous opponents of grading schools, including superintendents, school district personnel, and the Missouri PTA president. In fact, the PTA president states that A–F grading “doesn’t address any problems at all. It’s just another way of identifying the problems that we know are there.”

The fact is, A–F grading does help address problems. The first problem it addresses is transparency. Currently, it is very difficult to see how an individual school is performing in comparison to other schools or a benchmark level of performance. A letter grade will solve this problem in a way that is easy for the average parent to understand.

Assigning letter grades to schools also encourages those schools to improve. The A–F grading system in Florida has been evaluated a number of times and the results show that the stigma of receiving an “F” grade encourages schools to change practices and to improve. Rouse, Hannaway, Goldhaber, and Figlio wrote in a National Bureau of Economic Research paper:

In sum, we find that schools receiving an “F” grade are more likely to focus on low performing students, lengthen the amount of time devoted to instruction, adopt different ways to organize the day and learning environment of the students and teachers, increase resources available to teachers, and decrease principal control, as was expected given the increased oversight built into the A+ Plan.

Assigning A–F grades is not just a way to single out or label low-performing schools. It is a way to motivate schools to improve instructional practice and to strive for excellence.

Crowds of parents and students rallied at Union Station in Kansas City to celebrate school choice, as part of the National School Choice Week Whistle Stop Train Tour. Students sang, danced, and cheered as speakers drove home the message that students are all different — but they share one thing in common. They all deserve a quality education.

On a previous blog post, I explained why many teachers join a teachers’ union. In my estimation, the biggest reason is to get the liability insurance in case of a lawsuit. What many teachers do not realize is how many teachers’ unions are blatantly partisan.

On Dec. 4, the California Teacher’s Union released a video titled “Tax the Rich: An Animated Fairy Tale.”

The cartoon, which smacks of indoctrination of children, attacks rich people as the villains of most of our society’s ills. The greedy rich decided they did not want to pay taxes. So they bought politicians, paid for private schools, and private security. They basically stole all of their money from the 99 percent.

It is natural to want some liability coverage, but there must be a way to get it without supporting an organization that seeks to indoctrinate children with anti-rich propaganda, opposes school choice, balks at performance pay, and protects low-performing teachers.

One option may be the Association of American Educators (AAE).

As one AAE member says, “The AAE does not go out and lobby the government for random political issues. What they do is they handle only education issues.”

The AAE also is generally supportive of many sensible education reform initiatives. Such as:

School Choice

“Parents must have the choice of where to educate their individual child. And as educators we must recognize the possibilities for advancement and positive growth in the profession through school choice.”

Performance Pay

“Teachers in a modern workforce do not necessarily need one-size-fits-all salary and benefits packages that do little to recognize teachers who go above and beyond in their schools. “

Tenure Reform

“Further, AAE is against the ‘last hired, first fired’ policy by which newer teachers, regardless of performance are let go first to meet lay-off requirements.”

As a former public school teacher, I know there are many liberty-loving individuals in the classroom and there are probably more organizations that support those values and teachers.

If you are a teacher who supports free-market ideals, I would love to hear from you. Or if you know of other organizations that Missouri teachers should know about, please let me know.

You can reach me at james.shuls@showmeinstitute.org or on Twitter @Shulsie

On November 7, I was invited to present my paper — The Salary Straitjacket — to the Missouri Mathematics and Science Coalition in Jefferson City, Missouri. Now you can listen to the audio of the presentation and see my slides:

About the paper: Imagine a school in which the highest prize for academic achievement went to the student who had been there the longest. Though it seems ridiculous to reward students in this manner, this is exactly how school districts reward teachers — by longevity. Teachers by and large are paid on a single salary schedule. These schedules not only fail to reward teachers based on their quality, but they fail to recognize that teaching different subjects and grade levels requires different skill sets and that those particular skill sets are in varying demand in the marketplace. For instance, there are reportedly 3.1 jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) for every one unemployed person in Missouri. In comparison, there is only 1 non-STEM job for every 3.7 unemployed people. This means teachers with strong backgrounds in math and science may have more, higher-paying options outside of teaching. This is a reality we must address.

Hunting season is in full swing, and for many Missourians it’s a family affair. As one hunter put it in the Kansas City Star on Sunday, “For me, it’s a lot more than just the hunting….I get to see people that I only see a couple times a year. Deer season is always a big deal for our family.” From learning how to safely handle rifles and bows to enjoying time with family outdoors, today thousands of young Missourians participate in an enduring — and growing — tradition of hunting in the state.

