In this episode, James V. Shuls speaks with Michael Q. McShane, Director of National Research at EdChoice and Senior Fellow of Education Policy at the Show-Me Institute, about his latest paper, ‘Why Markets Matter in Education.’ They explore the growing role of market forces in education, the benefits of choice and competition for schools and students, the impact of educational marketplaces on innovation and quality, the challenges of government intervention in schooling, and the long-term advantages of allowing parents to shape their children’s educational journeys.

Read the essay here.

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Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

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Michael Q. McShane, Director of National Research at EdChoice, Susan Pendergrass, Director of Research and Education Policy at Show-Me Institute, and Patricia Levesque, Chief Executive Officer of ExcelinEd discuss the state of accountability in education, why state leadership is critical, and how Missouri and other states can reform their accountability systems.

Accountabilty Matters

Missouri schools are failing to teach the core subjects of reading and math and the most recent test scores show that students are falling further behind. Missouri’s Department of Secondary and Elementary (MO DESE) has not offered the level of transparency regarding student performance that is necessary to create an education system focused on higher standards, reducing achievement gaps, and results-based accountability. The status quo is leaving thousands of students behind without the fundamental skills to pursue higher education or compete in the modern labor market. In response to DESE’s failure to perform one of its most basic functions, we launched The Missouri School Rankings Project and MoSchoolRankings.org.

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Dr. Michael Q. McShane is the director of national research at EdChoice and Senior Fellow of Education Policy at the Show-Me Institute.

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Earlier this week, Susan Pendergrass wrote a blog post addressing some of the criticisms levied by The Kansas City Star editorial board about a bill that creates an Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA) program in Missouri:

Big shock—now that the Missouri legislature has finally created a program to give school choice to students from low-income families and students with disabilities, the misinformation campaign against the program has begun. Case in point: The Kansas City Star editorial board has fired a first shot at the Empowerment Scholarship Account program, and it has gone wide.

On May 19, Show-Me Institute Senior Fellow of Education Policy Michael Q. McShane joined The Pete Mundo Morning Show to set the record straight about Missouri’s new, yet to be signed into law, ESA program.

Listen Here

The post Setting the Record Straight About Missouri’s New ESA Program appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Two paragraphs in the Post-Dispatch story are worth highlighting:

Normandy schools have not been fully accredited for the last decade and are under the control of the Missouri Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. Starting in 2013, the district paid tuition and transportation for about 1,000 students to transfer to higher-performing districts, as allowed under state law. The district nearly went bankrupt after spending $35 million on the transfer program. It returned to provisional accreditation in 2017, effectively ending the transfer program.

The district’s test scores still rank as lowest in the state, with 15% of students proficient in English and 7% proficient in math in 2019. There have been recent improvements, including the graduation rate at Normandy High rising from 53% in 2013 to 78% in 2019.

Families are already voting with their feet. Normandy has been shedding students, either through the transfer program or now just the old fashioned way (the Post-Dispatch reports elsewhere in the story that enrollment in the district is down 316 students, or 11 percent, this school year).

It is the school board of this district that approved a resolution last month expressing its “complete discontentment” with the Missouri Charter School Commission’s process of soliciting and developing a charter school in the district, as the board wanted to be included more in the process. Why on earth should a district that has manifestly failed to educate its students or even keep its financial house in order have any say on a new school that is coming in to try and do better? Lunacy.

And it is the civic leaders quoted in the story who believe that this district should have a monopoly on education provision within the boundaries of the Normandy School District. Also lunacy.

The question has to be asked of these leaders: How can you, in good conscience, look into the eyes of the children of Normandy and tell them that they don’t deserve a different option? Why must they stay tethered to a district that has been foundering for longer than they have been alive? Would you accept this for your own children?

The post A Charter School for Normandy? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

For Missouri families that might be considering homeschooling, I’d like to share a couple of potentially useful resources.

