Avery Frank, Elias Tsapelas, and David Stokes join Zach Lawhorn to break down the final week of the 2026 Missouri legislative session. They discuss the constitutional amendment heading to voters that would begin the process of eliminating Missouri’s state income tax, where property tax reform efforts stand heading into the final days, the early literacy bill’s uncertain path through the Senate, the legislature’s approach to A through F school report cards, what the state budget does and does not get right, the Ferguson city council’s rejection of a major data center tax subsidy, and more.

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Episode Transcript

Zach Lawhorn (00:00): Welcome to the Show-Me Institute podcast. I’m Zach Lawhorn from Show-Me Opportunity. Today I’m joined by Avery Frank, Elias Tsapelas, and David Stokes from the Show-Me Institute. It is the last week of the 2026 Missouri legislative session. Today we’re going to go through what has crossed the finish line, mostly what has not crossed the finish line, and see what these guys think about the possibility of that happening here in the home stretch. Elias, we’ll begin with something that has crossed the finish line, and that is the start of a discussion about phasing out Missouri’s state income tax. Legislation did pass. It goes to the governor, and he gets to decide when it goes on the ballot. So what do we know right now, what passed, and what are Missouri voters going to be asked sometime in the fall?

Elias Tsapelas (00:50): By May 22nd, the governor needs to decide whether this constitutional amendment will go on the August or November ballot. What it says, essentially, is to Missouri voters: do you want to start the process of getting rid of Missouri’s income tax? It comes with three main components. The first piece is the legislature will be required to enact legislation that would get rid of the state’s income tax based on revenue growth. Once that income tax is gone, it cannot be reinstituted. Previous versions of this bill had some details lined out about how the income tax rate would be cut based on revenue growth, but in later versions this was stripped back to just the legislature will decide this later. The other two pieces say you will also be authorizing the legislature to expand the state sales tax base, meaning the things the state sales tax applies to. This could also involve changing the rate, because right now Missouri’s constitution does not allow the state legislature to expand the sales tax to anything that was not taxed in 2015. But this does come with a guardrail: if the legislature does change the state sales tax, it has to be done in a revenue neutral fashion. So expanding the sales tax base or raising the rate to bring in additional tax revenues has to go towards lowering the state income tax. That gives the legislature the authority to change how much revenue comes in, which would speed up the process for getting rid of the income tax. The last piece is a component for local governments. If the state changes the number of things that the sales tax applies to, this would also increase revenues to local governments. Those additional revenues would have to go towards a list of other taxes that would be lowered. In places like St. Louis and Kansas City, that would go towards lowering the earnings tax. For other local governments, they get to choose whether it goes towards lowering the sales tax, property tax, personal property taxes, or real property taxes. The key piece being revenue neutral. This is not going to be a windfall for anyone. It is basically the start of a discussion, because they don’t say what the rate might need to go to, what the sales tax could be expanded to, or what revenues would trigger income tax elimination or cuts. This is just the start of the discussion, giving the legislature the authority to keep moving in the direction we started around 2014.

Zach Lawhorn (03:57): Taking those a piece at a time: the first one, if it passes and the income tax is eliminated at some point, it cannot come back. That seems pretty straightforward. The next two seem like responses to opposition that we hear on a regular basis. The first being the revenue triggers, which seem designed to prevent what we often hear about with Kansas, where they cut the income tax without cutting spending, leading to revenue shortfalls. And the expansion of the sales tax base seems like protection against having to raise the sales tax rate on goods. Do I have that right?

Elias Tsapelas (04:40): Yes. The revenue trigger piece is basically what Missouri has been doing for a while, waiting to see how much revenue we have before lowering the income tax by that amount. We’ve been doing that for over a decade now and have lowered the top individual income tax rate from 6% to 4.7%. We’re just continuing down that path to be sure we don’t create some enormous budget hole. Now, when you look at the sales tax, Missouri has a very complicated, out-of-date sales tax system. The state sales tax rate is 4.225%, but when you go to the store you’re paying something significantly higher, largely due to local governments and a lot of special taxing districts. Missouri also has a lot of sales tax exemptions. Missouri really needs a full look at its entire sales tax system. But economically, when thinking about switching a state from being primarily funded by income taxes to something closer to sales taxes, the best way to fund a state is to tax as broad a base as possible so you can have the lowest rate possible. You want to be taxing final consumption, not business inputs. As we start the idea of transferring to more of a consumption tax in Missouri, the goal is to make sure it doesn’t become a tax increase for some people while things change elsewhere. It’s trying to keep it level the whole way, and at least right now it seems like a pretty neutral proposal going forward.

Zach Lawhorn (06:24): David, for people who don’t think about taxes as a corresponding tax system, can you explain the idea of local governments rolling back certain taxes and how people might experience that on their property tax bills or personal property tax bills?

David Stokes (06:44): It’s trickier than you might think, but it’s vital that it be done right. If you expand the sales tax base at the state level, as Elias discussed, you don’t want local governments to start collecting significantly more sales tax revenue for no reason. At the state level we’ll do something good with that and phase out the income tax, but at the local government level we don’t want just more revenue with nothing to spend it on. You need tax relief for citizens, which is why they’re going to require rollbacks. They’ve given local governments some options in how you roll that rate back, which is a good thing, but they need to give them a few more options. For example, they said you could roll back property taxes, real property taxes, personal property taxes, or sales taxes. A few things that need to be considered: many municipalities don’t have a property tax, so they won’t be able to roll back the property tax. And it’s trickier to roll back sales taxes than you might think. Unlike property taxes and income taxes, which can be reduced in small increments, sales taxes have to be done in set increments. You can’t go from a 1% sales tax to a 0.92% sales tax. It’s just not allowed and would be incredibly difficult for retailers to implement. So local governments need even more flexibility in how they roll back taxes. I would say the utility tax, which just about every county imposes, is a great option to add to the choice mix for rollbacks. These are the sales taxes that can be placed on utilities, which unlike other sales taxes can be rolled back in small increments. That’s a very good option. The biggest challenge of all, though, is the special taxing districts that Elias mentioned earlier, such as transportation development districts and community improvement districts. These usually only have sales taxes and nothing else. You have to address what they do if their sales tax collections go up 30% and they have no legal way to roll it back by that same amount. So we need to adjust that. I would also hope that part of this whole deal would be a substantial cap on how these special taxing districts like TDDs and CIDs operate in the first place, to really restrict their continued expansion in Missouri, which has been very harmful. Those are just a few ideas out of many in how local governments are going to have to address this.

Zach Lawhorn (09:59): Finally, Elias, as you said, it’ll be on the ballot sometime in the fall. But between now and either August or November, people interested in this topic are going to see a lot of data, modeling, estimates, and projections. We want to be honest about what we can know and what we cannot know. With the legislation that has passed now, what should people keep in mind when they see some of these estimates or models or projections this summer?

Elias Tsapelas (10:39): The first thing is, if you see anything claiming this is going to generate a tremendous budget shortfall or major harm to local governments, this thing is set up to be revenue neutral. This is not something that is going to create enormous holes. Most of the time, estimates that reach that conclusion assume this would work in an entirely different way than what is allowed. So that is something you don’t necessarily need to worry about. What people are more reasonably worried about is: if you empower the legislature to expand or raise the sales tax, how is that going to impact everyone? Missouri’s state and local combined sales tax rates are relatively high already. The state’s portion is pretty low, but combined it’s relatively high. So what the state decides to do in terms of how much it expands the sales tax base, whether that involves more services versus goods, will impact different people differently, in different parts of the state and at different income levels. Anything right now that says this is definitely going to be bad for X person, we just can’t know that, because there’s not enough information out there. Everyone should keep an open mind and also recognize that the reason for this amendment and this proposal is that Missouri’s economy is falling behind. We are falling behind our neighbors in terms of tax competitiveness, and the only way to change that is to improve Missouri’s tax standing. Our sales tax system is incredibly broken, so this is something that is going to need to be fixed. At least right now we are at the point of asking: do we want to go down this path? Let’s hope the legislature does a good job. We’ll be shining a light on whatever they do, but we can’t know some of the things that people are warning about right now.

Zach Lawhorn (12:50): David, after the legislature got the income tax bills out the door, they shifted to talking about property taxes, which is something we hear a lot about. People want property tax reform. With only a few days left in the session, where do those efforts stand and what are your thoughts?

David Stokes (13:11): Unlike a lot of the property tax changes of the past few years, I actually like the property tax changes being proposed this year. At least one property tax bill is in conference committee being debated between the House and Senate right now. Another major bill has passed out of the Senate but hasn’t made it through the House yet. I’m told there are going to have to be some compromises on both sides to get a bill across the finish line, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The biggest change this year, which seems very much in the weeds but is significant, would take the way property taxes are imposed in St. Louis County and apply it to the rest of the state. St. Louis County has different tax rates for all the different types of property: residential, agricultural, commercial, and personal property, which includes your car, boat, farm equipment, livestock, and the like. Those rates adjust differently as assessments go up and down each year. This approach was originally intended to be extended to the rest of the state about 20 years ago when they did it in St. Louis County, but the following year they came back and said the rest of the state didn’t have to do it. It’s a good idea. It might sound strange to some people, but a good example of why it would be beneficial came from stories in the St. Louis Business Journal about the real decline in commercial property values in the city of St. Louis over the past year. Because they set one tax rate measured under one unified property value, residential homeowners in St. Louis end up making up with their taxes for the decline in commercial property. In St. Louis County, with the siloed tax rates, if commercial property goes down, the commercial property tax rate will go up to offset that instead of passing it on to homeowners. In rural Missouri, which has so much agricultural property, this would allow agricultural property tax rates to increase to fund goods in rural areas without as dramatically impacting commercial and residential property. I think this is a good idea and I hope it passes. There are also some good amendments that would put taxpayer protections in place to avoid the temptation of local officials to target commercial property with these new different tax rates. It’s in the weeds, but I think these are good changes this year.

