We’re writing from the education reform summit of the State Policy Network. It’s a great forum for school choice activists and education reform scholars to learn more about school choice from the city with the most school choice. After the summit comes the SPN annual meeting and health care summit.

It’s a record-setting conference. There are over 400 participants from over 200 organizations and over 40 states.

Over the next few days we’ll share some insights and reactions from these events.

While school choice can benefit children in all situations, foster children, who by definition live in an unsettled situation, could use choice the most. Says Dan Lips, author of the Institute’s policy initiative:

“Children require specially tailored education and assistance to help with the difficult transition from youth to adulthood. Unlike their peers in traditional families, foster children often do not have an adequate safety net or social network. They are unable to rely on parents and other relatives for support during the school years and to facilitate a smooth transition out of the home and into adulthood.”

The proposal, which would offer scholarships of approximately $8,000 to the state’s 11,500 children in foster care, would impose no additional financial burden on the state’s taxpayers. To the contrary, the proposal could save taxpayer money. Individuals who have been in foster care are more likely to commit crimes, abuse drugs and alcohol, and suffer from poor health.

Educational choice could help foster children in several ways, including the promotion of stable peer groups and increasing the ownership they have over their own lives.

Competition that is tough, but does not involve special favors from government, is good for the economy and for the consumer. Ultimately it’s good for the activity known as business, even if responding to competition can be rough on a particular business. Unfortunately, government often steps in to distort the competitive process.

The Allegheny Institute for Public Policy, a Pittsburgh-based and focused organization, has long had an interest in economic development. In a recent policy brief called Predictable Effects of Tax-Supported Mega Malls Comes to Light [PDF], the Institute talks about a business owner’s nightmare: seeing the government actively support the competition.

Through Tax Increment Financing (TIF), governments give favorable tax treatment to businesses, in exchange for promises of jobs. Of course, many an ambitious business owner would like to gain more employees over time, so TIF can lend itself to favoritism.

The Pittsburgh Mills development is a TIF project that has now claimed two businesses that could not compete against a tax-advantaged competition. The city is now left with two fewer employers, and taxpayers have, in effect, made government a business partner of some local firms. Not only do residents lose business establishments to patronize, they also lose companies that had been paying taxes. So who gets to pick up the slack? You get one guess.

Under No Child Left Behind, states set targets for the percentages of students who score
proficient or better on standardized tests. If a school fails to meet targets, certain steps kick in, steps that don’t sit well with the education establishment. Meanwhile, few politicians find it useful to criticize school performance—criticism of schools being seen as a criticism of education itself—so it’s natural for them to overstate the condition of school performance.

The OCPA says that “Oklahoma has, on the whole, set unusually low educational standards for its students, teachers, and schools. While objective measures put Oklahoma in the lower half of states in terms of educational performance, measures reported by the Oklahoma State Department of Education consistently paint a far rosier picture.”

Earlier in Minnesota this year, politicians in both major political parties toyed with the idea of dedicating a portion of sale tax revenues to the Department of Natural Resources and conservation projects. Peter J. Nelson of the Center of the American Experiment argues that dedicated funding streams is a bad idea.

It’s not that Nelson is against the environment. He’s a cross-country skier and hunter, for one thing, so he appreciates the value of a healthy natural environment.

Rather, the problem is one of fiscal management, setting priorities, and limits. “If we dedicate a set portion of the sales tax,” he writes, then conservation funding will be pegged to our overall level of consumer spending. Why on earth should the amount we spend on wetlands be inextricably linked to the amount we spend on TVs, refrigerators, and watches?”

Why indeed? Yet voters in other states have taken a similar path. The most prominent example may be Colorado’s Amendment 23.

The idea, called paycheck protection, was overwhelming approved by voters in Washington state in 1992. But it’s been the subject of political and legal disputes ever since. A leading advocate of the idea has been the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, which today applauded the move. The foundation’s Michael Reitz said that “This is excellent news and a first step toward securing the First Amendment free speech rights of teachers and 17 million union-represented employees across the country.”

The Foundation created www.teachers-vs-union.org as a one-stop shop for documents related to the case. It has found the Washington Education Association making several inaccurate claims about its activities.

Much of the attention on earmarks has been at the federal level, and rightly so. But one group in the State Policy Network isn’t happy with the practice, even though it may at first benefit its state.

The Rio Grande Foundation says that New Mexico receives $2 in federal spending for every $1 that it sends to Washington, DC. Still, says the group’s president, Paul Gessing, New Mexico is a relatively poor and undeveloped state. The federal funds haven’t done much for the state’s economy.