First, and perhaps most important, is the Homeschool Legal Defense Association (HSLDA). HSLDA offers lots of resources on its website, including a state-by-state guide of laws and regulations related to homeschooling. For families worried about running afoul of the law, they can join HSLDA for $130 a year and get access to legal advice and protection as well as a host of other homeschooling resources.

Second, there is Khan Academy. Started as a series of YouTube videos Sal Khan created to tutor his nieces and nephews, Khan Academy has grown into a huge free online repository of lessons and projects for students. It has really stepped up during the coronavirus, creating a fully articulated school schedule for students with all the lessons and supplemental videos and articles necessary to complete it. Again, this is all available for free.

Third, Study Island by Edmentum offers a full self-paced online curriculum for students aligned to state standards. For those families thinking that homeschooling will be temporary and that their children will return to their traditional public school next year, keeping up with state requirements is important. Study Island provides its service for around $180 per student per year (though they do offer a free trial for folks looking to check it out). It is not free like Khan Academy, but is plug-and-play and standards-aligned, two key features that parents under pressure might think are worth the cost.

The fourth resource is Carol Topp, the Homeschool CPA. “Pandemic pods” are cropping up as a popular option for families to link together and share resources as they homeschool for the upcoming year. How can families set one up and potentially hire a teacher or set of tutors without running afoul of non-profit or employment law? This is where a knowledgeable CPA can help. Even for those who are homeschooling independently, tax questions can frequently arise. Her website has lots of free content, and she also offers one-on-one consulting services to help families navigate the homeschool landscape.

If you’re thinking seriously about homeschooling in Missouri this year, you are not alone. There are lots of families in the same boat, and lots of resources out there to help.

If you know of any other resources, particularly Missouri-based ones, please feel free to share them in the comments below.

The post Thinking About Homeschooling in Missouri this Year? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

For those who aren’t aware, PPP was created by Congress to give forgivable loans to businesses and nonprofits affected by the coronavirus. As governments across the country shut down schools and businesses, Congress realized that it needed to provide support or businesses would go under, costing millions of jobs and carving deep scars into the American economy.

The first part of the story is important. Government shut these businesses and schools down. PPP was not a “bailout,” rewarding businesses that had acted poorly or were floundering. Businesses and schools had little say in whether or not they would be able to serve customers and did not deserve to be harmed as a result.

Lots of schools took PPP loans. This shouldn’t surprise us. As Dean Johnson, leader of the Crossroad Academies charter schools in Kansas City told The Kansas City Star, “I understand the economic realities, but one way or another we need to be able to meet our expenses, and if we’re trying to provide a more complex learning model what we certainly can’t be doing is laying off staff.”

But here is where the Star’s PPP story went off the rails. Rather than examining the effects of the coronavirus on local schools and their budgets, the author decided to pit charter and private schools against the Kansas City Public Schools (KCPS), making the case that it was unfair that charter and private schools could get PPP support while KCPS couldn’t. The article PPP-shamed them. It includes the predictable jabs at Rockhurst High School’s tuition ($15,000 for the upcoming year), and a quote from the local teachers union leader taking a dig at Betsy DeVos.

Like great Kansas City jazz, it’s the notes that it didn’t play that are the most revealing.

First, it left out the fact that KCPS receives more public funding than local charter schools, and even more per pupil than most private schools. According to the state of Missouri, KCPS spent $15,137 per student in 2019. Seems like an important detail to put in the story. KCPS is hardly in penury. It is certainly not “underfunded.”

Second, as Mayor Quinton Lucas pointed out on Twitter, in Clay County, federal CARES Act dollars were allocated to support the North Kansas City and Liberty public school districts. Jackson county could do the same for KCPS but hasn’t. Maybe someone should ask them why not.

Third, the article fails to mention that if private and charter schools were to close due to the economic effects of the coronavirus (as more than 100 private schools already have), it would be terrible for KCPS. State and local governments are already reeling from decreased tax revenue due to depressed economic activity; flooding schools with hundreds or thousands of new students would put tremendous strain on KCPS or any other public school district. If public school advocates could see beyond their immediate, narrow interests they would understand that charter schools and private schools are doing them a favor.

