Susan Pendergrass speaks with Chad Aldeman, education policy researcher and founder of Read Not Guess, about Missouri’s early literacy crisis and why the legislature has struggled to address it. They discuss what it means for a fourth grader to be below basic in reading, why three-cueing may be harmful to early readers, the science of reading and what it actually prescribes, the case for third-grade retention policies, and more.

Learn more about Read Not Guess at www.readnotguess.com.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcasts 

Listen on SoundCloud

Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00):
Looking forward to this conversation with you, Chad Aldeman. I just want to give you a little background on why I want to talk to you today. Missouri just wrapped up its legislative session in late May. This is the second year in a row that we have tried to make some inroads into what I consider to be a crisis, which is that 42 percent of our fourth graders are below basic in reading. We have tried to force the state education agency, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, to improve how reading is taught and to create a system of guardrails around kids being promoted without knowing how to read, all of which have failed. What does it mean for a fourth grader to be below basic in reading? Given that more than four in ten Missouri fourth graders scored below basic, what does that mean?

Chad Aldeman (00:59):
Below basic is a very low level. It means that kids cannot read an unfamiliar passage and understand what it means. In fourth grade, maybe you’re not super worried about those kids, but you probably should be, because that is a key milestone. If you’re not reading in fourth grade, you’re really going to struggle with everything that comes next. You’re not going to be able to understand social studies and science. You may not be able to read owners’ manuals or instruction manuals when you’re trying to build things at your house. You’re really going to be dependent on other people interpreting words and language for you. YouTube is helpful, lots of things are helpful, but we’re still in a written culture, and there’s lots of information that’s written that if you can’t pass even the basic level you’re going to struggle with in life going forward.

Susan Pendergrass (02:02):
Yeah, so this is kind of the problem, which I consider to be basically a crisis. Forty-two percent of our kids are below basic. What we call it when we’re trying to fix it goes by a bunch of different names: early reading, early literacy, read to learn. But when my kids were little, about thirty years ago, I think it was called whole language, this language-rich environment where kids would just learn to read. But now there’s a thing called three-cueing. What is three-cueing? I assume it means that kids are supposed to look three different places for cues, but what specifically is it?

Chad Aldeman (02:37):
Three-cueing and whole language have a lot of similarities. They’re basically trying to get people to memorize words. Rather than sounding out, like my name is Chad, which is pretty phonetic, rather than understanding that the CH combination makes the ch sound, they want you to just memorize the picture in your head of what the word looks like. Really good readers do have a lot of memorized words. I don’t have to sound out my name. There are lots of words that my brain just goes to instantly because I’m so familiar with them. But taking what expert readers can do and using that as a method to teach kids is actually really harmful. Kids develop those skills by learning the core elements. The CH combination makes the ch sound, and they need to practice that when they’re learning to read. Over time they’ll just see it and recognize it quickly. English is quirky. English is not entirely phonetic, but it’s still quite phonetic, and phonics is still the building block of reading. There are cases when CH doesn’t make the ch sound, when it makes the hard C sound. Kids need to understand and recognize those as well. They need repetitions, and they need to understand what the normal rule is and what some of the exceptions are.

Susan Pendergrass (04:04):
So would three-cueing be considered part of the science of reading or not?

Chad Aldeman (04:08):
Three-cueing is not part of the science of reading. Three-cueing is saying, rather than teaching kids the building blocks of the language, have them guess at the words based on a picture they see. So there’s a picture of a horse, and they see a word, and they just guess horse. The text may actually say pony, and sometimes those differences really do matter.

Susan Pendergrass (04:29):
Ha.

Chad Aldeman (04:38):
The second cue is the first letter of the word, and the third is other context clues. So if it’s a story about horses, you might guess horse. And those cues are actually detrimental to learning how to read, to knowing what the words and letters actually translate into.

Susan Pendergrass (05:02):
Why? Why is it detrimental?

Chad Aldeman (05:04):
Because it leads to guessing. It might be harmless for a four-year-old to say pony when the word actually says horse. But as kids get older and start reading more complex texts, those types of mistakes really do matter. And if you haven’t learned the phonetic skills, you’re not going to be able to read a word like ribonucleic acid or something like that. When you start reading more complex words, all of a sudden you can’t break them down. Your mind doesn’t have the ability to understand how to break down a word that you’re not familiar with.

Susan Pendergrass (05:33):
Mm-hmm. So two years in a row at least, the legislature has tried to ban three-cueing so that teachers would not be allowed to use it. They punted a little bit and said it can’t be the first thing they use, but could still be a tool in their toolbox. They’ve gotten a lot of pushback. In Missouri, legislators are sometimes former teachers, sometimes married to a teacher, sometimes their best friend is a teacher. And they’ll just say, you know what, we’re a local control state, so we can’t tell these teachers what to do. When they’re in the moment in the classroom, they know best, and that’s how we roll in Missouri. But what I hear you saying is it can actually be harmful.