Zach Lawhorn (16:24): That sounds like the other side of the coin from what’s happened in Jackson County, where over the last few years people have been very upset that their assessments have gone up by more than 20% and residential homeowners have seen gigantic leaps in their property taxes. Is this kind of like having to turn one knob one way and another knob the other way?

David Stokes (16:55): Sort of. The tricky part is that the situation in Jackson County for the past 10 years has been so bad, it’s hard to compare it to other counties. It’s been uniquely horrible for the people of Jackson County. But it does start with one basic truth: 15 to 20 years ago, Jackson County was under-assessed. The assessor was ordered to increase the valuations because they were improperly low, and probably artificially and intentionally low. The right approach would have been to raise those assessed valuations to more accurate totals while lowering the rates at the same time to avoid crushing people with higher taxes. But Jackson County’s taxing entities have not really done that, starting with the Kansas City 33 school district, a very large school district in Kansas City, which is the only taxing body in Missouri exempt from rolling back rates as values increase. So you’ve seen these giant increases within that school district and they don’t even have to roll back rates. They just get to keep their same rates, as they have frequently over the past 10 years. So people are getting walloped. And then you throw in the fact that the Kansas City Assessor’s Office has done a terrible job managing the process year after year, not hitting deadlines for notifying people about changes and not properly running the appeals process. It’s just been a terrible system in Jackson County, and almost uniquely so.

Zach Lawhorn (18:30): All right. Before we have Elias read the budget line by line, Avery, I want to get an update on the education items here in the last week of the session. Early literacy, the reading bill, we’ve been talking about it all session long. How’s it looking?

Avery Frank (18:47): When it first passed out of the House before spring break, 131 to 10, I was genuinely excited. It wasn’t necessarily that it passed so early; it was that it passed with such little resistance and such bipartisan support on both sides of the aisle. Teaching our students how to read, giving every student the best chance to become a confident, capable reader, that seems like common sense and a goal that everyone wants to work toward to help our state improve and perhaps become the next Mississippi. It looked that way before spring break, but the Senate version of the early literacy bill got filibustered and set aside. The House bill has made it through the process and is on the informal calendar for third reading, so it could be taken up at any time. If it does pass the Senate, I anticipate it would easily pass the House again. But that is the problem with a lot of education legislation: can it pass the Senate? There have been different concerns about the early literacy bills. Some people are concerned that the MAP test, or the Missouri Assessment Program, which we use to test all of our students, is not a good measure and we shouldn’t be basing anything on it. Some are concerned with third-grade retention and whether it actually helps, looking at states like Mississippi and noting that while fourth-grade scores are great, eighth-grade scores have only improved a little. Those are the main pushbacks we’re seeing. I would still say this is something we really need to do. The early literacy bill is built on two different pillars. The first is a mandatory third-grade retention policy. Missouri already tests all K through third-grade students with a reading screener to see how they’re doing with reading. What this bill would do is set a passing score for those screeners. If students don’t meet that score, they would be retained in third grade, because reading is such a foundational skill. If you don’t know how to read, that’s something worth holding back for, to make sure students get it down before moving on for the rest of their educational career. Students would still have the opportunity to retake the screener, and there would be good-cause exemptions for students with disabilities, for students who have been held back previously, and for English language learners. The second main pillar is reforming our teacher preparation programs. In 2023, the National Council on Teacher Quality conducted a survey of all of our universities and teacher preparation programs and found that half of them received an F in teaching the science of reading, which is the best evidence-based way to teach students to read. The early literacy bill would align our teacher prep programs with those best practices. If they don’t do it, they can’t certify teachers. You can see how there could be pushback and reason why people would filibuster or not want it to come to the floor. That’s where it stands right now. I’m hoping people set aside their objections and recognize that this is a great first step to get Missouri back on track. Our reading scores have been really poor, especially after the pandemic. They continue to decrease and have not bounced back at all. They’re lower now than they were the first year after the pandemic, and we have to turn things around. These early literacy bills, I hope people see the common sense in them.

Zach Lawhorn (22:30): It’s not even the perfect being the enemy of the good. It’s just people being afraid to push back against the status quo. Missouri has fallen back in reading test scores, and other states, most notably Mississippi, have found ways to improve. I don’t think it’s helpful to frame this as some kind of radical moonshot. In the final days of the session, the urgency cannot be overstated. The other thing we’ve talked about a lot this session is A through F report cards, a transparency measure. Governor Kehoe issued an executive order before the session started. What’s the status of the legislature trying to adhere to the governor’s executive order?

Avery Frank (23:19): The legislature has tried to legislate its own way into how the executive order gets implemented, because DESE, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, could implement it in their own way. The legislature wants to determine how things are going to be scored instead of letting DESE make that decision. There’s been a lot of back and forth, and a lot of different interested parties. Not to get too in the weeds, but some districts really want academic achievement, their base score on the Missouri Assessment Program, to be weighed the most heavily because that would give them the highest score. Some want growth to be weighed the most heavily for the same reason. Some want basically no grades and a lot more qualitative information. There are a lot of different factors. The best vehicle for A through F report cards right now looks like Senate Bill 1351, which continues the long legacy of education omnibus bills used in recent years in Missouri. It combines the report card, limits on screen time for young students, and a couple of other things. I’m not sure if that’s going to make it past, to be honest. People are still concerned about whether the Missouri Assessment Program is something they want to base all of this on. Personally, I think the executive order is better than the legislation as it currently stands. They got rid of one aspect I liked as a researcher: in Governor Kehoe’s executive order, there was a penalty if districts didn’t report their data properly. In the current legislation, Senate Bill 1351, if districts don’t report sufficient data, it’s just written as an aside, basically saying they have to note on their report card that there is not sufficient data, and then they’re not included in the ranking as much. I don’t like that. It gives districts, especially poorly performing ones, an incentive not to report their data so they can have this qualifier on all of their report cards. I also don’t like it because, from all the education research I’ve been doing, we really do have a data reporting problem and we need to be a lot better about transparency. I hope we get some good report cards, because right now at the Show-Me Institute we do our best with the data we have, but we have to work with unsuppressed data, meaning we don’t have data that could potentially identify certain students. So there are some districts we have no data on because they’re so small. But DESE and the state have the best data possible. They could make a really good report card even better than we could, because they have better data than we do. That’s why I’m really hoping we get a good report card, because it would be very helpful for all the parents, legislators, and researchers across the state to see which districts are doing well and learn from them, and which ones are doing poorly and need more support.

Zach Lawhorn (26:42): Let’s talk about the budget. Elias, the legislature passed the budget a little early this year. They beat the deadline by a couple of days, right?

Elias Tsapelas (26:53): They finished early, which is a little bit different than the last few years.

Zach Lawhorn (26:56): Are we spending more or less money than last year?

Elias Tsapelas (27:01): Spending less, but I’m not throwing them a party. There’s just a lot less federal money going around. There was a lot of COVID money in recent years, and Missouri hasn’t spent all of it. The current budget this year is about $54 billion. What the legislature passed is a little bit less than $50 billion, depending on whether you count different construction items. But there was a lot of federal money in that total. At the end of the day, what we’re looking at is a budget that is still going to spend more general revenue, where our income and sales tax dollars go. It’s still going to spend more than we expect to bring in. So we’re still going to exhaust all of our surplus that we built up over those years. There were some positive things that happened this year, but ultimately part of how they got the budget done early was by spending just a little bit more, so they left some of the good on the table.

Zach Lawhorn (28:20): So we’re spending the surplus, as you’ve been warning about for several years, the federal money is drying up, and to circle back to the opening segment, I think part of the trust the legislature is going to have to build this summer is demonstrating we’re getting spending under control. You said you’re not throwing them a party. But is this reduction, whatever the reason, directionally good enough for the legislature to say they’re working on the spending side of things, or is it just not good enough?

Elias Tsapelas (29:00): I think I’ll know a lot more going into next year, because there were a lot better discussions this year, especially looking at spending incentives. As was mentioned, DESE is going to have a new funding formula, or at least the governor has a task force working on one. The way education is funded for K through 12 is going to change. There was also a big fight this year about how to fund higher education. What seemed to me like a common sense idea, essentially having the legislature fund colleges based on how many students are enrolled, turned out to be considered too radical and was pushed off for the future. But there’s talk of coming back with a performance funding measure going forward. There’s also some movement on changing how the state does its IT work. There are a lot of IT changes coming, including things affecting Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Missouri has a very bad track record with IT. Part of this budget moves some IT resources over to the Department of Social Services to support getting things going there, because most IT for the state of Missouri is currently consolidated in the Office of Administration. While that can seem efficient because every state department doesn’t need its own IT department, it also makes it a lot harder to hold people accountable. There has been a big issue recently with the state’s accounting software, where a contract is millions of dollars behind schedule and not working. The budget tries to get at that too, and it raises this major incentive question: are the people in charge of implementing new IT going to do their best at something that will ultimately try to eliminate their job? I think the legislature is finally starting to deal with that. Ultimately, if we go down the path of a more efficient government and a better tax system, that may mean fewer state employees, and that is something that hasn’t come up much but I think the legislature is finally starting to look at. Pushing toward better funding models, a better state workforce, all those type of things, is moving in the right direction as opposed to how it has been, where the budget just grows larger every year. They’re looking in the right direction. I would have liked to see more, but I think we’ll know a lot more in the next year, especially because the federal COVID funding will essentially be gone.

