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MCPP President and CEO, Douglas Carswell, had the opportunity to speak at the Winona Rotary Club this past Friday.

Detailing MCPP's post-session plans, Douglas discussed our initiatives to combat DEI in our state universities, uncover the disincentives that welfare poses against full-time employment, and the newly passed Mississippi Student Funding Formula.

House Speaker, Jason White, addressed a packed lunch time meeting hosted by the Mississippi Center for Public Policy in Jackson.

Speaker White talked about what had been accomplished during his first session as House Speaker, and shared his priorities for the future.

Notably, under Speaker White’s leadership the House:

The Senate might have subsequently blocked the restoration of the ballot initiative and Certificate of Need reform, but both school funding reform and the SAFER Act have since passed into law.

“There was enormous interest in what Speaker White had to say” said Douglas Carswell, MCPP CEO.  “Rather than skating over subjects, the Speaker went into tremendous detail.”

“While praising public schools, Speaker White talked about the need to allow money to follow the student within the public school system.”

“He also talked about Certificate of Need laws and the need to review the impact of such laws of restricting access to health care in certain areas.”

“MCPP loves hosting conservatives, and there was real warmth towards Speaker White and what he had to say.”

Many university degrees produce a negative return on investment, according to a report out this week.  Data from the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity shows that the cost of many college degrees is not offset by increases in lifetime earnings.

This prompted me to take a look at some separate Mississippi-specific data from the State Workforce Investment Board on graduate earnings.  I discovered an extraordinary variance in the future earning potential of different degrees. 

Here are the earning averages for fifteen different degree types for Mississippi public universities:

So what?  Demand for engineers and insurance professionals is far greater than for actors and anthropologists.  Some degrees require more rigor than others.

But then I took a look at data on what happens to Mississippi high schoolers.  Approximately 6 in 10 of those that do complete public high school in Mississippi fail to either start any form of college education, or start but fail to complete any kind of college education.

Of those public high school graduates that do go into any kind of post-secondary education, about 1 in 3 drop out. 

Pointing out awkward facts about education in Mississippi can be a sensitive subject.  Much has been said about the relative improvements in Mississippi’s reading and writing scores in recent years.  To be fair, our state is no longer 49th out of 50, but 30-something-or-other.

Great, but the data also shows that only 31 percent of 4th graders were at or above proficiency in reading in 2022.  In other words, more than two in three Mississippi 4th graders were not proficient in reading.

The data also shows that a mere 32 percent of 4th graders were at or above math proficiency in 2022.  Forgive me if I don’t rush to celebrate a system that fails to produce proficiency for two thirds of public school 4th graders. 

In the worst school districts, a student has the odds of achieving proficiency overwhelmingly stacked against them.  But even in the best performing school districts – the ones they keep telling us are good – nearly 4 in 10 students are not proficient. 

These are the hard facts about public education in our state, and facts do not care about politicians’ feelings.  Neither should you if you want to improve the life chances of young people in our state.

Poor proficiency rates in primary education help explain why one in three public high school graduates are dropping out of college education later on.

The underperformance of our education system helps explain the low rate of workforce participation in our state.  Unless we acknowledge the underperformance of our education system and address it, we will see our state held back. 

If our private school system was producing these kind of outcomes, I suspect politicians would have acted yesterday.  Instead, the inconvenient facts are brushed under the carpet.

If we are to change Mississippi for the better, this has to change.  Policy makers must not keep going along to get along.  That is a recipe for yet more mediocrity. 

The time for taking false comfort in marginal improvements is over.  The implementation of phonics reading in primary schools might indeed have raised reading standards, but on its own, it is not the strategic change in education we need.

If we want an education system that prepares young people for the life they might live, we need action to ensure:

Douglas Carswell is the President and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy

This has been a good week for education reform in Mississippi.  Our lawmakers might not agree on much, but last Saturday, they finally voted to replace the old education funding formula with the new Mississippi Student Funding Formula. 

Under the old funding formula, your tax dollars were spent in the interests of the education bureaucrats.  Local administrators were guaranteed the same amount of revenue even when they lost students or underperformed. 

Mississippi will now fund students, not a system.  Every student will now get a base amount of $6,695, on top of which they will then receive additional amounts based on their own individual circumstances.