Chad Aldeman (06:39):
Yeah, and there actually is a science about how kids learn to read. It’s been well documented for a long time through empirical researchers looking at whether kids do better under method A or method B. What they found is that teaching kids the building blocks of reading, the phonetics, is more helpful, particularly for students who might struggle, or who are dyslexic, or have other language issues. If you teach the three-cueing strategies, you’re teaching them the wrong thing and leading them down a side road. It can lead to bad habit formation, which is then really hard to kick later on. The other thing that’s relevant here is that reading is somewhat sequential, and kids need a lot of practice in the early grades in order to be proficient readers. If you use the three-cueing tactics, you will not be giving them the building blocks they need to develop. And it’s a challenge to get kids back on track if they’re off. There’s all kinds of data about delays in reading, and kids who aren’t proficient by third grade will struggle in the short and long term. So it’s really important to catch those issues as early as possible in K through two.

Susan Pendergrass (08:14):
Well, on that note, another component to the legislation that’s been considered and that we have been supportive of is that if a child at third or fourth grade has demonstrated that they are substantially behind in learning to read, they should not be promoted to the next grade. What do you think about that policy?

Chad Aldeman (08:34):
Some people may hear that policy and think it’s punitive and it’s going to be bad for kids, but it’s not really about what happens at the end of third grade. I see that policy as more of a threat to the adults in that student’s life about making sure that doesn’t happen. In K through two, those students are being flagged and identified as being at risk of potentially being held back.

Susan Pendergrass (08:39):
Mean.

Chad Aldeman (09:04):
And they’re given interventions and supports so that they’re ready to take and pass the assessment in third grade. That’s really my read of the evidence. In the states that have these types of policies, kids who are flagged as needing more help get the help. That is the key: this sort of threat of being held back, and then the interventions and all the adult behaviors it changes. Teachers then know which kids need extra help. They then communicate to parents, hey, your child is behind and they need to catch up, and here’s what we’re going to do to help them. I wrote about this in Mississippi. They have learning plans, specific, tailored, individualized instructional plans for children who are at risk of being held back. And parents are brought into the conversation. It’s pretty scary that your child may be at risk of being held back, and here’s what we’re going to do in the interim to get them ready. That is the key for me. It’s not what happens in third grade. It’s all the stuff that happens before and what the adults can do to make sure kids are ready.

Susan Pendergrass (10:19):
Yeah, because if I understand it correctly, Mississippi has that policy, but they don’t actually retain that many kids.

Chad Aldeman (10:26):
Yeah, that’s right. In state after state, the states that have these types of policies, the number of kids who are ultimately retained is not that high. There are screens that are identified earlier in K through two, and then interventions are put in place. There are oftentimes some exceptions for students with severe disabilities or English learners who are newly arrived, and chances for retakes if there’s something about stress on the day or they go through a summer program. There are other ways to get students ready. It’s not just the third-grade cut point.

Susan Pendergrass (11:07):
Yeah, it seems like one of those situations, and I doubt it’s unique to Missouri, where people in charge of teaching young children to read feel threatened or feel like they’re being criticized, because we have a real problem with 42 percent of our kids being almost illiterate. And the adults are taking it personally, and therefore they’re resistant to any policy that would force the hand of these districts or teachers. And to me that’s just a shame.

Chad Aldeman (11:47):
Yes, I agree. I think part of it goes to the culture in education where every teacher is supposed to create their own idea and method for how to teach. We don’t really give teachers the building blocks of here’s a well-scripted curriculum, and if you follow this your kids are likely to be successful. Some of the highest-performing schools, school districts, and countries do a much better job of being clear that here’s a well-defined, articulated curriculum, and we’re going to support teachers to do it. There’s still the question of how it gets implemented, but the what is pretty well articulated. And this goes back to the science of reading idea: there is a science. It is evolving in the sense that there’s still more research being conducted and we’re still learning new things, but we know a fair amount about how kids learn to read. So teachers, schools, and teacher preparation programs should be equipping their teachers to use those things.

Susan Pendergrass (12:58):
So you have spent a lot of time studying and writing about this, and you decided to take a leap and start your own company?

Chad Aldeman (13:06):
Yes. I got interested in this because my own child was taught to read using three-cueing. He came home during the pandemic and I was oblivious. I kind of thought my son could read. We had been to school and celebrated his reading superpowers that the teachers had taught, and they were things like guessing at pictures, picture power.

Susan Pendergrass (13:26):
Yeah.

Chad Aldeman (13:33):
During the pandemic, he was a kindergartner and he came home, and we sent him up to his room to do silent independent reading. It turns out he was just guessing. He hadn’t been taught how to sound out words. After working with him, I came up with a program called Read Not Guess. It’s designed for parents to work with their kids, both to build early literacy building blocks like phonetic skills, and also as a way that they can spot early reading issues with their own children. It gives parents the tools to work with their kids, support them from home, and be an advocate by their side.

Susan Pendergrass (14:12):
And your son was in what’s considered to be one of the top school districts in the country, Fairfax County, Virginia.

Chad Aldeman (14:17):
Yeah, Fairfax County Public Schools. People move here for the schools, and yet we were using a balanced literacy three-cueing approach to teaching reading. To the district’s credit, partly because the state forced them to change, they have now moved to a more phonics-based approach and are using something called content knowledge building. So they’ve adopted a curriculum that’s also trying to build

Susan Pendergrass (14:22):
Yeah. Sure.

Chad Aldeman (14:47):
content knowledge along the way, which I’m supportive of. I’m sure there are people within the district who are upset, but the state said this is what we’re going to do, and so they’ve moved in that direction.