Zach Lawhorn (32:12): Our final topic, partly so we can put it in the title of the episode for clicks, but also because it seems like every week there’s a story from across the country or across the state about data centers and communities pushing back for a lot of reasons. The most recent one was Ferguson in the St. Louis area. David, can you catch us up on what was on the table for this data center in Ferguson and what happened?

David Stokes (32:40): The vote that the Ferguson city council took last week was strictly on a tax subsidy, I believe about $1.8 billion in tax abatements and various subsidies for the project. It was not a vote on approving the data center itself. This was a commercially zoned area, so it didn’t need any permission to put a data center there, and that’s a good thing. But the city nonetheless rejected the tax subsidy, which I thought was the right call. These data centers are very profitable and important, and I’m certainly not anti-data center. But the demand that they get enormous subsidies everywhere they seem to be going is improper. Festus was right to approve the data center operation there, but I think very much wrong to approve the enormous tax subsidy the city granted, which I believe was about a half a billion dollars. Avery can correct me if I’m wrong on that exact number. I like what Ferguson did, and I hope the data center moves into the old Emerson complex there nonetheless. We need data centers. Data centers produce so much tax revenue that they can generate their own tax cuts, and I don’t mean a special subsidy for the data center itself. I mean they go into a city or a small area, generate so much revenue, and you can cut taxes for everybody in that community, including the data center itself. I think that’s the road to follow, and hopefully that’s what we’ll have in Missouri. I also think we need to change the way data centers are taxed in an upcoming legislative session, taxing them a little more like utilities to reduce the incentive for one city or county to hand out a big subsidy and instead spread those tax benefits around a little more.

Zach Lawhorn (34:46): Avery, are you heartened by this rejection? Because as David said, we need the data centers, but we really want to avoid this new layer of corporate welfare that could pop up everywhere. So how do you feel about it?

Avery Frank (35:00): I’m actually very excited by the rejection in Ferguson. I’ve talked to a lot of people on both sides of the data center debate, those who have gone to the meetings and stayed up until 3 a.m. and protested, and those who want them. When I look at this Ferguson project specifically, the numbers David was talking about involved granting up to 15 years of tax abatements on real estate, personal property, and sales tax for a data center project. When I see something like that, it gets at what David was talking about. The only true significant benefit of a data center is the tax revenue it could bring. It doesn’t bring a lot of jobs. It takes a lot of electricity and a lot of water. It generates noise. It already makes a lot of people upset, and there are concerns about housing values and everything else. So if you’re not getting any tax revenue, there really is no strong incentive to have a data center project. That Emerson complex in Ferguson had thousands of employees. A data center does not take very many employees at all. So when you have people coming up and saying this data center project won’t succeed unless we get all these tax subsidies, I say that’s fine and I hope you don’t build a data center there, because the tax revenue is really the only benefit you’re getting from it. One of the bigger things is just something about Missouri in general. I’m from Tennessee and there are a lot of concerns there about having too much growth. Missouri sometimes feels like the opposite of Tennessee. We’re so desperate for growth that we’re willing to hand out a bunch of money. We don’t have enough pride. This Emerson complex is a good building and a good place. Ferguson has a STEM high school that produces very high test scores and graduates people who can work in the tech industry or an engineering industry. We shouldn’t waste a good building and a good workforce on a project that’s going to get all these tax subsidies and not bring a lot of jobs. The same thing happened over in Independence, where they gave out billions in subsidies for a data center project. Whenever I see that, I think we have to have a little bit of pride in Missouri. We can’t just be giving out all this money to get anyone to come. We have a good parcel of land, a good workforce, a lot of water, and a central location in the country. We can attract good projects, data centers or not, without giving out a bunch of subsidies. We need to understand what the benefits and costs of a data center are and what data center developers are actually looking for. They have a lot of money already. If you give them a good workforce, a place to build, and community support, I think they’ll come, even without a bunch of money.

Elias Tsapelas (38:28): I was really hoping this was the discussion we were going to have this year in Missouri’s legislature, because it started off so well with the discussion of how to get rid of the income tax and everything that goes with that. Talking about the income tax is really about how you make your state more desirable and how you grow faster. But Missouri for so long has just said: we want this industry or this type of business, so let’s give it an economic development tax credit. Let’s give out a billion dollars worth of those. Let’s give out sales tax exemptions. As far as I know, data centers in Missouri already get state and local sales tax exemptions. We just give those out. If we’re really going to start thinking about how to make the state the most desirable place, how to grow the fastest and be the most desirable for families and businesses, that’s really more about making the tax climate the best for everyone, not constantly picking winners and losers. Unfortunately, the budget didn’t see as many cuts as I had hoped. As we go into the last few days of the legislature, there are plenty of tax credit bills waiting to pass. The film tax credit is back and there’s talk of extending the sunset on it. There are other tax credits. We’re still going down that path. There are still more sales tax exemptions being considered. Missouri just needs to decide what direction we want to go, because ultimately if we do get rid of the income tax, a lot of these economic development incentives don’t even really work anymore. You have to look at different things. You have to look at what is really the criteria for families and businesses. States across the country are dealing with these issues, changing their economic conditions, their tax policy, and people are moving there. We know people are leaving Missouri. We know income is leaving Missouri. We need to change things. The status quo is not going to work going forward, and I was hoping that would have sunk in a little bit more this year than it did.

Zach Lawhorn (40:37): We will leave it there this week. We’ll talk to everyone again after the session ends over the next few days and see how everything turned out. As always, plenty more at showmeinstitute.org. David, Avery, and Elias, thank you very much.

The post Missouri’s 2026 Legislative Session Final Week appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Interestingly, the bottom ten spenders had a higher average academic letter grade than those in the top ten. However, many of the top spenders in the state are tiny rural districts with fewer than 50 students. That raised an important question: Would this pattern hold when comparing districts of a similar type?

Table 1 begins to answer that question by focusing specifically on suburban and city districts—schools that are far more comparable in size and structure, but still vary widely in student demographics. It should be noted that Table 1 includes non-current spending items like interest and capital outlay (such as constructing a new gym, renovations, etc.).

For reference, in the 2023-24 school year, the average expenditure per student was around $19,500. Of that, about $15,900 were current expenditures and $3,600 were non-current expenditures.

Source: MOSchoolRankings.org

Interestingly, the five highest-performing school districts in the state are split between the highest and lowest total spenders. Table 1 suggests that it is overly simplistic to assume that more money per student automatically leads to better academic outcomes.

Consider Valley Park and Park Hill as examples. Both spend relatively high amounts per student (including non-current expenditures) and serve comparatively lower shares of low-income students, yet neither achieves top-tier academic results. Meanwhile, several lower-spending districts of similar demographics earn strong academic grades.

This does not mean funding is irrelevant, but rather that the process of producing strong academic outcomes is complex and money isn’t everything.

The post The Wide Difference in Spending Per Student in Missouri’s Suburban Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

These are all relevant questions, and at the Show-Me Institute, we’ve created a resource to answer such questions: MOSchoolRankings.org

As an example of what these data can be used for, Figure 1 shows how Missouri school districts are distributed across different levels of spending per student. It should be noted that these statistics include non-current spending items like interest and capital outlay (such as constructing a new gym, renovations, etc.).

For reference, in the 2023–24 school year, the average expenditure per student was around $19,500. Of that, about $15,900 were current expenditures and $3,600 were non-current expenditures.

Figure 1: Number of School Districts and Charter Schools Grouped By Average Expenditures Per Student, 2024–25

Source: MOSchoolRankings.org

Most Missouri school districts and charter schools spent between $13,000 and $22,000 per student in the 2024–25 school year, but there are numerous outliers in the data, as shown below.

Table 1: Public School Districts and Charter Schools with the Highest and Lowest Average Expenditures Per Student, 2024–25

Source: MOSchoolRankings.org

In Table 1, many of the highest-spending school districts in Missouri are rural, including several extremely small districts, such as Missouri City 56, which enrolls just 14 students. By contrast, many of the lowest-spending districts are also rural, though they tend to be larger and vary more in size.

Missouri’s mean total expenditure per student (weighting each district equally and including non-current expenditures) is $20,406, while the median is $18,934. Even so, there is a surprisingly wide spending range across the state, from roughly $12,000 per student to more than $60,000 per student.

These kinds of statistics are important when evaluating potential changes to the funding formula. To take one small example, Spickard R-II saw enrollment decline from 54 students in 2005–06 to 21 students in 2024–25: a 61% decrease. For state funding, Missouri’s hold-harmless policy guarantees that Spickard R-II receives no less than the state funding it received in 2005–06, even though the district has far fewer students. This likely contributes to why Spickard spent $41,224 per student in 2024–25.

Clear, accessible data are important. And of course, spending is only one aspect of this. MOSchoolRankings.org allows users to go further by comparing districts on academic performance, student demographics, growth, and much more.