The disappointing thing about the Star’s article is that if it were not framed as adversarial, but as a system of schools wrestling with a shared problem, we might be better able to find solutions. Judging from the social media reaction, most readers walked away from the story angry at private and charter schools, not interested in how to help all children in Kansas City get a good education in the time of the coronavirus. That’s a shame.

The post The Star PPP-Shames Kansas City Private and Charter Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Like most things in education, the losses will probably not be spread evenly across the population. Students from families that have been able to provide instruction at home will likely suffer less than those who haven’t. Students from districts that have been able to more competently roll out distance learning will be in a better position than those from districts that have not. But, even within districts, schools, or classrooms, there will likely be a wide range of consequences from this crisis.

Assuming that students can return to some semblance of normalcy in the fall, teachers are going to need to know where students are and what needs to be remediated so that students can move forward.

As part of the shutdown, Missouri (like every other state) has cancelled its state assessment, and even in the best of times, those scores are of limited value when it comes to shaping instruction. What teachers need is a focused diagnostic assessment that can identify the key building blocks from the previous academic year that students have missed so they know where to start and what supplemental efforts are required.

Here’s an idea. Why don’t teachers come up with their own assessment? The Department of Secondary and Elementary Education (DESE) could convene a virtual working group for each grade level and 10 to 20 teachers could put together an assessment that tests what students should know when they start that grade. These teachers know best what kids need to know at the start of the year and I’m confident they know how to assess it.

Because this would just be a diagnostic tool, most of the concerns around standardized testing don’t really apply. Test security isn’t an issue, because there is no incentive for students to do better or worse on the test. Reliability is basically a non-starter as this is a one-off event. The validity of the test should be strong because the people who will bear the brunt of its success or failure (the teachers who will have the students in their classes) are the ones making it.

Now, I understand the broad diversity of schools in Missouri, so one test might not be appropriate. But this could be done through similar districts collaborating with one another. That way,  there isn’t just one test, but rather 5 or 7 throughout the state based on school needs.

It would be great if researchers could get access to the results, as measuring and quantifying the impact of COVID-19 is something they are going to be trying to figure out for years. That said, making an assessment that is useful to researchers is not the primary goal here. If it is useful to researchers, that’s great, but if not, that’s okay too.

DESE does not need to contract with an expensive testing vendor to create a useful assessment. Some small stipends for teachers’ time and free open-access platforms can be used to create and disseminate the tests.

What do y’all think? Can we get this done?

The post An Idea to Address Missouri’s COVID Learning Loss appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Northside has consistently been one of the top-performing schools in St. Louis, and it’s easy to understand why when listening to Asher talk about his passion for serving low-income students and the culture of expectations and excellence that guides the school.

North Side puts to lie the pernicious notion that because a child comes from a certain neighborhood, is of a certain racial or ethnic group, or comes from a family that is struggling, they cannot learn.

It isn’t easy. Students who come from stable, two-parent homes in safe neighbors absolutely have advantages over those who do not. But just because it’s hard doesn’t mean its impossible. And just because it is hard doesn’t mean that it isn’t worth doing.

Part of the story, left unsaid in the KSDK spot, is that because of how Missouri authorizes charter schools, Northside is limited to serving students in St. Louis City even though it sits less than a 10 minutes’ drive from the boundary of the Normandy Schools Collaborative, one of the lowest-performing school districts in the state. Students born eight minutes away from the school instead of seven can’t attend, because politicians have created artificial barriers between children and opportunity.

That is not a happy story. It isn’t right. It isn’t fair. It should change.

The post The City-County Line Remains a Barrier to a Good Education appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

De Tocqueville focused much of his analysis on America’s civil society, the tapestry of voluntary organizations that citizens put together to unite themselves and solve problems. He wrote:

“In the United States, as soon as several inhabitants have taken an opinion or an idea they wish to promote in society, they seek each other out and unite together once they have made contact. From that moment, they are no longer isolated but have become a power seen from afar whose activities serve as an example and whose words are heeded.”