Susan Pendergrass (15:01):
You’re certainly not anti-teacher. You’ve been working on teacher issues for as long as I can remember, right?

Chad Aldeman (15:06):
No, I’m very pro-teacher. I’m pro-good policy. I’m pro-helping kids learn to read, and I think that’s one of the basic things that schools can do and that they should be doing.

Susan Pendergrass (15:08):
Yeah. Yeah. It really is frustrating to me that when something’s not going well in our state, we have 520 school districts, not county-based like Virginia’s, and it just feels like a throwaway line to say, well, we’re a local control state. As a matter of fact, somebody in our state education agency said out loud in a recorded meeting, it’s not our fault the kids can’t read, we’re local control. Everyone passes the buck and no one takes any responsibility. Some of them actively work against retaining third graders who can’t read or banning three-cueing. The last thing we were looking for was just that every student in the state would take essentially the same test with the same cutoff score so we could know consistently across districts which students are in that at-risk group so that we could identify them early. We got pushback on all of it. It’s baffling to me. We’re not trying to be mean to teachers. We’re trying to help little kids, because I see it ultimately impacting the Missouri workforce and everything else. We are graduating kids from high school who cannot really read.

Chad Aldeman (16:30):
Yeah, there’s a reason that the state created an education system in the first place, and the districts are entities of the state. They’re state standards, and so they should be teaching kids to those standards, and reading is a big essential building block of that. How far they get down into curricular choices is something that people can still debate, but the ultimate goal of teaching kids to read, and the argument that here are some methods that have been fundamentally disproven that we should as a state abandon, I think is a good and valid argument.

Susan Pendergrass (17:09):
Mississippi seemed to lead the way with this with the Mississippi Miracle, and then we have Louisiana and some other states. Do you see this spreading nationwide, this idea of forcing schools to use the science of reading?

Chad Aldeman (17:25):
Yeah. More states have science of reading laws, and they vary in their components. Last I saw it was 42 states. So Missouri is one of the last stragglers to not have one of these laws. The laws vary across the country in terms of how strict they are, what the state does versus what they put on districts, in terms of the third-grade retention policy versus state mandates on curriculum, whether they’re giving districts a menu of

Susan Pendergrass (17:37):
Right.

Chad Aldeman (17:56):
options or just saying they can’t use three-cueing. There are also other things around screening what happens for students in K through two, how much parents are notified, and what they’re given to help their children. All those things vary, but I think the most interesting point for Missouri is that most states have now adopted one of these laws and are pushing in this direction because they see the crisis as you’ve articulated it and the urgency for it. There’s still some important implementation work to get right if Missouri wants to see strong outcomes. Being focused on third-grade reading is very important, building it into accountability systems, building it into everything the state does, trying to simplify that and keeping it a priority. If the state is saying we don’t really care if it happens, then you’re not going to get outcomes. But if you focus on it and think about ways to drive it, there are levers that can be used.

Susan Pendergrass (19:03):
Yeah. Well, I hope we do it. Read Not Guess, where do folks find out more about that?

Chad Aldeman (19:10):
Read Not Guess is a website. It’s an email-based program. Parents can sign up for free at any time. There are three levels, starting with a beginner level, level one, then level two and level three. They’re all 30-day sequences. When parents sign up they receive

Susan Pendergrass (19:17):
Free, right?

Chad Aldeman (19:32):
a sequence of 30 emails for each of the levels. I also have one for slightly older kids who just need more practice, called a daily decodable program. There’s an app version of that program as well, or a workbook if parents want it in print form.

Susan Pendergrass (19:43):
Well, that’s great. Way to jump in and try to solve the problem yourself. I appreciate that. Thanks so much, Chad. Always great to talk to you. This was fairly narrow. We might need to have you come back and talk about school finance and teacher pipelines, but I’m going to reserve you for early literacy today. Thank you so much.

Chad Aldeman (19:52):
Thanks for having me.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Missouri’s Reading Crisis with Chad Aldeman appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Andy Smarick, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, about Missouri’s education leadership shake-up and what comes next. They discuss how to find the right commissioner of education, why outside reformers tend to succeed where insiders struggle, what the dismantling of the US Department of Education means for state accountability systems, why public complacency about poor academic outcomes persists, and more.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcasts 

Listen on SoundCloud

Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00):
Thank you so much, Andy Smarick, for joining once again on the Show-Me Institute Podcast. We love having you on and I appreciate you taking the time. You’re a busy man, so it’s really wonderful to have you back.

Andy Smarick (00:06):
I love being here. It’s a treat. Thank you for having me. I always like talking to you, but also anytime I get to talk about state-level education policy, it’s a treat.