This is a major win for Speaker Jason White and Chairman of the House Education Committee, Rob Roberson, as well as for Jansen Owen and Kent McCarty.  The bill would not have passed without a strong lead from the Governor, Tate Reeves, as well. 

Now that Mississippi will personalize the amount of funding each student gets, the money might just start to follow the student.

Will this happen?  Thanks to a ruling by the Mississippi Supreme Court on Thursday, one of the key objections against it happening has been removed.

Lawmakers opposed to school choice in our state often suggest that while they personally might agree with school choice, sadly, you can’t put government money into private schools. 

Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling shows this excuse to be bunkum.

During Covid, when large sums of federal money were provided to Mississippi, our state legislature, in turn, authorized a state agency to distribute some of those funds to private schools for infrastructure improvement.

This prompted an activist group, Parents for Public Schools, to challenge allocating public money to private schools as unconstitutional.  Had Parents for Public Schools been successful, we might have found ourselves in a situation now where public dollars could not follow a student into the private sector. 

Thursday’s ruling is a defeat not just for anti-school choice activists.  It means that those in the legislature looking for a ready-made excuse not to support school choice can no longer hide behind the claim that school choice is unconstitutional.

As our legal division, the Mississippi Justice Institute argued when we filed a ‘friend of the court’ brief, alongside the Institute for Justice, the Mississippi Constitution does not prevent school choice.

You might have noticed that despite there being a supposedly conservative majority in our state legislature, not a great deal of conservative legislation was passed this session.

A bill to tackle DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) dogma in our public universities was killed in committee.  Efforts to restore the Right of Initiative fizzled out, as did proposals to remove restrictive laws that intentionally limit the number of health care providers. 

Our lawmakers weren’t even prepared to pass a law that might have allowed Mississippians to buy wine online.  They only just managed to pass the SAFER Act to protect women’s rights at the eleventh hour. 

The forces of do-nothing intransigence are powerful.  But as the success of education funding reform shows, inertia can be overcome. 

When Speaker White played hardball and Governor Reeves gave a clear lead, the intransigent folded.  Maybe this is the way to achieve change? 

Mississippi desperately needs change.  Reformers need to be prepared to ruffle a few feathers in order to achieve it.

Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

Imagine if all the restaurants in your neighborhood were guaranteed the same revenue even if they managed to serve fewer customers? 

That’s pretty much how Mississippi has been funding public education for the past thirty years, under the so-called Mississippi Adequate Education Funding Formula Program, or MAEP system.

Under MAEP, taxpayer dollars are allocated in a way that suited education administrators and local bureaucrats.  Under the so-called ‘hold harmless’ provisions of the MAEP, they did not need to worry about loss of revenue, even if they lost students and underperformed. 

Last week, the Mississippi legislature finally voted to replace the antiquated MAEP system, with the new Mississippi Student Funding Formula.  HB 4130 passed unanimously in the House, and before sailing through the Senate on a 49-3 vote.

Under the new Student Funding Formula, Mississippi will fund actual students, not a self-serving system.  What does this mean in practice?

Every student will now be allocated a base amount of $6,695.  On top of that base amount, a weighted system will be used to allocate additional funds to each student depending on their individual circumstances.

MAEP treated every child as if they were an identical accounting unit on a bureaucratic spreadsheet.  As every parent knows, each child is different and has different needs.  The new Student Funding Formula recognizes this fact.  Children with special needs, or particularly gifted students, get more, as do those from lower income neighborhoods. 

The new formula has a specific weighting for career and technical education, too, which could be important for future workforce development. 

Also important is the fact that those crony ‘hold harmless’ deals, which reward mediocrity, will be terminated in 2027. 

Early on in this session, Speaker Jason White made it clear that he was 100 percent committed to getting this new funding formula passed.  Both he, and the Chairman of the House Education Committee, Rob Roberson, who authored the bill, deserve enormous credit for getting it though the legislature.  Kudos, too, to Jansen Owen and Kent McCarty.

Frankly, this bill would not have passed without a strong lead from the Governor, Tate Reeves, as well.  He made it clear that he was 100 percent behind this reform, and repeatedly talked about the need to fund students, not a system.

HB 4130 is really important for the future of education reform.  Perhaps, though, there is an even greater significance in its passage through the legislature.

What happened last week shows that Mississippi has leaders that are willing to spend political capital achieving the kind of change our state needs.  Do-nothing intransigence is not so powerful after all. 