The post Which School Districts Spent the Most Per Student? Which Spent the Least? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Last year, the passage of Senate Bill (SB) 4 allowed natural gas plants to raise rates to pay for construction before plants are put into operation, a process known as construction works in progress (CWIP). Companies using CWIP under SB 4 would still be subject to cost caps (by estimated cost and completion date) and a refund mechanism (with interest) if the project is not finished. There was speculation about whether a provision in SB 4 would also allow its usage for nuclear projects.

A recent change to SB 838 would remove any ambiguity; the change explicitly prohibits nuclear energy projects from using CWIP.

But is preventing nuclear projects from being able to use CWIP really a good idea?

Some view CWIP as necessary for new nuclear projects to get a foothold in Missouri. Excluding nuclear from this flexible financing method could either drive up total costs (since loans would bear interest) or even eliminate potential projects altogether.

At the same time, the concerns surrounding CWIP are real and should not be dismissed. Charging ratepayers before a plant is operational raises difficult questions. Should utilities earn a return before delivering a service? Does this reduce incentives to control costs during construction? And what happens if a large, high-risk nuclear project is cancelled (which has happened in the United States before)?

These are not trivial concerns. However, a better solution for Missouri would be to improve the CWIP framework for all energy sources.

SB 4 already includes cost caps and refund provisions, but additional safeguards could further protect ratepayers while still allowing needed infrastructure to be built.

Virginia recently passed CWIP reform, and it instituted additional safeguards that Missouri could also adopt:

• Excluding 20% of development costs from CWIP eligibility
• Mandatory evaluation of federal funding opportunities from the Department of Energy
• Establishing a cap on residential monthly bill increases ($1.40 per 1000 kWh)

Additionally, the Missouri Public Service Commission could evaluate compensating ratepayers appropriately for early contributions and their role in risk-sharing, such as treating CWIP financing more like a bond system.

These improvements could even better protect and reward ratepayers, as well as facilitate needed power plant construction without targeting a specific technology—an effective compromise.

The post Nuclear Energy and Construction Works in Progress (CWIP) appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In Governor Kehoe’s State of the State address, he declared that Missouri is “all-in” on nuclear energy. But the question of how the governor plans to turn this statement into a reality remains.

Part of being “all-in” could include allowing the creation of private electricity grids (often referred to as consumer-regulated electricity (CRE)), to bolster the development of next-generation nuclear technology.

Free-Market Principles and the Future of Energy

Private electricity grids could be key to opening the energy sector up to testing and innovation—something that is difficult on a ratepayer-supported grid.

Due to mountains of regulation, public fear, and high costs, there has been little recent experience in constructing nuclear power plants, as only seven of the 94 operating reactors in the United States were built after 1990. While continued regulatory reforms are absolutely imperative, opening the sector to specialists to gain expertise would be significant.

Specialists will be needed to rapidly deploy any new technology like small-modular reactors (SMRs). However, it is expensive to build new technology (as SMRs would be), since there are likely to be unforeseen challenges. These first-of-a-kind (FOAK) costs usually come down with experience and repetition, but asking regulated utilities to handle it would likely be slow and expensive. Further, it simply may not be a risk that ratepayers are willing to accept.

With CRE, different types of private developers could meet different needs for large projects separated from the grid supported by ratepayers.

Consider an example. CRE would allow a private electricity developer that specializes in SMRs for data centers to partner with a data center developer to meet its desire for clean nuclear energy. This is a very lucrative market—there are significant incentives to specialize in meeting this demand, and this kind of pairing allows each party to do what it does best.

New deployments with less red tape would help test new technologies more quickly and identify areas to improve efficiency—which could reduce build time and lower costs in the long run.

There is a lot of uncertainty in today’s energy sector. There is also the opportunity and the need to innovate. Hopefully, Missouri can use the free market, rather than solely rely on government planning, to help usher in the next generation of nuclear technology.

The post Opening the Nuclear Sector Up to Innovation in Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Visit the site: moschoolrankings.org/

Susan Pendergrass and Avery Frank join Zach Lawhorn to discuss MOSchoolRankings.org, the Show-Me Institute’s website that assigns letter grades and GPAs to Missouri schools and districts using publicly available academic and spending data. They explore how the site works, why Missouri has lagged behind other states on accessible school report cards, and how the governor’s executive order requiring A through F grades may change that. They also discuss the most common objections to grading schools, how growth and proficiency data account for differences in student populations, the status of report card legislation in the 2026 session, and more.

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 Episode Transcript

Zach Lawhorn (00:00): Welcome to the Show-Me Institute podcast. I’m Zach Lawhorn from Show-Me Opportunity, and today I’m joined by Susan Pendergrass and Avery Frank from the Show-Me Institute. Susan, welcome back to the podcast as a guest — we’re really making a habit of this. Today we’re going to talk about MOSchoolRankings.org, which is a website that was launched a few years ago now at this point. So we’re going to talk about some updates, some new data, some improvements that have been made to the site. But for the handful of people who haven’t yet visited MOSchoolRankings.org, Susan, just give us a primer. What is it? What’s the idea of the site, and then we’ll kind of talk about the upgrades.

Susan Pendergrass (00:35): Yeah, MOSchoolRankings has been the subject of a couple of ironic moments in history, one being that we decided to launch this in 2018-19. We decided that because we’ve complained a lot about how the state doesn’t do informative report cards that parents can understand — simple, ideally with a letter grade because everyone gets that. And we looked at this model that is used by the Fraser Institute in Canada, where they also rank order all the schools. So you can see this school compared to the rest of the schools in the state is number one and this one is number 2,500. So we decided we would rank order and assign letter grades to only academic measures, which is really pretty groundbreaking. In 2018-19 we picked the only academic measures really available, which is proficiency in reading, proficiency in math, proficiency in reading and math for only low-income students to get a measure of achievement gaps or how districts deal with low-income students, a measure of how a particular school or district would expect to do in reading and math based on the percentage of low-income students they serve, and the growth model that was developed and is used by the state. ACT scores and graduation rates. So a total of the most would be 10 measures for each school that we assign letter grades to using a very simple curve where we took the full range of scores. For example, graduation rates might go from 75% to 100%. We divided that into five equal sections and assigned letter grades. So an F would be 75% to 80% and an A would be 95% to 100%. Did the same thing for all 10 measures — took the range, divided by five, and assigned the letter grades that way, which is a curve, and you get most of the schools and districts in the middle: Cs, 2.0 grade point averages. And we decided that when we set those grade intervals, we wouldn’t change them so that we could see over time whether Missouri schools are doing better or worse than they did in 2018-19. Same for districts. And of course we had no idea there would be a global pandemic. The next year’s data in 2019-20 was not usable, and then we get into 2021, still difficult with schools reopening. There was some pressure at that time to recalibrate all the grades and make them more based on the COVID environment, but we didn’t. We stuck with our 2018-19 letter grades, and we currently have six years of data on there now. We kept 2018-19 so that we can see whether schools have caught up or not from what happened during COVID. And from the first year, we took 10 letter grades and combined them into a GPA, just like you would see on a college or high school report card. Very simple approach — an A is worth four points and an F is worth zero points. And we combine them into a GPA.

What we did this year is we took the GPA and just made that a letter grade. Same GPA, same rank order, but for folks who don’t readily get the GPA thing, we just made the GPA also a letter grade. It’s kind of helpful and a little weird because you don’t get an overall letter grade on your high school report card or your college report card, but we took your overall GPA and turned it into a letter grade. At the same time, the governor in January signed an executive order requiring the state to create report cards and have a single letter grade on them. So we were already in the process of doing this, and our newest data on the website also reflect the single letter grade for each school and each district. We just happened to do it at the same time as the governor’s executive order. So it’s going to be really interesting to be able to compare our site and our letter grades to what the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education comes up with. It shouldn’t be the case that ours are dramatically different than theirs — we use proficiency, growth, and graduation rates just like they do — but ours is equally weighted, and time will tell how theirs are weighted.

Zach Lawhorn (04:49): All right, before we move on, I want to make one thing perfectly clear, because you used “we” and “our” a lot, and then you said “they” — we use the same data they use. So when people hear that Show-Me Institute has this website that grades schools and assigns GPAs, talk to me about the methodology, the data — what data are you using and where specifically did you get it?

Susan Pendergrass (05:11): So what we do is, when DESE releases test score data, we go to the DESE website and we download it. DESE does not release score data — we request it through a data request to DESE, they give it to us. We download the graduation rate data from DESE. We download the ACT data from DESE. That’s all of the data behind the letter grades. We simply take it from DESE. It’s the same data in the APR scores, the same data used for MSIP 6. It’s all the same test, same test scores. We don’t make any of it up. The only thing we do is put it on a curve and assign it a letter grade.

I should have mentioned that four years ago we added finance data to the website, so it’s kind of a dual website — one side is academic, one side is finance. That’s because every school district in the state does a massive comprehensive financial report to DESE every year called the Annual Secretary to the Board report, and it has so much revenue and expenditure data — like hundreds of lines of it. We decided to download those from DESE and convert them into something that a reasonable person could understand. It’s like 14 pages and very complicated. We convert that into just revenues and expenditures and donut charts, and we tried to make that as accessible to folks as well. So if you look at the academic data for a district, you can go over and look at the finance data and see how much they’re spending, how they’re spending it — down to the most granular detail: how much did they spend on substitute teachers, how much did they spend on advertising, how much did they spend on gas for the buses. So all of that is in there too, and we think that gives a really good comprehensive look at every school district.

Zach Lawhorn (07:00): And Avery has been heavily involved in this process, including the data checking. Tell me a little bit about what that process has been like. And Susan described what she hopes the website has accomplished — when you work on MOSchoolRankings.org, what do you hope it accomplishes? What’s your goal?