Susan Pendergrass (00:19):
Well, I know that you have experience serving on a couple of state boards, both K-12 and higher ed. Just to bring you up to speed on what’s happening in Missouri: we have a relatively new governor, about a year in, and we had a state board of education where people stayed in expired seats, rubber-stamped decisions, and were very complacent, I feel comfortable saying. Our governor shook up that group and appointed new people who came in and said, what do you mean we don’t have bylaws? It was like, this is bananas. At the same time, the governor issued an executive order requiring letter grades on schools and districts, new school report cards. I don’t know exactly how everything went down, but our Commissioner of Education resigned, our Deputy Commissioner resigned, and our president of the state board of education resigned, all in about one week. So we are now straightening things out and there is a new board president. But this new, relatively new board now has the task of finding a commissioner. The way things have happened in Missouri is we always get a new commissioner from the ranks of the state education agency, maybe from the legislature, always from Missouri. Just a real this-is-how-we’ve-done-it mentality. And we have not been big reformers. No Chiefs for Change in Missouri. Like a lot of states, our reading scores for young kids are tanking, forty percent below basic for third and fourth graders. We have a state accountability system called the Missouri School Improvement Plan in which 516 of our 520 districts are fully accredited and about four are provisionally accredited, none unaccredited. So we have this meaningless accountability system where every district is fully accredited, even St. Louis, which I can’t even go into. So here we are, and I want to know a few things from you. Number one, if you were on the Board of Education in Missouri, how would you go about finding a new commissioner? What would you look for? And then later I want to get into what’s happening at the national level. We are not doing well academically, we have never had a bold reformer in charge, we keep doing the same thing and getting the same result. What would you do if you were in their spot?

Andy Smarick (02:59):
So in education, I’m going to wind up to this answer, so just bear with me for a second. Conservative can mean two different things. One is the traditional conservative view, which is to preserve, to stand athwart big, swift, dramatic, perpetual change. You’re trying to keep things the way they are because there’s a lot of wisdom that has gone into it and people are accustomed to it. In education, there’s also this other right-of-center conservative view, which is we have to be much more open to choice, competition, accountability metrics, and so on. And it seems that Missouri has been one of those very red states that has tended to believe in the first kind of conservatism: protect our traditional school districts, protect the hierarchies we have, protect the tradition of you grow up as a professional, as a teacher, then a superintendent, then maybe go to the state education agency. A lot of people believe that’s the way to do it.

There probably is an ethic among a lot of people to keep it that way. The only way you get out of that is if there’s a recognition among leadership that we can’t continue to preserve the status quo, that we have to change some things. That is a big step for a place that has elevated the idea of preserving for a very long time. If they get to that step, then they have to do the very tough things, which is start to pull out the Jenga pieces of that conservatism. The most important one is having board leadership and having a state superintendent who come from outside the state, and then having a board chair or board president who is not going to just do what the staff of the state education agency says or what the district superintendents say. We saw this work quite well about fifteen or twenty years ago. There was a big movement nationwide in educational reform led at the state level, and a number of states chose out-of-state superintendents and commissioners of education who did a terrific job of shaking things up and advancing a bunch of important proposals. The downside is a lot of them were so brash and so young, and I have to say so cocky, that they made unnecessary waves and kicked a lot of people in the shins in the states where they landed. So my view is a place like Missouri should pick someone from out of state for a state chief, someone with a long track record of success, but someone who isn’t so green as to think he or she knows everything. Someone with enough humility and enough time on task to know what they don’t know, and who can come in and be bold enough to make some changes, but not think that everyone in the state is a dummy who needs to be ignored. That’s how I would think about it. And if you have a board chair and board membership who get all of this, it makes things a whole lot easier. But that might be the hardest part of all. Who is your board president? Who are the board majority going to be? They have to be the ones with the backbone.

Susan Pendergrass (05:57):
Yeah. I feel like we’ve had people come in and say, well, I’m only the commissioner, it’s not my fault that the kids don’t read. And then people say, well, we’re a local control state, so it’s really the local guys’ fault that the kids can’t read. Then the legislators are like, well, who’s supposed to be making sure the kids can read? And technically, kind of they are, but them plus the board, and there’s just fingers pointing every different direction with nobody really taking responsibility. If we had the capacity for hard things, we would not have all of our districts be fully accredited. There’s even pushback on the letter grade idea because folks will say, well, then the teachers in those F schools feel bad and the parents feel bad and the kids who go there feel bad. I’ve seen some states change it to colors or something where nobody feels bad. I’ve also heard folks say it’s racist because a lot of the D and F schools enroll large percentages of students of color. So there are just all of these reasons to resist. It’s going to happen because there’s an executive order, but I feel like we’re going to have a hard time finding somebody who’s willing to do those things.

Andy Smarick (07:17):
Well, your state, like every other state, has a state constitution that makes the state ultimately responsible for education. Your state, like others, has both tradition and some laws that give a number of powers to local districts. The weird thing, and I’ve seen this in a lot of different states, is the state government ends up in a very weird position. The state can get sued and state leaders can get criticized if kids aren’t learning, because the state actually has constitutional authority to make sure kids are learning. But as a matter of practice, and often of state statutes, a lot of this power is delegated to districts. States then try to recapture some of that power through the accreditation system. It’s the way the state can say, okay, districts, you have the power to do these things, but we’re going to hold you accountable for results and we’re going to accredit you or not. And then it turns out it’s virtually impossible to take away the accreditation of these districts because of legislative pushback, and the state typically doesn’t have the capacity to run a district if it does take away accreditation. It just becomes a complete hot mess. That’s why you need state leadership who has some experience but also some backbone to say, this is how we’re going to thread the needle of state authority, state responsibility, local control, and still making sure that kids learn. This is not easy, other states have gone through it, but it isn’t the kind of thing that someone who has lived in Missouri all their life and grown up professionally there can do easily. It’s going to be hard for that person to get out of that box. Having someone from the outside who can start to do some bold things, including hiring smart, tough lawyers, having board leadership who’s going to stick by it. But I just want to emphasize this point: every state I ever talk to begins by saying, well, you know, we’re a local control state, our districts have all the power. Everybody says that. Go back to your state constitution. The state is the one that’s going to be responsible. And if the state has the backbone, it can do a whole lot. But whether it has the backbone is the operative phrase.