When reformers in our state work together, they win. 

Ever wondered why there has been so little progress towards school choice in Mississippi? 

In a recent radio interview, Mississippi state Senator David Blount was asked by Paul Gallo if he supported school choice.  Senator Blount, who is Vice Chairman of the Senate Education Committee, made it clear he was against school choice. 

Blount criticised “taking taxpayer money and giving it to private schools”. 

Except it seems as if Senator Blount might have sent his own kids to private school. 

Corey DeAngelis, a school choice campaigner, picked up on Senator Blount’s comments, tweeting that Senator Blount sent his own kids to private school. 

If true, it means that Senator Blount’s position is to deny to other families in Hinds County, the district he represents, the school choice opportunities he had. 

It’s never right to criticise a politician over where they send their child to school.  We should support the right of every parent to seek the best for their kids.  In fact, it is great when parents, including state Senators, have those opportunities.  But those opportunities should be available for everyone.

Senator Blount makes it sound as though tax dollars belong to school boards.  Tax dollars belong to the taxpayer.  Tax dollars are there to provide children with an education. 

Why not allow Mississippi families to allocate their portion of education tax dollars to a school that best meets their needs?  This is what now happens in a growing number of US states.  Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia and – hopefully – Louisiana now all allow families to allocate their share to state education tax dollars to a school of their choice.

The idea that tax dollars must only be spent on public education providers is nonsense.  Public dollars get spent at private institutions when it comes to Head Start, Pell grants, and social security.  If we adopted Senator Blount’s logic, we would force low-income families to spend their food stamps at government grocery stores. 

Now are you starting to see why Mississippi has made so little progress towards school choice?

In a rock solidly conservative state, we somehow manage to end up with a Vice Chairman of the Senate Education Committee, David Blount, adamantly against school choice.  Why?  How does someone so opposed to the conservative position on education get appointed to that position? 

Seeing how Senator Blount responded to Corey, it strikes that perhaps those opposed to school choice just aren’t that accustomed to having to defend their opposition to change. They should get accustomed.  

Momentum for school choice in our state is only going to grow.  Mississippi will soon be surrounded by states that allow families control over their education tax dollars.  School choice is THE flagship policy that unites every wing of the conservative movement.

In this exchange between Senator Blount and Corey DeAngelis, we see the battle lines of the future being drawn.  In the coming months, it will take a very brave, or very foolish, lawmaker to oppose school choice if it turns out that they themselves sent their kids to private school.

Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

This week, it emerged that the newly appointed head of America’s NPR (National   Public Radio) hates the US Constitution.  Speaking in 2021, she described the First Amendment which safeguards free speech as “a challenge.”

How could it be that the head of America’s public broadcasting service, established by an act of Congress, has such contempt for the US Constitution?

In her previous role running Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, Katherine Maher rejected a “free and open internet” as a guiding principle.  Such principles are, in her words, a “white male Westernized construct,” according to reports.

Katherine Maher, reports say, support efforts to censor opinions that do not conform with her leftist world view.  She spoke of the truth as being “a distraction”.

Sadly, Katherine Maher is not a one off.  She is fairly typical of the sort of people now running many of America’s institutions, HR departments, government agencies and universities. 

Ms Maher’s social media posts might read like parody.  There is nothing funny about the way that people with Ms Maher’s outlook and opinions are subverting America’s Founding principles, and replacing them with a grim leftist dogma that risks destroying American and the West.

Conservatives need to push back, but how?

Until now, many conservatives have been better at identifying the problem than at tackling it.

To defeat DEI, we need to pass laws, reform institutions, appoint the right people and set the right incentives.  Most of all, however, we need to counter bad ideas with good ideas.

States can take a lead in the fight back.  Here in Mississippi, for example, there was a successful campaign two years ago for a bill to combat Critical Race Theory.  The new law goes some way to addressing the issue, but not far enough. 

If we are serious about restricting DEI dogma, we need to ensure that your tax dollars cannot be spent promoting this divisive ideology.

Florida’s Governor, Ron DeSantis, has shown that states can take the lead against DEI, signing an Executive Order, restricting the use of public money for DEI programs.  State leaders in Oklahoma, Utah and Texas have also done something similar.  We need to see similar action here in Mississippi.

Did you know that many public universities use your tax dollars to promote Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) programs?