Avery Frank (07:18): Well, I hope it really makes it accessible to average everyday folks — for teachers, for administrators, for parents — because this data is very hard to interpret. It’s very messy. The Annual Secretary to the Board report she’s talking about — those things are very hard to compile together into one central location. It’s very hard to understand, there’s a lot of jargon. One of our missions is to make our education system as transparent and as accessible to parents and average citizens as possible. So we put it all together in one place and they can look at it and hopefully do some investigating themselves. Maybe it’s hard to find some of the outliers in spending, but if a parent who knows their district pretty well looks and sees they’re spending a lot on electricity, or buildings, or textbooks, they might think, wait, this seems way out of normal — and then they can go investigate and be more informed to hold their school districts and schools accountable, both on the grade side and the finance side.

Zach Lawhorn (08:30): And Susan, we so often do here in Missouri — let’s talk about what other states are doing. Is this idea of easily accessible, easily understandable report cards for schools a novel idea, or have other states been doing this for a while?

Susan Pendergrass (08:47): Well, Florida was kind of the leader in letter grades for schools and districts. They started in the 90s, so maybe 35 years ago. They started putting letter grades on schools and districts, and they immediately coupled that with: if a child goes to a D school for two years or an F school for one year, they don’t have to go there — they can choose a different public school, which makes a lot of sense.

During the last Trump administration, there was a big push for understandable report cards. Every state is required to produce report cards by federal law — if you take federal money, you have to make a report card for every school in the district. What those look like is kind of up in the air, and they’re supposed to meaningfully differentiate between schools and districts. Missouri has gotten by with, like Avery said, initially a school report card written at the 16th grade level, which is like graduate school — very jargony, a lot of acronyms. Box checked, we’ve got report cards. No one could understand them, but that’s fine. There has been a push at the federal level, and hackathons and websites to show you how to make good ones. There’s a large foundation called ExcelinEd that has devoted multiple resources to what makes a good report card. So there’s a push for this, and Missouri has really resisted it until the executive order by the governor this year.

What Missouri does — and I think it’s the opposite of leading — is it puts the word “accredited,” “partially accredited,” or “unaccredited” on districts, and out of 520 districts, about six — I mean, 98% are fully accredited. So they use this system where everyone passes; maybe six out of 520 don’t. And it’s really misleading for parents. And worse, when St. Louis became fully accredited even though individual school buildings weren’t, they put “fully accredited” posters on the buildings. I think parents want this information. Parents talk at soccer fields or after-school programs — they kind of know if their school is doing okay or not. But no one is helping them get really easy-to-understand information. Lots of other states do letter grades. States that stopped doing letter grades, like Indiana, are going back to letter grades. It’s the one thing that everyone understands. So we are not in any way breaking new ground here.

Avery Frank (11:23): And again, with transparency and accessibility — I think Susan is definitely right about DESE just following the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law, because they really do report just the numbers. There’s not a lot of context for them. Like if you see a district that says 40% proficient in English, is that really good? Is that bad? How does that compare to everyone else? You can’t just report the data flat out for just one district because you don’t know the context. Maybe 40% for a 100% low-income district would be excellent. But 40% for a Clayton or a Ladue would be horrible. So you have to have context both for the types of students that are there and the growth of that district. Are they doing better than they have in the past? And are they doing better in comparison to everyone? Because if everyone is failing, the scale is going to adjust. If you have a lot of people failing and some really succeeding, that breaks the curve, and we have to start looking at what those other districts are doing because it shows that good performance is possible. That’s why I really think a report card with relative context, based on how their students are and how the rest of the state is doing, is really important.

Zach Lawhorn (12:45): All right, so Susan, my understanding when we started this project a few years ago was that our hope was that the state of Missouri would kind of take the baton — that we would start this, but it would be great if the state was able to produce an easily accessible, understandable school report card that Show-Me Institute and Show-Me Opportunity had nothing to do with. Am I correct?

Susan Pendergrass (13:12): That’s right. It was like six or seven years ago when we started with 2018-19 data, and we just posted 2024-25. I didn’t want to be in the school report card business — I don’t work for DESE — but there was a vacuum of information in the state that we decided to fill. And we have said that we’re committed to filling it until the state takes over. That could happen with the new report cards. They have access to all the data, better data than we have access to — student-level data. They can do much more in-depth analysis and I suspect they will. The governor’s executive order includes something called “growth to proficiency,” which is a new model that the state is going to have to create using experts in the field. Maybe they’ll be better. I suspect that when DESE puts out the report cards for the first time with letter grades, there’s going to be a lot of conversation. There’s going to be a lot of pushback. I don’t think many people whose kids are in F schools will be shocked, but I think some people whose kids are in maybe C schools will be shocked because they’re under the impression their kids are in A schools. It’s going to be interesting. Typically when you survey parents, they give their own kid’s school very high marks, so it’s going to be a dose of reality for a lot of folks. And I think that’s the conversation that we’ve been wanting to start for a long time, because if you just listened to what the state and legislators say, you would think that Missouri is doing just fine — and we’re not.

Zach Lawhorn (14:42): And Avery, Susan mentioned pushback. As you’ve been working on this project and following the governor’s executive order for the state to produce A through F report cards, what are some of the common objections to putting letter grades on schools, or really just making school performance and spending data more accessible?

Avery Frank (15:07): Honestly, the most pushback I hear is against the Missouri Assessment Program, or the MAP itself. A couple of senators said that it’s a “useless autopsy” and that we shouldn’t tie any incentives to a flawed test, because a lot of people want a test that tests throughout the year — more of a formative assessment rather than a summative assessment at the end of the year. But the MAP is a good test at the end of the year because we get to have everyone take the same test at the same time and then compare the results. That’s what it’s really for, and there’s a lot of pushback on that idea in general.

If we don’t have those kinds of tests, we can’t see how everyone’s doing relative to one another. There wouldn’t be any context if we’re not comparing to one another. If everyone’s doing their own test and their own grades, they can see how they’re performing relative to themselves, but they can’t see how they’re performing relative to one another. Of course there’s also some pushback about which type of grade should be weighted more — should we weight growth more, total proficiency more, expected proficiency versus actual proficiency more? There are going to be arguments for which rating scale should be used and what the weighting should be, because that will favor different districts.

Susan Pendergrass (16:47): Here’s the pushback we get: schools aren’t letter grades, schools aren’t test scores, teachers do so many things that have nothing to do with how kids do on a test, letter grades are racist and classist because it’s mostly low-income children of color who go to the D and F schools, and if we point that out then we are being racist towards them. We are not acknowledging the hard work of teachers. There’s already a video circulating against school report cards because this is not how schools should be measured — because they do so much more. I hear the same tropes over and over.

On the other hand, I think it was President George W. Bush who said, if you don’t measure it, you can’t fix it. The reality is we might not want to look at our bank balance or the scale, but if we just say no, I’m so much more than my credit score, then we’ll never fix it. And this is what Missouri’s been doing for a long time — let’s not make anyone feel bad. We don’t want the kids to feel bad, the parents to feel bad, the teachers to feel bad. And somebody even said in the discussion around report cards happening right now, because the legislature is considering legislation on report cards in addition to the executive order: why couldn’t every school be an A? They really want to believe that we can create this environment where everyone feels good about what’s happening.

But in the states that have been doing this for a long time, like Florida — not only has Florida had letter grades for 30 years, but as too many schools and districts get A’s and B’s, they raise the bar. They move the goalposts further to push schools and districts harder. As a result, Florida fourth graders are top 10 in the country on the national test, where we’re in the low 30s, more like 36 to 38 out of 50 states. Florida is top 10 because they keep pushing themselves, and this is how you push. The pushback on report cards is basically: it makes people feel bad, it’s racist, and it doesn’t acknowledge all the work that schools do.

Zach Lawhorn (18:54): Okay, so let’s engage with the context argument that a school is more than a letter grade. As the legislature moves through this process now, moving on from the governor’s EO to actually forming legislation, Susan, as they design the criteria, what are some of the things they should keep in mind that can hopefully account for some of that context?

Susan Pendergrass (19:24): DESE in doing the executive order report cards is looking at proficiency, growth, and growth to proficiency. But it’s going to be really interesting, especially in how they weight them. What we found with our letter grades is some districts do really well on proficiency and not so well on growth, because their kids come in better prepared. In some of the higher-income districts, kids aren’t getting a year’s worth of growth in a year, and I would argue that they should. And then you see some real standouts that serve more disadvantaged students — their proficiency numbers are pretty low, but their growth is more than expected. Their growth is higher than the statewide average. Basically, the state reports growth in terms of whether it’s higher or lower than the statewide growth, and some of them have higher-than-average growth. Those are schools and districts we should be looking at really closely to see what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.

How they weight the measures is going to make a big difference, because if they weight growth really high, then some of the districts you think are the highest performing in the state will be B’s and C’s. They’re looking for schools and districts that are getting kids the furthest down the road, not just the benchmark of proficiency.

Zach Lawhorn (20:49): Okay, so it’s correct to say that for people who are not familiar with growth and proficiency, if the claim is it’s unfair to grade schools because they serve different student populations, that is acknowledged and accounted for in these models.

