Education
School Report Cards
THE PROBLEM
Missouri parents don’t have access to accurate and easy-to-understand information about the quality of their children’s schools.
THE SOLUTION
Create transparent school report cards that assign letter grades to schools and districts based on student achievement and performance. Post the report cards to an easy-to-access location online.
Parents Have Been Kept in the Dark
When done well, school report cards are a powerful tool for communicating school performance to parents. According to a 2019 Phi Delta Kappa survey, 66% of parents who are aware of school report cards read them, and of those, 82% find them useful.
Federal law has required the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) to produce report cards for every school and district in the state for many years. While DESE has technically met this requirement, its report cards have not been useful. They provide a lot of data, but the data are not labeled clearly, nor is context provided in order to understand the data.
This is about to change under an executive order issued by Governor Kehoe in January of 2026. Though there is some ambiguity in the executive order about timing, DESE will assign the first batch of letter grades in either 2026 or 2027. The executive order requires the letter grades to be based on student achievement and performance and has a stipulation in place to prevent grade inflation.
The executive order follows the example set by other states that have done this well. It is no coincidence that states with clear and transparent school report cards significantly outperform Missouri on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
It is important that DESE carry out the executive order in good faith, producing report cards that are easy to understand and are based on objective measures of student performance, and that meaningfully differentiate schools and districts. The state legislature should also use the momentum created by the executive order to codify the letter-grade report cards in Missouri law while resisting the urge to tack on unnecessary or administratively burdensome conditions.
The Show-Me Institute has its own website, MOSchoolRankings.org, with letter grades for all schools and districts in the state.
POLICY RECOMMENDATION
- DESE must implement the report cards required by Governor Kehoe in good faith. The legislature should follow up the executive order with legislation to codify its provisions in state law.