One of our leading public universities here in Mississippi has an “institutional diversity, equity, and inclusion plan” governing every aspect of campus life.  DEI shapes not only university admissions, administration and faculty hiring, but what young people are taught, with the development of an academic equity scorecard. 

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.  That is why conservatives need to expose how many of your tax dollars are being spent to DEI programs. 

Instead of more DEI hires, the University of Florida recently decided to eliminate all DEI employee positions.  Last month, the University of Texas at Austin fired dozens of employees who used to work in diversity, equity and inclusion programs.  Every state should aim for something similar.

The best way to defeat bad ideas is with good ideas.  Teaching young people the following truths about America will give them immunity against the ‘woke’ mind virus. 

This is a fight that we can win.  One day we will look back and think it absurd that someone with Katherine Maher’s outlook could be put in charge of producing public service broadcasting content.  But there is a great deal that we need to do right now in order to get there!

Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

Mississippi is now entirely surrounded by states that have either passed, or are in the process of passing, laws that will give every family school choice.  A proposal to do something similar in our state never even made it to a full vote in the legislature.

How odd that there has been so little progress towards school choice in such a solidly conservative state.  School choice, surely, is the one policy that unites every wing of the conservative movement across America more than any other. 

School choice appeals as much to blue collar Trump conservatives as it does to the conservatives of the country clubs.  Donald Trump has spoken passionately in defense of universal school choice.  His Education Secretary, Betsy De Vos, has fought heroically – both in office and afterwards - for school choice. 

Universal school choice has universal appeal for conservatives – except it seems in Mississippi.

Even more odd, perhaps, is that it is not only school choice that has failed to advance in the Mississippi state legislature in 2024.  A whole raft of solid conservative measures have failed to advance during this session.

Two months ago, there were high hopes that the legislature give back to voters the right of initiative.  The measure died in the Senate. 

Most conservative, you might think, would oppose the DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) agenda that has run rampant across US university campuses.  A modest bill was put forward to prevent your tax dollars funding DEI programs at our public universities.  The measure was killed off in committee.

At the start of the session many leading lawmakers agreed that something needed to be done to deal with the mismanagement of Mississippi’s Public Employee’s Retirement System (PERS).  A modest proposal to change the way PERS was overseen was shot down in the Senate.

Most people accept that healthcare in Mississippi is not as good as it needs to be.  HB419, which could have removed some of the intentionally restrictive red tape that limits the number of healthcare providers able to treat patients.  The measure was killed off. 

At some point, I put it to you, the voters might start to notice.  It is not long term sustainable to have voters repeatedly vote conservative but to get so little conservative policy in return.

The US South is flourishing.  For decades now, there has been what you might call the Southern Success Story.  Texas, North Carolina and Florida have taken off.  Tennessee, Alabama and even Arkansas are seeing strong, sustained growth, too.  Why not Mississippi?

To be fair, we are starting to see signs of the kind of growth we need.  Our Governor has helped attract so much inward investment there is a danger we grow blasé about yet another billion dollar announcements.  It seems that there are now more people moving to Mississippi than leaving.  Every time I visit Hattiesburg, Laurel, Starkville, Oxford or the Coast, I see evidence of growth all around. 

Nor is there anything pre-ordained about Mississippi being ranked 50th out of 50 states.  It is a choice if we do not do more to emulate the kinds of reforms that have helped transform other southern states for the better.

If a conservative were to run for office today against tax cuts, they’d be unlikely to get very far.  It wasn’t always that way until people like Grover Norquist and Americans for Tax Reform helped make being a conservative synonymous with wanting lower taxes.

We need to do something similar when it comes to school choice.  We need to make it unthinkable to run as a conservative unless you favor universal education freedom accounts.

The good news is that this beginning to happen.  In Texas, for example, a few weeks ago, almost all anti-school choice conservatives lost out in their primary elections.  It would be impossible that anyone could run as a conservative in that state to be Governor or Lieutenant Governor without being unequivocally in favor of universal school choice. 

Why stop with school choice?  I doubt it will be possible to run as a conservative unless you oppose spending tax dollars on divisive DEI or favor giving citizens back their right of initiative either. 

America is now six months away from a Presidential election.  If current polls are correct and Donald Trump comes out ahead in the key battleground states, we could soon see a conservative in the White House, and a conservative-controlled Senate and House.

