Should We Be Surprised about Missouri’s Lack of Education Legislation in 2023?

Missouri officials failed to deliver on promises made to expand school choice in the 2023 legislative session. Failure came both big and small. Open enrollment puttered out and did not even make it to the Senate floor for debate, while a tiny bill concerning improving virtual class funding (for inaccessible subjects in certain districts) was filibustered in the Senate. Should we be surprised by this? In the moment I was, but in hindsight, I shouldn’t have been.

Education reform was never a top priority—it was barely mentioned in the governor’s State of the State address. The lack of commitment to educational progress foreshadowed how the rest of the session would unfold. Other states managed to accomplish what Missouri could not. Let’s take a look at three states (there were many more) that made major strides this year in education policy.

Florida, already one of the leading states in educational performance and choice, continued to build on past success. Governor DeSantis, in his State of the State, emphasized:

We must continue our momentum with K-12 education by increasing teacher salaries, enacting a teacher’s bill of rights, providing paycheck protection for teachers, expanding school choice and fortifying parents’ rights.

Every single one of these objectives became law in Florida this year, with the highlight being a law that made the Florida education savings account (ESA) program universal throughout the state.

Two of our neighbors, Indiana and Arkansas, also made education a priority.

Arkansas’s Governor Huckabee Sanders was committed to expanding education choice and personally pushed for reform. The LEARNS Act (Arkansas’ new education bill) creates an ESA program (starting with only “at-risk” families and expanding to all families by 2025), removes the limit on charter schools in the state, eliminates the 3% transfer cap on the existing open enrollment program, raises teacher starting salaries, and creates a required literacy screening for K-3 students.

Indiana waived textbook fees for K-12 families and expanded the state school voucher program to be near universal (77% eligible to 96% eligible).

Missouri’s failure to advance education reform was bad enough on its own, but it is even worse when compared to the progress of other states. Missouri remains stuck with an extremely limited ESA program (only 1% of students are eligible), no open enrollment program, and charter schools being inaccessible for a vast majority of students in the state. After this year’s inexplicable failure, it will be difficult to trust politicians when they say they want to improve education in our state. Action is what counts at this point—our families and students are counting on it.