I have a paper out with Washington, D.C.’s R Street Institute exploring the role the civil society has played in Kansas City’s charter schooling sector. While the traditional public school district has struggled with legitimacy and engagement over the past three decades (enrollment has  been on the decline, and KCPS struggles to recruit enough candidates to make school board elections competitive), charter schools have been an outgrowth of the community, reflecting their needs, values, and desires.

In the paper, I briefly explain the roles of local philanthropists in founding and supporting high-performing charter schools, of civic organizations like the Guadalupe Centers in creating schools geared towards the needs of specific communities, and of parent groups in recruiting potential school operators to create the types of schools that they want.

The charter sector in Kansas City is not perfect, but it is built on a sturdy foundation. Somewhere, Alexis de Tocqueville is smiling.

The post Charter Schools and Civil Society in Kansas City appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Rep. Roeber was a tireless advocate for Missouri’s children. She was perhaps the greatest champion of school choice in Jefferson City and worked for years to expand the educational options of our state’s children.

She was curious, she listened, and more than anything, she was kind. She modeled for all of us that we can be passionate advocates without demonizing those who disagree with us. Perhaps it was her years as a teacher that instilled these skills in her. Maybe it was just part of who she was.

We experienced a great loss this week, but it is important for all of us who believe in empowering families with choice to continue the work that she began. She would expect nothing less.

May she rest peacefully in the loving arms of the Lord she so loved.

The post Rebecca Roeber, R.I.P appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Missouri’s education spending has continued its upward march. Current spending is up 2.7% from the year before, to $10,589 per student. This is roughly in line with previous year-over-year increases (which were 1.6%, 2.7%, 2.9%, and 1.7%, respectively).

When looking at the total revenue figure, which is a good way of looking at the total amount of money that schools spend (not just on current expenses), Missouri schools received $12,492 per student.

Every time I see spending figures like this, I have to ask myself, where does all of this money go? If you think of a class of 18 students, those children are generating over $190,000 in current revenue alone. How much is the teacher getting? Less than half?

The Kansas City Star’s Editorial Board took to its pages earlier this year to decry low teacher salaries that haven’t even kept pace with inflation. But no where in there did they try to square the circle that spending is actually up! Its just that the new money is not making it to teachers.

Looking at a slightly longer time horizon, Missouri per student spending is up 33% since 1992 while teacher salaries are down 4%. This is largely because both the number of teachers and the number of staff members in Missouri schools have grown substantially faster than the growth in students. While the student population is up 9% over that time period, the number of teachers grew 28% and the number of all other staff grew 24%.

These are policy decisions. We can make different ones.

Our education system has become bloated with bureaucrats, administrators, and non-teaching staff that are sucking up money that could be going to the people who are in the classroom every day doing the hard work of educating children. If you want to be outraged about something, be outraged about that.

Bottom line: we are spending enough money to adequately compensate teachers. We just aren’t spending it on them.

The post Missouri Education Spending Continues To Grow appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As this pithily-titled piece from the Brookings Institution argues, moving elections on-cycle will both drive up turnout and minimize the effect of organized interest groups. As the author writes:

By exploiting the occasional episode in which a change in state law forced localities to move their elections “on cycle,” [UC Berkeley Political Scientist Sarah] Anzia is able to provide some pretty rigorous causal evidence that off-cycle elections decrease voter turnout and equip organized interests (e.g. teachers unions) to obtain more favorable policy outcomes. Anzia’s findings mesh nicely with other work done by University of Pennsylvania Political Scientist, Marc Meredith, who found that when school boards are given the authority to choose election dates for raising revenue (e.g. bond elections) boards will “manipulate” the timing of elections in predictable ways to ensure an electorate that is most favorable to increased school spending.

That is why I was so surprised when the Missouri School Boards Association announced that it “strongly opposed” the bill. Why would that be? Why would the organization that represents school boards want to drive down turnout in the elections that elect them? I guess they’ll have to answer that one.