Susan Pendergrass (09:41):
Yeah. So about seven years ago we developed our own school report cards with letter grades, called MOSchoolRankings. I’ll just plug it. It was with GPAs, and this year for the first time I just took the GPAs and converted them to letter grades because folks found GPAs tricky. I put up the methodology. I took all the data from our state education agency, DESE, and just tried to make it a map you can zoom in and out on, easier to navigate. And my thinking is you have to do these things, make sure you say how you do it, and then people can argue with you and debate whether it’s right or wrong or good or bad. And many people have. A lot of people don’t like that the average is a C. I’m open to discussing why the average should be anything other than a C, but you have to at some point just make the move and then be confident enough in what you did that you can defend it and change it if people point out flaws. But this is where I think we struggle at DESE. They struggle to just put that out there because they worry about every negative outcome and consequence. And it’s like, yeah, but at some point to not do it is worse than to do it.

Andy Smarick (11:10):
For sure. And I’ve gotten to the point of realizing that if you have been in a system at different ranks for thirty or thirty-five years, all of your friends, your reputation, your pension, your income, everything about your identity is wrapped up with that system. Expecting these folks to suddenly turn the corner and say, you know, we’ve messed up, tens of thousands of kids are not learning right now today in classrooms, and we have to start holding the adults accountable for that, including teachers and principals and local school board members and local superintendents, and we have to be courageous about it. That’s asking a lot of people who are of, by, and for the system. It can be a whole lot easier if you just get someone from the outside with the courage to do it.

Susan Pendergrass (11:54):
Yeah. So can you think of an example of a state that has done this well?

Andy Smarick (12:02):
Definitely during the late No Child Left Behind era and then the Race to the Top era, a number of states found people from outside. Tennessee was famous for this. Arne Duncan ended up going to a couple of different places, including Rhode Island. New Jersey ended up picking Chris Cerf. There was a movement where probably ten or fifteen states did this quite well. My state, Maryland, brought in the superintendent of Mississippi after Mississippi had had so many gains, so she could carry some of those especially reading reforms to our state. This is not uncommon. Texas did something like this for a while. Louisiana became very famous during the John White era for doing this. But in all of these cases it began often with a governor, and then some members of a state legislature who said, we just can’t keep doing things the way we’ve done in the past. We have to do things differently. Once the governor says something like that, he or she can appoint people to the Board of Education who will do things differently, and the legislature, at least his or her party, will start to fall in line, and the media then starts to understand how serious it is. It is hard to do this without the governor leaning forward and giving the blessing to the bureaucracy to do things differently. So the question for you is, is your governor going to spend any political capital on this and say things are messed up and we have to do things differently?

Susan Pendergrass (13:29):
I don’t know. I hope so. But I haven’t seen evidence of that. I suspect, though I could be wrong, that they’re looking more internally than externally. However, I just want to add one wrinkle to this context that we’ve been thinking a lot about at the Show-Me Institute. If you’re following the US Department of Education, I believe you used to work there. Is that right?

Andy Smarick (13:54):
Yes, back in the day.

Susan Pendergrass (13:55):
Last week they moved the Office of Special Education over to the Department of Health and Human Services. They moved the Office of Civil Rights over to the Department of Justice. The building where the Department of Education used to be is now vacated. All those people are over at an old Department of Energy building. It’s a significantly reduced staff. Without touching the Every Student Succeeds Act, they are effectively dismantling most of the structure over there, at a time when the current president said that sending education back to the states was one of his priorities. I’m particularly concerned that at a time when Missouri has this vacuum, we could be looking at the apron strings being cut, states being told to sink or swim from the federal perspective. You don’t have to maintain the accountability systems. The Secretary is encouraging states to submit requests to waive parts of the law. I don’t really know exactly where it’s headed, but that concerns me. Do you think they’re going to let off the gas on mandated accountability systems in exchange for flexibility?

Andy Smarick (15:15):
Such a good question. To begin with just some editorializing: it is astonishing that Congress has allowed this to happen. In general I’m a big fan of decentralizing education power to the states, but that they’ve been able to administratively dismantle a department without Congress doing anything about it is just shocking to me. Even members of the Republican Party twenty years ago, let alone forty or sixty years ago, who jealously guarded the prerogatives of the legislative branch to create departments and fund departments, would have been appalled at this. There would have been unanimous consent to stop this from happening. So that says a lot that Congress has just sort of excused itself from the discussion. It has been remarkable the extent to which that building where we used to work, and the thousands of people there, is just empty, and they are handing off all the tasks to other places. I don’t know how this is legal, but I guess they’re figuring out a way to do it.

