School choice by mortgage is the current system in Missouri and has been for decades.

The Missouri Legislature is considering legislation that would reform the state’s teacher tenure laws. Teacher tenure would be eliminated in favor of a performance-based evaluation system.

The Missouri Legislature needs to act now and allow students in the unaccredited Saint Louis and Kansas City public school districts to attend alternative schools that have a proven track record of providing a good education.

The Missouri Supreme Court has recently engaged in substantial judicial activism in its effort to circumvent the legislature and solidify collective bargaining rights for public school teachers.

Educators in Missouri often under-appreciate the fundamental importance of capitalism, entrepreneurism, and free markets to social cooperation, order, and the pursuit of happiness.

A national “common content core curriculum” for all public schools in the United States has an obvious appeal: Simply select what students should learn and tell the schools to teach it. Instead of more federal micromanagement, though, we need more autonomy for schools to innovate and serve the individual needs and interests of their students.

Parents with the means often choose their homes based in part on the quality of the school district they are located within, or decide among a number of private and parochial schools. On the other hand, our educational system routinely fails poor and minority students — those least able to choose a different school by moving to another district.

A new study examining superintendent compensation in Missouri finds that salary figures leave out significant forms of benefits, such as insurance, car allowances, and annuities. Compensation is also not correlated with performance metrics or to academic gains by district students. Greater transparency and accountability may lead to better results. 

The values of Missouri's higher education system are under siege. Both the legislature and the governor are advancing proposals that will undermine support for students who choose to attend private universities. The governor's proposal would leave students attending private higher education institutions ineligible for the needs-based Access Missouri grant, the merit-based Bright Flight scholarship, and the Marguerite Ross Barnett Memorial Scholarship, which is awarded to part-time students. In 2009, private school students received $52 million from these sources, totaling about 48 percent of the $108 million that Missouri awarded in scholarships.

Higher education funding has never been very transparent, so the amount of government funding that students receive is often arbitrary. By doing away with guaranteed funding and keeping reporting state contributions as a line item in tuition bills, universities would have a greater incentive to strive to reach performance benchmarks.

By offering students a portion of the state funds that would have been used to pay for their public school educations, Missouri would establish early graduation incentives for public high school students who were willing and able to complete the curriculum at an accelerated rate. The state’s taxpayers could save nearly $6 million annually with such a program.

A new Show-Me Institute study examines research revealing that, on the whole, charter schools nationwide perform as well as or slightly better than traditional public schools. Another recent Stanford study found that Missouri’s charter students were performing better than would be expected if they had stayed in traditional public schools.

Schools in Missouri’s urban centers have been declared educationally bankrupt. Although public school systems have more resources to work with than ever before, this outpouring of funding has not led to improved student performance. Much more fundamental changes are needed, like incentives that reward teaching success.

As the General Assembly searches for ways to provide services to Missouri’s citizens while still reducing overall government spending, it could both help students and save taxpayers millions of dollars by allowing the state’s public school districts to contract with lower-cost schools for the purpose of educating part of their student population.

Tuition tax credits are the most effective policy solution for parents with autistic children. Insurance mandates wouldn’t provide sufficient coverage for specialized education, and most public schools aren’t set up to treat autism. Tax credits would help all autistic kids without placing excessive burdens on individual school districts.

Despite a resounding defeat in circuit court, many Missouri school districts are appealing the “adequacy” school funding lawsuit that uses taxpayer dollars to sue taxpayers for $1 billion. But such a drastic increase in public school funding would come at the expense of the rest of the state budget.

Several commentators have claimed that a recent report by the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute casts doubt on the effectiveness of Milwaukee’s school choice program. They apparently didn’t really read the report, which was written with a fundamentally flawed methodology — using national demographic data to make tenuous claims about Milwaukee parents.

Utah voters recently rejected a universal school choice plan because they believed the widely advertised contention that it would harm public schools. Other states’ experience with school choice demonstrates that those fears are utterly unfounded. Missourians dealing with failing public schools should find hope in the success of the nation’s enduring school choice programs.

A recent court decision denied school districts throughout Missouri from receiving $1.3 billion in additional public funding. The data shows no correlation between increased public school spending levels and increased student performance, so taxpayers should hope the decision is not appealed. Instead, Missouri needs to encourage a new educational approach — the power of choice.

Statistics demonstrate that increased educational spending in public schools does not correlate with enhanced student performance. Parents surveyed throughout Missouri, in every demographic, support some form of school choice. But it’s not only parents — teachers and their immediate family members say they support school choice, too.