Susan Pendergrass (21:08): Yeah, and people who just believe their kids go to a fantastic school are going to have to keep believing it regardless of what the letter grade is. But it is going to find those high-flying performers that are doing really well with growth and growth to proficiency, even if their test scores are low. And then you’re going to have some schools that just don’t have good proficiency and don’t have good growth, and a lot of their kids are below basic. So this growth-to-proficiency model is about how you get the lowest performers to move hopefully up toward grade level, and it’s going to point those out as well. I’m looking forward to seeing exactly what they come up with. The executive order has some flexibility in it so that the experts and statisticians putting it together can determine the best mix. It’s going to be really interesting to see how it turns out and to see that first set of grades in September.

Zach Lawhorn (22:05): Avery, we’ve got MOSchoolRankings.org, then we’ve got the governor’s EO, and currently the legislature is working on legislation. So as we sit here in the second half of the 2026 session, what’s the status of the legislation?

Avery Frank (22:22): The legislation passed out of the House already and they’re hearing it in the Senate now. It’s undergoing some changes. We’ll see how it turns out in the Senate. There was a school climate survey that was attached to it that’s up in the air as well. We will see what the final bill looks like. Hopefully the legislation sticks close to the governor’s EO, which was really good in my opinion. There are a lot of great aspects to it. There’s going to be a lot of senators trying to advocate for their district — some are going to want more weight towards proficiency, some are going to want more weight towards growth, some are going to want no ratings at all because their districts are doing badly and they want to cover it up. So there are going to be a lot of different political moves trying to mess with the grading scale, and I hope it sticks as close to the EO as possible because I really do think it was a well-written EO.

Susan Pendergrass (23:33): I agree. The legislature can do what they want — if they pass a really good school report card bill, that’d be great. But I wonder if it wouldn’t be smarter to let the executive order play out and get that first set of grades and see how they look. Then the legislature next January can start thinking about what would be a better way of doing it. They’re kind of jumping the gun by wanting to get it into legislation. And I suspect, like Avery said, it’s possible that some lawmakers are thinking they don’t like the EO and they can do something with the law to water it down. But I don’t think a watered-down version is going to end up getting to the governor’s desk. So I think the EO is probably the most watered-down version that would get to the governor’s desk, and what might make more sense is to reconsider it in the future when we know how it’s even going to work.

Zach Lawhorn (24:35): All right, well, it sounds like that as with all things, once the political process kicks in, there’s a lot to be considered and debated. For now, until the state of Missouri produces something great and Susan and Avery get to spend more of their time on other projects, you can go to MOSchoolRankings.org. You can find performance-level data, GPA, letter grades, and spending data. Susan and Avery, before we wrap up, is there anything we haven’t covered that you want to make sure we highlight?

Susan Pendergrass (25:17): Yeah, just one thing — when it first came out in 2020, it took folks a while to understand that when grades are curved, you get a lot of Cs. If the statewide average is a C, then a C means you’re at the statewide average. If you get a B, you’re better than the statewide average. If you get a D, you’re worse. I think people — maybe thinking of ourselves or our kids or our grandchildren — think the only good grade is an A and a B is okay. It’s really not that. A C is average. A C is a good grade. It means you’re at the statewide average. A B is better and an A is better than that. We didn’t use grade inflation where everyone gets an A.

Zach Lawhorn (26:07): And on the site you can find the full methodology — we post all that. There’s a glossary of terms. And you can download the full data set. So if you go to MOSchoolRankings.org and you say these people are full of it, you have access to the same data that Susan and Avery had.

Susan Pendergrass (26:29): Transparency was always our goal with this whole thing — it’s not my numbers. Our goal throughout has been just to make a transparent system. I’ve had members of the media writing stories who find it easier to just download our data set rather than go to 10 different DESE files. Our finance data set is like a lifesaver for folks because we took something very complex and made it accessible. I’ve had people use our data in lawsuits — people arguing about which school is better. I think a lot of folks have gotten comfortable with our method and now use our rankings when they come out. A lot of schools are doing better than they did before the pandemic — not every school is doing worse, so you can find those schools too. I’ve had school boards that want us to present on how it works, and I do think we’ve had a lot of buy-in on the method. And one thing I can say in our defense is we haven’t changed anything — everything is the same as it’s been for seven years. There was a time when DESE switched how they calculated the growth numbers from being centered on zero to centered on 50, or the reverse. So we have to make changes as DESE makes changes. But other than changes that DESE has made, we haven’t changed one thing. We now have line graphs so you can look at how your school was doing in 2018-19 and see how it’s doing six years later. That’s all really important.

Avery Frank (28:07): The website has a lot of cool features. It’s very interesting if you want to do some research on both the finance side and the academic side. There’s a misconception in education that more money equals better results. And this is just directly pulled from MOSchoolRankings — Valley Park has 34% free and reduced-price lunch students, they spend $36,000 per student, and they got a C. But then you look at Festus, which has 28% free and reduced-price lunch students, they spend $13,000 per student, and they received an A. There are a lot of districts like that. You can compare and ask: wait, these districts spend a lot more money, they have the same types of students, but they’re doing a lot worse. You can use that data to show that it’s not just about money. And the last thing I’d add is that we have both schools and school districts. So if you want to see how your district as a whole is doing, you can look at that. And if you want to look at your specific school within your district, you can compare schools within your district and across the state, which is also a very cool feature.

Zach Lawhorn (29:18): And you mentioned spending data — if you go to the home page of MOSchoolRankings.org, in the upper right-hand corner there’s a button that says “Rank by Spending,” and it’s a whole new world from the performance data to the spending data.

Susan Pendergrass (29:31): Any feedback is welcome, right?

Zach Lawhorn (29:34): Yeah, we take notes. We take comments. Okay, one more time: MOSchoolRankings.org. Go to the website, find your school. Susan, Avery, thank you very much.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Grading Missouri Schools with Susan Pendergrass and Avery Frank appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

While the Missouri Legislature continues to debate A–F school report cards, the Show-Me Institute recently released our annual report card update on MOSchoolRankings.org.

Our rankings are built on a model that incorporates 10 academic indicators of student success. All data are sourced from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), and all English/language arts (ELA) and math scores are based on the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP). Each component is weighted equally, and a full explanation of the methodology is available online.

Table 1 shows all 24 public school districts and charter schools that received an “A” in the 2024–2025 school year.

Suburban and rural districts dominate the top rankings, with numerous districts from St. Louis County (Ladue, Brentwood, Clayton). Many of the rural school districts are exceptionally small: Skyline has 81 students and Thornfield has 48. The largest school district on the list is Nixa Public Schools (near Springfield) with 6,518 students.

The suburban districts have relatively low rates of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (FRPL)—a common proxy for school poverty rate. Fewer than 10 percent of Ladue and Clayton students were eligible for FRPL, with Brentwood at 18 percent, Nixa at 26 percent, Festus at 28 percent, and Ozark at 35 percent. However, some rural “A” districts have a sizeable number of lower-income students.

Mansfield R-IV, which had 60 percent of its 622 students qualify for FRPL, performed above average in almost every single category (except in ELA growth). Richwoods R-VII, a small rural district about an hour from St. Louis, had 100 percent of its 125 students qualify for FRPL and had particularly impressive scores in math. These examples demonstrate that low-income schools can achieve academic success.

There is a lot more to delve into for academic performance. Table 1 is just one snapshot of what is available on MOSchoolRankings.org. Accountability tools like these can help highlight success stories, identify areas for improvement, and provide a clearer picture of how schools across Missouri are performing.

The post Looking at Missouri’s “A” Districts appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A version of the following commentary appeared in the Columbia Missourian.

As technology companies try to meet the skyrocketing demand for AI-specialized computing capacity, they are dotting the country with data centers to the dismay of some and the delight of others. As is all too often the case in Missouri, many of these companies are being offered taxpayer-supported subsidies or tax exemptions.

For example, Independence, Missouri, is giving Nebius more than $6 billion in tax breaks over the next 20 years for a “hyper-scale” data center, and Montgomery County has offered Amazon hundreds of millions in tax abatements to build a data center near New Florence. But why would subsidies be needed when it seems like data-center developers have money to burn and are desperate for suitable building locations?

Recent actions of data-center developers suggest that it is not the cost of building and operating those facilities that is the barrier; the main problems appear to be finding pathways to secure reliable energy generation and getting their centers online smoothly and quickly (speed-to-operation).

These two obstacles are so serious that the major technology companies (Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc.) recently met with President Trump and signed the “Ratepayer Protection Pledge” to supply and pay for their own power for their AI data centers.

Why would these companies agree to take on this expense? Because their constraint is not cash. For these firms, time is money. The costs of delays in permitting and interconnection outweigh the value of a local tax incentive.

The negative effects of economic development subsidies and tax breaks are well known. When local officials offer these incentives, they diminish positive benefits that could come from a new data-center development: increased property-tax revenue to fill in the gaps for local services or be used to lower the overall tax rate of the community.

With all of this in mind, rather than just doing what most other states do (handing out checks or tax exemptions) Missouri should work on policies that actually deliver what these companies need most: pathways to secure and reliable energy generation, regulatory certainty, and speed-to-operation.

For local communities, this means they should not offer taxpayer dollars. Even with big tech agreeing to pay for their own power, many municipalities will still try to lure projects with incentives. No doubt the companies will take whatever money is offered to them, but subsidies are unlikely to significantly drive their decisions about where to locate.

Instead, local communities should offer a stable, predictable permitting environment and a suitable location to build. That would help address the greater desire for certainty and speed-to-operation.

And at the state level we should think even bigger. Policies like consumer-regulated electricity (CRE) could help make Missouri a true hub for data center development—without using unnecessary subsidies.