Now, the people who are leading this from inside genuinely believe that education will be better off if Uncle Sam isn’t meddling in it so much. That requires a theory of action, or at least a theory, that the reason why things are bad is that Uncle Sam is causing them to be bad, as though if Uncle Sam backs up there’s going to be a sunnier future ahead. Or it requires believing that it is just morally wrong for Uncle Sam to get involved, and whether states sink or swim after he gets out, that’s up to them. That’s a theory, it’s an ideological approach, and they have the right to pursue it. Donald Trump was elected and he gets to hire who he wants to. But then, to your point, it starts to implicate the Every Student Succeeds Act, which still requires the federal government to do some things related to state accountability systems. And if you believe you have the power administratively to undo a cabinet department, I suspect you probably believe you have the power to ignore some federal accountability provisions and just allow states to do what they want. So we’re going to be left in this position of saying, all right, the federal government is getting out of the business of accountability, therefore the states need to do it well. And then anyone who cares about kids learning will ask, okay, are states going to do this well? And so I turn to you as a state leader. Is Missouri going to

Susan Pendergrass (17:23):
Yeah.

Andy Smarick (17:47):
kick butt and take names?

Susan Pendergrass (17:48):
I’m concerned. I mean, No Child Left Behind was difficult and a lot of people didn’t like it, but test scores went up. Strict accountability, test scores went up. As we backed off, the Race to the Top era with waivers, and then Every Student Succeeds, which allowed more waivers, states were able to lower a lot of bars. Some states raised bars, like you mentioned, Mississippi and Louisiana. Some states are doing a great job, especially with early literacy. Others are not. And so Missouri, I think of it like this: you have a college student and you’re paying all their bills. You’re writing the checks, ordering their textbooks, doing all that work. Then one day you say, you know what, instead of that, I’m going to give you $3,000 a month: you pay your rent, your utilities, get your own books. There are going to be kids who step up and do fine. And there are going to be a lot of kids who take that $3,000 and immediately go to Cancun. We know this. It kind of depends on what you’ve done with the kids so far. And I feel like we have lulled the states into a feeling of compliance. If we just tell you how we spend our Title I dollars, fill out this form, and report that our test scores keep going down, no one cares. There’s no stick. They don’t withhold the money. We just say our test scores this year are lower than last year, and they say, good to know, here’s your

Andy Smarick (19:14):
Yep.

Susan Pendergrass (19:22):
check. So if that’s how you were raising your kids so far, why would you expect them to step up and become suddenly responsible?

Andy Smarick (19:31):
Okay, I have to admit that I have learned a hard lesson in my years doing education policy, which is that I was wrong that the political system of its own volition will always push for big action to make sure schools are great. I believed that if we had accountability systems showing that schools were underperforming, there would be a perpetual energy within the public to say we have to fix this, that it was just a matter of making the knowledge available and then everything else would take care of itself. It turns out it just doesn’t work that way. You need leaders at the top to constantly push and say, we are not doing well enough, we have to do dramatic things to make sure kids are going to be better off. Otherwise, No Child Left Behind is in place for a while and then people get sick of it. Or you have some interesting testing regimes and then there’s pushback to that, or just resistance to Uncle Sam in general. And people like the two of us say, but kids aren’t learning anything anymore. We are seeing a cratering of student learning since the peak of No Child Left Behind’s learning gains. This is horrible. Kids just aren’t learning anymore. The Andy of twenty years ago would have assumed the nation would revolt and say, how dare we do this to our schools and our kids, we have to do something differently. Instead, I don’t want to say it’s crickets, but there has not been a major wave of energy to change things again. The only way to do this is for governors or presidents to say this is not good enough and keep pushing. It is the ultimate dog that didn’t bark. The story is why something isn’t happening. If things are so bad in student learning, why is there not a dramatic energy within the public to do things differently? So maybe I look to you. In Missouri, are people just satisfied? Do they just not want the hassle?

Susan Pendergrass (21:28):
Why do you think? Yeah, they are like, we love our schools. All the time: we love our schools. We love, love, love our rural schools. It’s hard, kids show up with a lot of baggage, it’s just hard. But we love our schools. God forbid we have tiny districts getting below fifty kids. We love it. There isn’t an appetite to say, well, thirty-some percent of our rural high schools don’t offer calculus, and we don’t think we need it. It’s like, well, those kids are going to join a world where a lot of other kids had access to these things. It’s just, I don’t know the word. Complacency for sure. And it gets exhausting to continue to talk about it because it feels like

Andy Smarick (22:20):
Yeah. So this is why it can feel that way. And listen, if I were a state superintendent, based on the things I have learned, I would always begin a big reform movement by saying, first, all of the things you just said, but sincerely, because I believe this. I would say I love our public schools. I know how much they do for kids. I know that we love our teachers. I know that these schools are part of the community. I know that they help shape young people in ways beyond reading and math scores. I know that we love to go to these sports events. I know that we love to go to our fifth-grade graduation. This is an important strand in the fabric of our community. We love these schools, we love our teachers, we need to protect them, and we have to do better. What I found in that previous movement of big, dramatic out-of-state actors who came in and took over is they were awesome at the we-have-to-do-better part and absolutely lousy at the we-love-the-schools-and-teachers part. And that just caused a lot of anger. It was toxic in the long run. It is so important to a state to hear the we-love-our-schools message. That’s why they end up picking leaders, board presidents and superintendents who are of the system, who sincerely love their schools and say that. But they’re bad at the second part: we have to do things differently. The key to leadership right now is finding someone who can say both. We love these schools. We love public education in our communities. But Lord, our kids deserve a whole lot better than this. We have to do some things differently. That’s a rare leader.