A common argument for keeping elections off-cycle is that it somehow keeps politics out of education. That is simply wrong. Schools are a huge state and municipal expenditure and are tasked with imparting skills and knowledge onto the next generation of citizens. Every day, we hand over our state’s most precious resource, its children, to schools. We live in a diverse state where different people have different views about what that education should look like. Any system that we devise to try and manage that will be political.

If education is going to be political, the best thing that we can do is try and make sure that as many of our fellow citizens as possible have the opportunity to make their views known. Moving elections on-cycle allows that to happen.

The post Moving School Board Elections On-Cycle is Good for Democracy appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Local education gadfly Rebecca Haessig recently broke down the 2018-19 enrollment figures for public schools in Kansas City on her blog Set The Schools Free. According to her number crunching, 12,475 Kansas City students attend charter schools, 3,705 students attend Kansas City Public Schools Signature schools, and 10,582 attend traditional neighborhood schools. That means that 16,180 students out of 26,762 total students attend a school that requires an active choice. That is 60% of all Kansas City students in public schools.

What’s more, this does not even count the thousands of children who attend private schools or the families that move to other school districts in the Kansas City area for better schools. It simply states that within the boundaries of the Kansas City Public Schools, the majority of families actively choose their schools.

This is important for three reasons.

First, school choice is not some fringe movement. Marginalization is a classic political tactic, and one that is frequently used to try and slow down the expansion of school choice. But the numbers don’t lie. School choice is the norm, not the exception.

Second, we need to be all-inclusive when we talk about school choice. Many of the loudest anti-charter school or private school choice voices in Kansas City send their children to schools of choice. These schools often have screening mechanisms that weed out lower performing students, students with discipline problems, or students with uninvolved parents. If these critics are going to complain about various types of school choice, they should be transparent about the fact that they’re using some form of school choice for their own kids.

Third, we have to square these figures with the continued argument that the Kansas City Public Schools are improving. Now, I totally agree with my friend Susan Pendergrass that Missouri is grading schools on a pretty generous curve,  but simply taking the district’s own rhetoric at face value, school choice is obviously not hurting  KCPS given its much touted improvement in APR (Annual Progress Report) scores. They can’t have it both ways. If the school district is improving, like they are arguing, school choice can’t be that big of a problem, because 60% of kids are taking advantage of it!

It was Daniel Patrick Moynihan who famously said, “everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.” The facts on school choice in Kansas City are clear and deserve to be acknowledged.

The post The Majority of Kansas City Families Choose Their Child’s School appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

• Unlike public schools, charter schools make families apply to them which keeps out kids from less-involved families.
• Unlike public schools, charter schools require students to maintain a certain GPA to apply (or to stay enrolled).
• Unlike public schools, charter schools require students to adhere to a conduct code or else get expelled.
• Unlike public schools, charter schools require parents to come to meetings before they can enroll their children, so that the school can screen out less-involved parents.

These are serious charges. If charter schools can pick and choose their students, are they really public schools that are open to all?

I did some digging on the websites of Kansas City area schools, and some admissions requirements surprised me.

For example, to get into one Kansas City area school, “Applicants must score at or above the 60th percentile on a national standardized reading and math test to be eligible for entrance. Students must also have a record of good citizenship and a cumulative GPA of 2.5 or higher.”

To get into another, “Students must have a GPA of 2.35 or better, a 90% or better attendance record, and a discipline record that shows appropriate student behavior.”

To get into another, “They must be school ready and able to abide by school policies and expectations as indicated in ‘Behavioral Expectation Student Contract’, which will be distributed upon acceptance.” What’s more, “All new parents will be required to attend a mandatory informational [meeting] before a seat will be offered.”

Can you believe this? Ostensibly public schools are deliberately screening out low-performing students, students with discipline problems, and students with less involved families.

So now is the time I’d bet you’d like me to reveal the culprits. It might surprise you to learn that none of them are charter schools. All five of these examples come from Kansas City Public School Signature Schools, a group of magnet schools. The full list of requirements is on the KCPS website.