In fact, the Missouri Department of Conservation announced last week that hunters had eclipsed the mark set in 2011 for deer harvested during the annual youth hunting season — over 19,000 deer, and a more-than three-fold increase above the state’s first youth hunt, instituted in 2001. Growing awareness of the hunt has no doubt increased participation in it over the years, but permit fees imposed by the state could easily have tamped down the season’s growth, if the costs were fixed high enough. Fortunately, Missouri’s hunting permit costs are generally quite low — and that’s a fact the Department of Conservation readily promotes on its website.

Low permit cost is another reason Missouri is a great place to hunt. Missouri’s $17 Resident Firearms Any-Deer Permit is a bargain compared to the average of $46.63 for equivalent privileges in surrounding states. Missouri charges only $8.50 for a resident any-deer permit for kids under age 16. Resident youths pay just $3.50 for antlerless-deer permits.

Missouri has kept the state-imposed costs of joining the hunt relatively minimal, and it’s reasonable to believe that participation in the youth hunt has risen at least partially because the barriers to engaging in it are so low.

Shouldn’t the state apply this lesson to other areas of policy? The lower the fees and taxes, the more likely it is that you’ll get more of an activity — here, hunting, but the idea applies elsewhere, too. Imagine: What would happen to Missouri’s economy from the perspectives of growth and competitiveness if the state got rid of its taxes on corporations and pass-through income?

Kansas opened the season for economic innovations earlier this year by dumping its tax on pass-throughs and reducing its income tax, but there’s no telling which state in the region is going to take down the big, long-term economic prizes in this highly competitive tax environment. Suffice to say, Missouri should join that hunt, and very, very soon.

Let me pose a hypothetical to you. Let’s say you were in charge of revitalizing a languishing downtown area but you didn’t have the money to develop the properties yourself. Would you let property owners renovate their properties so that they could attract new tenants? Or would you block their renovations because you didn’t think the renovations were consistent with your “vision” of the new downtown?

Enter St. Joseph, Missouri.

Geneo DeSpain, owner of 616-620 Felix St., said he was denied an approval to modify and update his buildings’ existing facades so he could accommodate businesses that have expressed interest in the property. It’s the “red tape” and multitude of guidelines that makes it difficult for small businesses to grow Downtown, he said.

The St. Joseph Downtown Partnership, however, says while it encourages business development, those guidelines are put in place to keep businesses in line with the city’s vision of Downtown.

Like most acts of civic development these days, St. Joseph has a “plan.” In late 2001 the city instituted the “Downtown Precise Plan,” a document which is chock-full of contemporary urban development conventional wisdom — including the notion that the city should be in the business of trying to “guide future private sector actions.”

“It used to be that anything goes Downtown. Then we got to the point that we realized in order to make positive changes Downtown and to bring back these historic buildings, there needed to be these regulations in place,” [Rhabecca Boerkircher, executive director of the St. Joseph Downtown Partnership,] said.

Well, it looks like St. Joseph might just “guide” one of its current property owners right out of town. Says DeSpain, “My fight is done. I’m not going to get any more white hair trying to get these people to understand why I want to be Downtown… It’s not like there’s people in line waiting to get their buildings done Downtown.”

“Development.” Cities keep using that word, but I don’t think it means what they think it means.

On October 25, the St. Louis Federalist Society and the Show-Me Institute co-sponsored a debate entitled “Suppressing the Vote or Stopping Fraud: The Voter ID Debate.” It featured John Fund of The American Spectator and Denise Lieberman of Advancement Project. The Hon. Robert Dierker of the 22nd Judicial Circuit Court of Missouri moderated. The debate gets into full swing at 1:19.

Show-Me tech guru Josh Smith recorded the event.

Here at the Show-Me Daily blog, we typically write about Missouri state and local policy issues. But this weekend, something way more exciting happened. JUSTIN BIEBER PERFORMED IN SAINT LOUIS! The Bieber fever was so overwhelming that colleague Josh Smith and I went down to the Scotttrade Center on Saturday to check out the concert.

OK, so we did not actually go into the concert. And this post is not really about teen heartthrob Justin Bieber. But we did have conversations with some friendly folks about their tickets for the concert. We will release a video of these interviews in the upcoming weeks. Did you know that Ticketmaster, venues, and sports teams want to use a new paperless ticketing technology that limits what we can do with our event tickets?