It is one thing to gain power.  It is quite another to know what to do with it.  Conservatives who try to run the federal government without a clear strategy in place soon end up being run by the federal government.  Why is this so?
 
The administrative state, with its vast alphabet soup of federal agencies, is fundamentally un-conservative.  Some might even say anti-conservative.
 
That is not to say that there is some sort of Deep State conspiracy against conservatives.  (Federal officials struggle to issue visas or approve new medicines on a timely basis. I highly doubt they are competent enough to engage in conspiracies). 

No, the problem is the mindset of those that work for the administrative state.  Or, what the French call “déformation professionnelle.” 
 
Those that work for big government bureaucracies tend to favor more government.  If your career is spent working for a federal agency, you will perhaps see federal fiat as the answer, whatever the question.
 
Many of those that work for the government are very smart.  Smart enough, in fact, to fall for the conceit that you can successfully engineer social and economic outcomes from above. 

Now that Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion has become the official ideology of America’s public institutions, federal officials likely find it easier to implement “diversity strategies” and talk about “microaggressions” than deliver competent government.

Being part of a national bureaucracy in Washington makes you more inclined to want to work closely with supranational bureaucracies such as the UN, WHO, or the EU.
 
What can an incoming conservative administration do about all this?  It is not enough to instruct the administrative state to govern differently.  We need a plan to re-wire the administrative state itself.  Here’s how:

1. Find the Right People.
 
Donald Trump’s decision to appoint Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court proved to be one of the most consequential things he has done.  As a result, the US Supreme Court now has a conservative majority for the first time in over half a century. 

Trump did not appoint the right people to the Supreme Court because he happened to know them.  It was the Federalist Society that identified and vetted suitable candidates for him.
 
I am delighted to be (a small) part of a project run by the Heritage Foundation and others to help identify the right people not so much for judicial appointments, but for positions across government.  Unless conservatives find the right people to install in the myriad of federal agencies, those that work in those agencies will nominate their own and little will change.

2. Shrink the Federal Machine. 
 
Argentina’s new President Milei almost halved the number of government departments in the week after he took office.  U.S. conservatives should do something similar. 

Do we really need a US Department of Education (created in 1980) or federal Housing department (1965)?  Surely education and housing are matters that can be left to each state? 
 
Why stop there?  There are currently 438 US federal agencies and sub-agencies.  Conservatives should go full Milei on them.

3. Control the spending.
 
What is the single biggest threat to the United States?  It’s not China or Islamism.  It is the ballooning national debt.  The US national debt is now growing by $1 trillion every 100 days.
 
Conservatives urgently need to bring federal spending under control. 

Remember that kerfuffle a few months back when Rep Kevin McCarty tried and failed to be elected House Speaker dozens of times?  One of the objections that the conservative refuseniks had was the fact that Congress did not seem to control federal spending.
 
The process by which Congress approves federal budgets is far too convoluted.  One committee approves agriculture budgets, another defense, and so on.  This makes it easier for various vested interests to ensure that their preferred spending items get approved.
 
We need to return to the principle that there is some form of unified Congressional budgetary oversight.  This is the only chance of restoring Congressional control over the administrative state’s spending.

4. Return authority to the states.
 
The 10th Amendment clearly states that “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
 
Since the days of Woodrow Wilson, there has been a creeping coup that has seen federal agencies, abetted by the Supreme Court, usurp the primacy of the states. Until now.

In a little noticed ruling in 2022, in West Virginia v. the Environmental Protection Agency, the Supreme Court essentially said that a federal agency could not presume to make policy the way the EPA was trying to.  The ruling puts a question mark over the presumption that Congress has delegated major political and economic questions to executive agencies.
 
Conservatives need to build on this, and other similar rulings, to push back against decades of self-aggrandizement by federal agencies. 

How often do conservative voters vote for conservative leaders, but end up with more soft-left statism?  I would argue that this has been a constant feature of U.S. politics for over half a century, with a brief break from business as usual when Ronald Reagan was in the White House for 8 years in the 1980s.
 
Unless we are to see more of the same, we need to ensure that if and when conservatives gain control of the federal government, they use their one chance to achieve fundamental, strategic change to the way America is run. There may never be another.
 
Our aim must not be just to oust liberals, or even to install a particular leader.  Our goal should be to renew America by overturning the incremental coup that has created in Washington DC an administrative state that our Founders never envisioned and never sanctioned.

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