The foundation points out that federal earmarking contributes to a rising deficit, which stands at $28,000 per citizen, and growing daily. As the deficit has increased, so have the number of earmarks. Actually, the number of earmarks has exploded, from 958 in 1996 to 15,877 last year—an increase of over 1500 percent.

Of particular interest to New Mexico’s residents is the Wheels Museum, an Albuquerque institution that received $525,000 in earmarked money. Gessing decries such activity, and says “Ideally, the costs of such museums should be borne by those who actually attend them or charities with an interest in promoting cultural advancement.”

The museum, by the way, does have something of an entrepreneurial spirit. It’s going to get its money the old-fashioned-way of asking people to voluntarily give, at a fundraising event.

Rural areas face the disadvantages of having small populations, which can make it harder to assemble a critical mass for innovative service providers. Thanks to Internet communications—something largely unheard of 15 years ago—more and more opportunities are opening up for rural areas. The Tennessee Center for Policy Research recommends cyber charter schools (PDF) as one option for education.

Unfortunately for innovation, and for kids in Tennessee, that state’s charter school law expressly forbids cyber, or virtual charter schools, whether run by private or public entities. This means that children in rural areas who might want to take a class that is available only in an urban district—say, physics—might be shut out.

Of course governments levy taxes. But their costs extend beyond payroll and sales taxes to include things such as regulations. Earlier this year the Sutherland Institute found that the costs of housing affordability can be negatively affected by controls on housing.

The Utah-based organization says that land use-regulations and planning can add $18,000 to the cost of a median-priced home (link is PDF) in Salt Lake City-Ogden area. It’s even worse in the Provo-Orem area, where $29,000 is added to the median price. If anything, says the Institute, the numbers may understated by 25 percent.

While the most widely cited studies suggest that low-density housing imposes an extra $11,000 per house than compact neighborhoods, the cost of “smart growth” regulations exceed the costs they are purported to overcome.

Few states have been as aggressive in pursuing education reform as Florida, and the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force recently released an evaluation of the state’s reform efforts.

The efforts include the Opportunity Scholarship Program, which let students at any failing public school transfer to a qualified public or private school. It was down by the Florida Supreme Court early this year.

The McKay Scholarship Program, which lets students with disabilities attend any school, private or public, that suits their needs, was untouched.

The Corporate Tax Credit Scholarship Program encourages donations to scholarship funding organizations.

Over 50 new charter schools were opened during the last academic year, and the Florida Virtual School is a publicly funded school that lets students anywhere in the state enroll at a school that uses the Internet to study at their own pace. Further, the state promotes supplemental educational services to students in poorly performing schools.

Voters in Maine will soon decide the fate of a measure to limit government spending, called the Taxpayers Bill of Rights, or TABOR. Will it help or hurt the state?

One opponent of the measure says that "TABOR will slow economic growth in Maine, due to declining investment in essential public works, transportation infrastructure, education and other vital programs and services that support Maine's economy."

TABOR will by design slow the rate of increase in government spending. You could say that is a "decline," though a quick and common reading of the word "decline" suggests that TABOR would actually mean that in year 2, government would spend less money than in year 1. Unless the Maine proposal is subject to the ratchet effect--which is unlikely, given the experience Colorado has had with TABOR--this simply isn't going to happen.

Then there's the question of whether a declining rate of increase would have negative economic effects. The experience of Colorado (see the Independence Institute for the details) suggest that TABOR would boost the economy of Maine by keeping more money in the private sector.

The Maine Heritage Policy Center, which favors the measure, releases its report (PDF) on the question today.

When it comes to budgets, the politicians in Washington DC get all the attention. But did you know that the people in your state capital can rack up some rather large bills as well?

The Commonwealth Foundation says that since 1991, spending by state and local governments in Pennsylvania rose 98 percent, or more than double the rate of inflation. (So even if your paycheck is keeping pace with inflation, your take-home pay is not.)

Today, state and local governments spend $8,690 per person in the Keystone state. Had government’s spending increases been limited to the rates of inflation and population growth, spending would have been $6,290. That’s still a sizeable sum, but 23 percent, or $2,400 less, per person.

Could you find a use for another $2,400? We thought so.

The Cost of Pennsylvania State & Local Government: 2005-06 and Beyond (PDF) gives the details.

Why does this matter? The tax bill is one consideration, obviously. But there’s more to it than that. High taxes, fueled by high spending and accompanied by onerous regulations, slow the economy. In many ways, those who can, move out of state. The stature of a high-tax, high-spending state will decline over time: “Following the census of 2030, the U.S. Census Bureau predicts that number will fall to 15, the smallest number of U.S. Representatives from Pennsylvania since Philadelphia was the nation's capital city 200 years ago.”