CRE would enable private electricity providers to serve large, energy-intensive customers independent of the existing, permission-heavy grid structure by allowing them to build their own power plants. Rather than spreading the costs for this infrastructure, CRE would create a “parallel path to energy abundance” —one financed by the large customers who demand the power.

CRE would allow these data centers to work with a private partner to meet their own energy needs, with less red tape, more certainty, more control, and more freedom to innovate. These benefits are likely to be more appealing than subsidies.

Unfortunately, offering subsidies seems to be a reflexive reaction in Missouri when there is an opportunity to attract a new business. But especially in this case, Missouri would be better off focusing on what the data center sector really needs. Efficient regulatory and permitting policies (like CRE), a predictable and stable environment in which to construct, and abundant energy would be far better suited to attracting and improving data center development than taxpayer dollars.

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The Missouri House of Representatives recently passed a bill requiring that the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) assign A–F letter grades to schools and districts statewide. The bill now heads to the Senate, which is also considering its own version.

The legislation is meant to build on and improve Governor Kehoe’s executive order from January. Unfortunately, it does not improve on the executive order; in fact, the version that emerged from the House is much worse.

The main problem with the House bill is that it has veered off topic. Governor Kehoe’s short and simple executive order mandates letter grades based on academic performance. This is what we need. The House bill adds language that would create new school climate ratings based on surveys of teachers, parents, and students, which would also go on the report card.

This is problematic for three reasons:

Most importantly, it will distract us from academic outcomes. Academics are where our schools are struggling, and until we focus on them, the situation is not going to improve. This is illustrated most easily with data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, which is widely viewed as providing the most credible test data in the country. Here are charts showing changes over time in Missouri’s national rank on NAEP, in 4th- and 8th-grade reading, since about the turn of the century:

Our 4th-grade reading results are especially bleak—we rank 38th out of the 50 states as of 2024, whereas two decades earlier we ranked in the low twenties. Today, an alarming 42 percent of our 4th graders score Below Basic on NAEP.

Making matters worse, our ranking decline since about 2015 is in the context of generally declining test scores nationwide. Our scores are declining faster than the rest of a declining nation.

Governor Kehoe was correct to focus on academic outcomes, and the focus should stay that way.

Unlike data on academic achievement, which we already collect, survey data for this new school-climate requirement do not exist. It is difficult to develop and implement a high-quality survey with a high response rate. Have our lawmakers considered how we would get these surveys done?

As one of several concrete technical issues, consider the survey response rate. We cannot make parents fill out surveys. So, what if they don’t? What if we end up with schools and districts where fewer than 10 percent of parents fill out a survey (which is very possible)? Are we going to hold a school with a 10-percent parent response rate accountable for negative survey results? If the results look good, are we going to give the school a high rating?

Even if we ignore the first two issues, do we really want to compel DESE to undertake this work? We hear a lot of grumbling around the capitol about how DESE has gotten too big. This is how that happens. Developing and administering surveys to Missouri’s more than 800,000 students and their parents, and 70,000 teachers, across thousands of schools and hundreds of districts would require more administrative expansion. That is far outside the low-cost, straightforward scope of the original report card plan.

Governor Kehoe issued a clear and simple executive order on school and district report cards in January, which properly emphasizes academic performance. The order is fundamentally sound. There’s always room for improvement, but the legislation that came out of the House has moved this effort in the wrong direction. We hope our lawmakers can get it back on track.

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In Jefferson City, there have been questions about the balance between academic promotion and social promotion in K–12 schools. In particular, there have been concerns about the effects a third-grade retention policy could have on social settings in schools (such as having 16-year-olds attending middle school).

It is an understandable worry. The movie Billy Madison was made about this very idea. However, in the context of Missouri’s pending retention legislation, House Bill 2872 and Senate Bill 1442, there should not be concern about Adam Sandler remaining in classrooms for years and years.

Under both these bills, a third-grade student can be promoted to fourth grade if they pass the objective reading assessment at the end of third grade or qualify for a good-cause exemption. Amongst those exemptions is one for students who “have already been retained at least once in any of grades kindergarten through grade three.”

This exemption is important to note because it prevents a student from being retained multiple times in early grades. In the existing system, there are already students who have been retained in grades K–3. The potential change would simply be in the number of students who repeat a grade.

House Bill 2872 and Senate Bill 1442 would not create new social problems in schools. Instead, these bills would ensure that more students get the best chance to become confident, capable readers, while maintaining the balance between academic promotion and social promotion that already exists in Missouri’s education system.

The post Third-Grade Retention Will Not Recreate Billy Madison in Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

David Stokes, Elias Tsapelas, and Avery Frank join Zach Lawhorn to break down the latest from the 2026 Missouri legislative session, including updates on the push to eliminate Missouri’s income tax. They also discuss why the film tax credit doesn’t work out for Missouri taxpayers, which provisions of the early literacy bills are still moving forward, the growing debate over data center incentives and energy demands, and more.

Listen on Spotify

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Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Income Tax Elimination, Early Literacy Bills, and Data Centers in Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A version of the following commentary appeared in the Columbia Missourian.

Missouri, like many states, mandates that a certain share of electricity come from renewable energy sources. Those sources typically include solar, wind, and biomass—but in many states, including Missouri, they exclude nuclear energy.

A productive debate could be had about whether state government should issue any such mandates. But in the meantime, legislators in Jefferson City have introduced several bills using different approaches, each of which would broaden Missouri’s existing standard to include nuclear energy.

Governor Kehoe discussed the issue in his recent State of the State Address, recognizing the long-standing mismatch between policy and reality.

What Is Missouri’s Current Policy?

Missouri’s current renewable portfolio standard (RPS) mandates that no less than 15 percent of each electric utility’s sales come from generated or purchased renewable energy resources (such as solar, wind, biomass, small hydropower, and other non-nuclear sources certified by the state as a renewable). Many other states have adopted similar standards.

Justifications for RPSs vary. Some view them primarily as a tool to improve air quality or limit greenhouse gases. Others argue that portfolio standards help newer energy technologies compete with established fossil fuels or ensure a diverse and resilient mix of energy sources. In any case, if Missouri is going to have an RPS, nuclear energy should be included.

Is Nuclear Energy Clean?

If Missouri’s RPS exists in order to protect the environment, nuclear energy’s exclusion is unreasonable.

Nuclear energy is a zero (or near-zero) emissions energy source, in terms of both criteria pollutants (those that affect air quality) and greenhouse gases.

Further, to produce the same level of electricity, solar farms need 31 times more land than nuclear plants, while onshore wind farms need 173 times more land. In terms of total direct and indirect land use, nuclear is by far the most efficient.

What About Nuclear Waste?

This concern is common but often misguided. Nuclear energy does produce waste, but the waste is compact, carefully managed, and tightly regulated. Much of what is labeled “waste” still contains usable energy. In fact, only about four percent of nuclear fuel is truly unusable after each use, and the United States could reduce nuclear waste in terms of both volume and radioactivity if the industry recycled used fuel. While existing American nuclear power plants are not well equipped to use spent fuel, new advanced reactor designs are increasingly capable of using it to generate electricity.

Regardless, the presence of safely stored waste should not prevent nuclear energy from being included in an updated portfolio.

Government Interference in the Energy Market

Past arguments have held that subsidies level the playing field for renewable energy. Yet, while solar and wind have expanded rapidly in recent years, only seven nuclear plants have been constructed in the U.S. since 1990. Factors such as regulatory burden have also contributed to nuclear energy’s stagnation, but government interference has played a role. Subsidies, tax-credits, and mandates have actually significantly distorted the market in favor of renewables.

The lion’s share of the more than $80 billion in federal support for renewables came through tax expenditures—driven overwhelmingly by the investment tax credit (ITC) for solar projects, which is claimed when a project begins operation, and the production tax credit (PTC) for wind generation. State RPSs create guaranteed demand for these resources, while federal tax policy lowers the cost of supplying them—effectively a double incentive.

This is not to argue that nuclear energy should be subsidized to a similar degree. However, including nuclear energy in Missouri’s RPS would at least make existing policy more even-handed. Nuclear energy meets growing electricity demand cleanly and reliably. The Missouri Legislature should update the state’s RPS to recognize this fact.

The post Missouri Should Update Its Renewable Portfolio Standard to Include Nuclear Energy appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Last legislative session, Missouri lawmakers took a swing at addressing anxiety over data centers increasing electricity rates with the passage of Senate Bill (SB) 4. This bill requires that customers with loads over 100 megawatts (MW) pay their share of costs associated with connecting to the regulated grid (the Missouri Public Service Commissions recently expanded that rule to 75 MW). For reference, 100 MW is roughly equivalent to the electricity needs of 80,000 U.S. households.

There has been confusion about whether average Missourians’ rates would increase due to data centers. It’s understandable that people might be confused about some language in the bill. For example, what exactly does “any unjust or unreasonable costs arising from the service to such customers” or “pay their share of costs” mean?

A recent hearing at a St. Louis Board of Alderman committee meeting brought some needed clarity to the matter. When questioned, Ameren’s manager of economic development clarified that “all Ameren customers, including residential customers, pay for expanding the grid through building new power plants through rate increases, and that may be needed to accommodate large-load customers.”

In plainer English, average Missouri ratepayers would pay for new power plants constructed to meet data center demand—which could be a hefty bill if Missouri does indeed need new power plants.