These paperless tickets may sound convenient and good for the environment (waste fewer trees), but they restrict our choices of how we can buy, share, or resell tickets. Most people feel that when they buy an event ticket, they own it and can do what they want with it. And rightfully so. If you buy a Justin Bieber CD and decide you do not want it anymore, do you have to return it to the store? Of course not.

We should not be forced to return our event tickets to Ticketmaster if we get sick, have a conflict, or simply want to give them to a friend. Ticketmaster claims they would be protecting us from the free market. But a recent investigation revealed that only 7 percent of tickets to a Justin Bieber concert in Nashville were directly available to fans. It does not look like Ticketmaster has the typical event-goer’s welfare in mind.

More charter schools, a change in Saint Louis Public Schools’ accreditation status . . . Get the low-down from yesterday’s Missouri State Board of Education meeting with my recap of the good, the bad, and the ugly from the proceedings.

The Good:

The board approved two new charter schools: Eagle College Prep and Lafayette Preparatory Academy. Curt Fuchs, coordinator of educational support services for the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), remarked that the applications were exceptionally strong. After having talked briefly with school leaders from both schools, I am very optimistic that these schools will be highly successful.

The Bad:

The board granted provisional accreditation status to the Saint Louis Public School District. Not that this was a bad decision, in fact, it probably was the right decision. The district met the minimum criteria laid out under DESE’s old accreditation system: the Missouri School Improvement Plan 4 (MSIP). The problem with this is threefold: (1) The bar for provisional accreditation is too low, (2) accreditation status is essentially meaningless, and (3) parents need information at the school level, not the district level.

The state is improving the accreditation system to MSIP 5, but this does not negate the fact that school accountability should come from parents armed with information, not from the state board. An “A” to “F” school grading system would help accomplish this.

The Ugly:

The most disturbing thing from the state board meeting was not anything that was voted upon; rather, it was the overall attitude that the board must micromanage schools, even charter schools. For more than a decade, Missouri has tried accountability systems run at the state level, with little success. It is time to move past the notion that we can prescribe solutions for public education. We need an atmosphere where educational entrepreneurs want to come and innovators can thrive. That can become a reality if we empower schools to make decisions and provide families with options.

As I diagnosed in my last post, Baumol’s disease is running rampant in Missouri’s public schools. This means Missouri school districts continue to spend more and more on education, with little improvement in the actual quality of education.  How can we combat the growing expenses and near stagnant achievement?

Obviously, there are two ways to control Baumol’s disease. One is to slow the rate at which spending increases and the other is to increase output.

We are in a time of declining state budgets and Missouri already spends approximately 34 percent of general revenue on K-12 education. This may force us to curb or slow education spending, but the public has shown little interest in holding education spending constant or even decreasing spending.

The other option, increasing output, is easier to say than to actually do. And, as we have noted on Show-Me Daily, Missouri has seen very little in terms of gains in academic achievement.

Students and taxpayers cannot support this type of system indefinitely, but fixing Baumol’s disease is not as simple as saying “we will do better.”

If we want to cure this disease, by increasing achievement and putting education on firmer financial footing, we need to rethink schooling.

Harness the power of technology

We at the Show-Me Institute have written at length about the potential benefits of using technology more effectively.

Rethink how we staff and operate schools

The traditional education system is designed to treat teachers like widgets, because teachers are paid in lock-step fashion, they are almost entirely evaluated with high marks, and we retain low-performing teachers just as readily as high-performing ones.

Missouri schools need to do a better job of identifying and rewarding good teachers and removing the worst. Furthermore, educators must figure out how to expand the reach of great teachers so they can have an impact on more students, not just the 25 students in their class.

Click below for live video of the Show-Me Institute’s Speaker Series on Economic Policy, which will begin at 6:00 p.m. CDT. Tonight’s speaker is John C. Goodman, a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute and the President and Kellye Wright Fellow in health care at the National Center for Policy Analysis. He is the author of Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis.

Video streaming by Ustream

Click below for live video of the Show-Me Institute’s Speaker Series on Economic Policy, which will begin at about 6:00 p.m. CDT. Tonight’s speaker is Arthur C. Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute. Until January 1, 2009, Mr. Brooks was the Louis A. Bantle Professor of Business and Government Policy at Syracuse University. Mr. Brooks is the author of a new book, The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise, published on May 8, 2012.