Susan Pendergrass (24:00):
Yeah. Well, I think that’s a great place to end, because what else can you say? That’s awesome. That’s what we’re looking at. We’re going to find out soon, and not just Missouri. Many states have the same problems. I would love to have you come back again, Andy. We love having you.

Andy Smarick (24:16):
I love getting emails from you or Zach asking me to come on. I’m happy to give my bad opinions on anything.

Susan Pendergrass (24:23):
No, you have such a good, crystallized view of these things, and your experience on state boards is invaluable. I do appreciate it. Thank you for taking the time. I know you’re busy and hopefully you’ll come back soon.

Andy Smarick (24:40):
Whenever you call. Have a great summer.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post The Case for an Education Outsider in Missouri with Andy Smarick appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Cory Koedel, director of education policy at the Show-Me Institute, about Missouri education policy following the 2026 legislative session. They discuss the governor’s A to F letter grade executive order, why literacy legislation failed to pass, leadership turmoil at DESE, Show-Me’s latest Report on the effects of open enrollment, the case for expanding charter schools in Missouri, and more.

The post Missouri’s Stalled Education Reforms with Cory Koedel appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcasts 

Listen on SoundCloud

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.

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.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcasts 

Listen on SoundCloud

 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.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcasts 

Listen on SoundCloud

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Bloated Bureaucracy and Failing Kids The Case for School Choice with Christopher Talgo appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcasts 

Listen on SoundCloud

Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00)
Great. Mike McShane, EdChoice, always great to have you on the podcast. I read your Substack, Informed Choice. I know you do not write them all, but you write a lot of them, and I think they are super interesting. A month or so ago, there was a lot of “what’s out, what’s in,” closing down 2025 and starting 2026. I really liked your post about six words for 2026, but…

Mike McShane (00:03)
Always great to be with you. Thanks for having me. I tried to.

Susan Pendergrass (00:28)
I want to talk about that, but generally speaking, I have been having this feeling, and I think we have even talked about this on the podcast, that something has changed in K–12 education in the United States. Something seems different than it did. You track the number of kids in private school choice programs, which took forever to get to a million, and now it is like a million and a half, right? It just seems to have been growing so fast.

Mike McShane (00:52)
Yeah. I think there has definitely been a shift. I have noticed that, with the start of the year and legislative sessions starting across the country, I am talking to journalists and other folks, and it seems like the normal conversation I would have had in the past was, “Are we going to have these programs, is there going to be choice, or what?” Now it is, “What is the shape of it going to be?”

So much of choice now is being taken as a given. I think we are even seeing that within public school districts. Even in states that might not have private school choice or robust charter schools, they are at least saying, “Parents are going to need to have choice, and maybe we can keep the genie in the bottle by just having it within public school districts, or in between public school districts.” But the idea that we are going to go back to residentially assigned public schools…

Susan Pendergrass (01:41)
Like Kansas.

Mike McShane (01:50)
…with the odd aberration here and there, it just seems like that shift has happened. Now it is a question of what it is going to look like, and it is going to look different in different states. It is not a “whether,” it is a “how.”

Susan Pendergrass (02:03)
That’s right, because we have a whole bunch of second-generation choosers, right? We have parents of young kids whose parents chose it, so they are not, like you said, going to go backwards.

Another interesting outcome you have talked about over the years is that the Catholic school movement is growing again, right? Like in Florida, we are seeing a resurgence in Catholic schools, and in Iowa, because parents did not necessarily not want to send their kids to Catholic schools. Some got mad about the scandals…

Mike McShane (02:05)
Yeah, for sure. Iowa, Florida, and probably other places when data comes out, for sure.

Susan Pendergrass (02:32)
…or they did not want to pay tuition, and now they can. And certainly this survey you all have done for so long, on where parents would send their kids to school versus where they do send their kids to school, maybe we are going to see some sort of convergence where parents can actually send their kids to the school they want.

A couple of the words you said are going to be big in education in 2026, “participants,” is that right? Participants.

Mike McShane (02:34)
Yeah. Totally, absolutely. “Participants” is one of them.

Susan Pendergrass (03:02)
And “supply side.” What do you mean by “participants”?

Mike McShane (03:06)
“Participants” is, there is this big debate now, and in the piece I started with very general words that are part of the broader conversation, and then I got very narrow into school choice research words. “Participants” is kind of a school choice research word, but not entirely. I think it is going to be part of broader debates about choice in general.

There is a big question out there, who uses these programs? Who is going to participate? There are competing theories. Skeptics say it is going to be all rich kids, or kids who are already in private schools. Stronger advocates say it will be low-income kids, or kids desperate for more options.

The answer is probably somewhere in the middle, and it will probably be different in different places at different times. Some of the emerging research suggests that when universal private school choice programs first start, for reasons that are perfectly predictable, students who are already in private schools are the first movers.

Susan Pendergrass (04:01)
Sure.