Major technology companies (Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, xAI, Oracle, and Open AI) are meeting with President Trump to sign a pledge that they will supply and pay for their own power for artificial intelligence data centers.

So average Missourians won’t be paying for new data centers at all?

Potentially, but it depends on the deal that is finalized with the major tech companies.

While there is some uncertainty about who will pay for what, Missouri could bring clarity by allowing consumer-regulated electricity (CRE).

CRE offers a private, parallel pathway to energy abundance, and gives data centers a private partner (CRE utility) to meet their own energy needs with less red tape, more certainty, more control, and more freedom to innovate. A CRE utility would develop and operate generation on behalf of large-load customers that prefer not to own and operate power plants themselves.

SB 4 was a good start, but Missouri can go further in protecting ratepayers and attracting investment. Allowing CRE could create a clear, structural pathway that could not only further protect ratepayers, but also provide attractive, tangible benefits to the developers paying for their own energy needs.

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Momentum for early literacy reform continues in Jefferson City, as House Bill (HB) 2872 recently passed out of committee.

While this version removed several provisions from the original bill, it retains the core components necessary to meaningfully improve early reading outcomes. As HB 2872 continues to move through the legislative process, it is critical to preserve two elements.

#1. A Clear, Firm, and Objective Third-Grade Retention Policy

Under HB 2872, a student who scores at the lowest level on a state-approved Missouri reading screener will be retained unless the student completes a summer reading program and scores above the lowest level on a retest opportunity, or qualifies for a good-cause exemption. Good-cause exemptions apply only to students with limited English proficiency, disabilities, or students who have already been retained.

Having a firm third-grade retention policy is important. An analysis of multiple states’ literacy policies found no consistent evidence that reading scores increase in states without a retention component. Critically, the value of the retention component is not just for students who are retained—it is also for all the students who are not retained because their reading scores improve. In most states with retention policies, the retention rate ends up being low; it is the threat of retention, more than retention itself, that spurs widespread literacy gains.

A number of states—Mississippi, Louisiana, Indiana, Florida, and Tennessee—use a rule-based retention policy. These states have seen significant gains in reading, and all have higher test scores than Missouri.

Without a rule-based policy, teachers and parents talk themselves into promotions that are ultimately to the detriment of children. It feels mean to hold a child back. But it is no kindness to promote a child from the third to fourth grade if the child cannot read. It is not setting the child up for success.

HB 2872 requires that parents be notified if their child is identified as having a reading deficiency at any time during grades 1–3. This level of transparency can help parents be part of the solution for their children.

Retention can be a difficult experience, but research shows it is much easier on young children; it is primarily students in later grades who are negatively impacted when retained. Younger students who are retained under these types of policies benefit tremendously in terms of on-grade academic achievement, even years after retention.

#2. Accountability for Teacher Preparation Programs

It is also critical to align the training in teacher-preparation programs with evidence-based reading instruction. In 2023, the National Council on Teacher Quality evaluated teacher-preparation programs nationwide and awarded nearly half of Missouri’s participating institutions with an “F” for their coverage of scientifically based reading instruction.

HB 2872 allows the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) to bring teacher preparation programs into alignment with the science of reading for the benefit of our students. Specifically, it allows DESE to review teacher preparation programs for compliance with evidence-based reading instruction and prohibit noncompliant programs from certifying new teachers.

The new version of HB 2872 that emerged from committee has changed in the following ways. The new bill:

• Has no explicit ban of the use of three-cueing (a reading method relying more on cues, guessing, and memorization rather than systematic phonics) in K-12 classrooms.
• Eliminates the proposed $500 incentive to districts for students who remediate a substantial reading deficiency.
• Redefines the Missouri Reading Screener to include multiple DESE-approved assessments rather than a single (new) statewide test.

These changes weaken the bill, but are secondary to the structural pillars of reform: an objective, assessment-based retention rule and stronger accountability for teacher preparation programs. As long as these pillars are in place (especially retention), HB 2872 represents meaningful progress.

We encourage our Missouri lawmakers to continue to take our literacy crisis seriously and to enact policies that help more Missouri students become confident, capable readers.

The post Early Literacy Reform Advances in the House appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Senate Bill 895 would continue to strengthen Missouri’s occupational licensing laws. The bill mirrors SB 61 from last session (which nearly reached the governor’s desk), and would establish a form of licensing reciprocity for professionals who were not required to hold a license in their previous state but must obtain one when moving to Missouri.

The Mechanisms and Potential Intent of SB 895

There’s been a recent push in Missouri to join interstate compacts for various professions. While those may make things easier for Missouri’s licensing boards, they primarily help people leaving Missouri to work in other states. This bill focuses on making it easier for people to come here.

Specifically, SB 895 would allow professionals who have been working for three years in states that do not require a license to receive a two-year, nonrenewable, temporary license in that same field when they move to work in Missouri.

Oversight bodies can still charge fees and require that applicants take license-related exams. The goal of this bill does not appear to be reducing licensing requirements, but to allow people who move to Missouri to work during the process of acquiring a license. This is evidenced by a provision that requires the individual to complete Missouri requirements and apply for a permanent license once their temporary license expires.

Currently, unlicensed professionals would need to apply for a permanent license if they were to relocate to Missouri, so SB 895 would certainly improve the status quo. But it also forces us to consider why Missouri requires a license in certain occupations when other states do not.

Considering What Missouri Licenses

With every single occupational license, there are real costs: higher prices for consumers, higher barriers to entry for workers (resulting in fewer providers), reduced innovation, and loss of time and money for licensees. The central question in occupational licensing is whether these costs

are justified by clear and demonstrable benefits to public safety or product quality.

It is not unprecedented for Missouri to require unnecessary and burdensome licenses. For example, our state recently reformed licensing requirements for hair braiders.

Over the past few years, our annual Blueprint has included a section outlining the need for a review of Missouri’s existing occupational licenses. Many licenses are created and then exist for years without scrutiny. Licenses that are found to do more harm than good ought to be eliminated.

SB 895 would be another step toward improving Missouri’s existing licensing regime. However, if individuals are permitted to work in other states without a license, Missouri should carefully evaluate whether a permanent license is truly necessary here. Our state has been a leader in occupational licensing reform, and we should continue that trend.

The post Another Step for Improving Missouri’s Licensing Regime appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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As a writer, there are moments when someone else articulates an idea so well that rewriting it in my own words would be unnecessary. A recent op-ed in The Hill did exactly that, clearly laying out the energy challenges facing the United States:

The U.S. electricity sector is a slow-moving maze of regulations, shaped by decade-long transmission approvals, time-intensive interconnection studies for new generators and large new customers, and overlapping layers of state, regional and federal bureaucracy. . . . The regulatory thicket surrounding the electricity industry was tolerable when the pace of change was slow. However, with the rise of AI and renewed growth from manufacturing and electrification, we can no longer endure a sclerotic grid.

In addition to reforming our rigid, reluctant-to-adapt grid, there are questions about whether average ratepayers should be on the hook for increased electricity demand being driven by a few large customers.

In the midst of all of these concerns, there is a U.S. Senate bill that could help fix the problem: S.3585 – DATA Act of 2026. The bill was recently referred to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

I have written about consumer-regulated electricity (CRE) for Missouri, which would reduce the number of state-level regulations that off-grid CRE utilities (CREUs) would face. (You can click here if you’re interested in what a CRE policy might look like in practice.) However, even if it were allowed in Missouri, there would still be many federal-level regulations that would diminish the benefits of the new practice.

That is where the DATA Act becomes so vital. The act would exempt certain new CREUs from specific federal regulations that apply to the broader grid. If our state and federal governments approve CRE, there would be a pathway for large electricity users like data centers and aluminum plants to more quickly generate their own electricity without impacting the rates of average Missourians. That would be a win for all of us.

All of this suggests that the DATA Act of 2026 is something to watch in Washington, D.C. But Missouri should not wait until the federal government makes its move. We should be proactive and allow CREs in our state, creating a pathway to address modern energy challenges that would become even more viable if federal reforms under the DATA Act follow.

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The investigation and review are intended to protect ratepayers, assess Missouri’s future energy needs, and manage Missouri’s natural resources effectively. These are good objectives, but the hard question is finding a policy solution to match all those goals.

One option I have written about, consumer-regulated electricity (CRE), is worth considering. (If you’re unfamiliar with CRE, you can click the link to learn more.)

Instead of placing new data centers on the existing regulated grid, we could match data centers with an independent CRE utility (CREU). Furthermore, if electricity demand for these data centers falls short of its sky-high projections, then the excess capacity will have been a poor investment. This protects ratepayers by putting private companies on the hook for that risk instead.

There are benefits to data center developers as well. A CREU can be structured around the developer’s reliability needs and preferred energy resources. Projects could also require less transmission, as new generation facilities could be built near their customer base. CRE could be a reliable, economical, and sustainable energy solution to meet current and future energy needs.

Speed to operation is vital in today’s economy, and data center projects have experienced difficulties securing permissions from the various layers of government. While many hurdles would still remain (like local zoning), CRE projects would not require permissions from the Missouri Public Service Commission since they would not be connected to the regulated grid. At the federal level, Senator Tom Cotton recently introduced the DATA Act, which would exempt CREUs from federal regulations not designed for on-site, self-contained power systems. While still early, this legislation is worth monitoring and could further increase the speed to operation.

The governor has made it clear that he wants to meet growing energy demand in a way that protects ratepayers and addresses Missouri’s current and future energy needs. CRE is a policy approach that matches those objectives.

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