According to Rebecca Haessig of the local education blog Set the Schools Free, nearly 26 percent of KCPS students attend one of the seven Signature Schools that place admissions requirements on children or families. They play a huge part of the public school system in Kansas City, yet get very little attention. I wonder why?

For the record, charter schools cannot, by law, place requirements related to previous achievement or behavior on their students. They cannot force parents to attend informational meetings before children are offered a seat. Perhaps they’re the most public schools in town.

The post Truly “Public” Schools? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

To read the essay, click on the link below. For a brief video on the topic, click here.

The post Bryce’s Law Revisited: Serving Missouri’s Neediest Students through Targeted Scholarships appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

That same month, we at the Show-Me Institute released Course Access in Missouri: Diversity, Personalization, and Opportunity. That paper highlighted the dire need for higher-level courses in hundreds of school districts across the state, and it also offered a solution already used by numerous states around the country: Course Access.  Course Access allows students to take a portion of the funds that the state spends to educate them to a provider outside of their traditional school.

If a student’s school only offers Spanish, but he’d like to study Mandarin, then when his classmates head to Spanish class, he could head to the library to log into an online Mandarin course. If he wants to take Calculus, but his school only offers up to Algebra II, he can get funding to take that class.

Promoting Course Access was part of both the 2017 Blueprint for Missouri and the 2018 Blueprint for Missouri. We have blogged about Course Access, created videos about Course Access, testified about the benefits of Course Access, and penned op-eds about Course Access.

Last night the legislature sent SB 603 to the Governor, which will create a course access program. The bill passed with huge bipartisan majorities in both chambers. At a time of great dysfunction in state government, it is great that legislators were able to come together to do right by Missouri’s students. Of course, as with all “omnibus”-style bills, there are provisions that we think are less than helpful, but such is the way democracy works. To be sure, we would love to see educational choice expanded further—with education savings account programs and the expansion of charter schooling, for example—but a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and this was a good one.

Now the real work begins. Parents need to know that this option is available to them. Schools need to figure out how to leverage this program to broaden their course offerings. Districts need to see Course Access offerings as part of the portfolio of classes that they make available to students and think hard about how they can help solve staffing problems and promote efficiency and effectiveness.

These are exciting times! Congratulations to all involved. We will be following this program closely and working to publicize its availability. Stay tuned!

The post Missouri Legislature Follows the Blueprint and Passes Course Access appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

THE SOLUTION: Expand charter schools statewide.

Charter schools should be allowed in districts regardless of whether the district meets minimum state accredi­tation standards. Per-student funding should be the same for both charter school and traditional public school students. Demand among families and charter school authorizers like uni­versities should determine where and when charter schools open in Mis­souri.

WHO ELSE DOES IT?

Over 6,900 charter schools operate in 43 states and the Dis­trict of Columbia, serving more than 3.1 million students. States like Indiana place no caps on the number of charter schools and fund charters and traditional public schools at equal or nearly equal levels. Unlike Missouri, almost all other states allow charter schools to operate anywhere.

THE OPPORTUNITY: Charter schools are growing. Over 23,000 students enrolled in charter schools in Missouri for the 2016–2017 school year—an 11% increase from the previous year. University Academy, one of the top-performing charter schools in the state, has a waitlist of 700 students. The demand is there. Simply by getting government out of the way, we can offer students a way out of underperforming schools and into schools they want to attend.

KEY POINTS

• Thousands of Missouri students are trapped in poor schools due to needless restrictions on school choice.
• Allowing charter school expansion will meet demand from families, not bureaucrats.
• School choice has a proven track record elsewhere in the country.

SHOW-ME INSTITUTE RESOURCES

Essay: Expanding Charter Schooling in Missouri

Blog Post: Charter Schools Boost College Completion

Blog Post: No, Charter Schools Don’t Push Out Kids Who Are Too Hard to Educate

Blog Post: The Charter School Discipline Problem That Isn’t

For a printable version of this article, click on the link below. You can also view the entire 2018 Missouri Blueprint online.

The post 2018 Blueprint: Charter School Expansion appeared first on Show-Me Institute.