Mike McShane (04:28)
That is probably because private schools find out about these programs and have an audience. They can say, “Hey, you all know how you are paying to go here? Now you do not have to do that anymore.” And then over time, the circle expands outward.

Susan Pendergrass (04:33)
They pass out a piece of paper in every backpack, yeah. “You should get this.”

Mike McShane (04:48)
More and more, those families have neighbors, cousins, and people they play YMCA basketball with. The word gets out over time. A lot of traditional channels for educating people do not work as well. It is not like everyone watches the nightly news or reads the local newspaper.

Susan Pendergrass (05:08)
“Put it on your website.” That’s a Missouri legislative mainstay, put it on your website.

Mike McShane (05:14)
So a lot of this comes out via word of mouth or discussions. You could look at the same state and see participation change over time.

Because these programs are rolling out in different states at different times, there is not going to be one national answer to who is participating. It could be the first year in Mississippi, but the second year in Alabama, and the makeup of students will be different. Because of the nationalized nature of coverage, people will keep pushing for “the one answer,” but there isn’t one. Though, to be fair, some people will say there is. I do not think that will be true.

Susan Pendergrass (06:07)
Yeah, I get a ton of questions around the rural issue. Either it is going to be the demise of our rural school system because we are all going to close, or rural families do not need it, which are opposites. It is opposites, right?

Mike McShane (06:09)
Yeah. It cannot be both. And yet a frequent criticism is that it will be both of them.

Susan Pendergrass (06:25)
But I get that a lot. “There are no private schools for them to go to,” and “it is going to cause rural schools to close.”

Certainly in Missouri, even our MOScholars program is quite small, and we do not really have charter schools outside of two districts, two very far away places. So I think for a lot of folks in Missouri, it is mysterious, who would do this, and why would anyone want it? And of course, “All the poor kids are going to go to the wealthy school districts.” Still a lot of talk about property taxes. It is almost like 2005 in Missouri, a lot of that going on.

But the reality is, in long-running programs, and now I am thinking open enrollment, anywhere you let parents pick, you get a lot of rural participation. They have the fewest choices, right? And you get a lot of urban participation, and some suburban participation. Like you said, I do not think you can…

Mike McShane (06:55)
Yeah, right.

Susan Pendergrass (07:20)
I have had so many parents over the years say, “We do not need that here because all our schools are good.” And I am like, I promise you there is a child who got on the bus with a stomach ache this morning because they did not want to go to school, for whatever reason. They think the teachers do not like them, or they are being bullied, whatever it is. I promise you there are families who would leave if they could easily do it.

Mike McShane (07:30)
Yeah, for sure. Totally.

One thing that is going to be interesting, as we watch this play out, with questions about who is participating and who is leaving public schools, is that there are broader trends of public school enrollment decreasing. You hear in some states, “My gosh, all these public schools are closing because of choice programs.” But the state next door that does not have a choice program, their public schools are closing too, because there are just fewer kids than there were before.

So that is another thing we have to disentangle, the broader population trends. I was just seeing something earlier about how congressional seats and electoral college seats are going to change because of population shifts.

Susan Pendergrass (08:17)
It’s huge.

Mike McShane (08:26)
You look at states like New York and California losing large numbers of people, Florida and Texas increasing numbers of people. These are people in general, because that is how it all happens. We have to start with that baseline and then layer these other things on top, because I feel like school choice is going to get blamed for this, even in places where it does not exist.

Susan Pendergrass (08:36)
Yeah. I cannot tell you how many times I have talked about this and shocked people. Every school district in St. Louis County, for example, has declining enrollment by large numbers. Clayton’s declining enrollment, Ladue declining enrollment, all declining enrollment. People are like, “Where are they going?” And I say, “They were not born.” They simply were not born.

We had our biggest kindergarten cohort in 2013. That moved through to senior year of high school like two years ago. It is just demographics. They just were not born.

Mike McShane (09:00)
Right? Yeah.

Susan Pendergrass (09:20)
We have net out-migration of some groups of people, people with bachelor’s degrees, but for sure, it is demographics. These kids were not born.

There is going to be this push and pull between five-to-seventeen-year-olds and retirees, basically, because we are getting more old people and fewer young people. Do we build a school or a nursing home? I think it is going to be a thing.

And we still have school districts getting bonds, 30-year bonds, to build schools and buy buses. I do not know if that is the right answer. At least the charter school sector, and probably similarly the private school sector, figured out how to not be in the real estate business, how to lease a building, or do different types of arrangements. They are going to benefit from this, while the public school system is still building schools. The kids are not being born, but we will see how that plays out.

Another thing you mentioned, one of your words I have been thinking about a lot, two of them, is “transparency.” I have wondered, can I start calling accountability transparency? Because accountability is kind of negative, but transparency, of course.

And you talk about “rage bait.” Sorry, I am rolling these into one, but with early media stories around some of these private school choice programs, like Arizona, people really jumped on what parents were spending their money on. As though they cannot be trusted to spend this money, in the way the public school system can be trusted with billions, I mean trillions, of dollars. Parents cannot be trusted with this $8,000, they will simply…

Mike McShane (10:52)
Totally. This is the irony. The irony is kind of like the discussion earlier, how there are no places in rural America, and everyone will leave rural schools to go to these non-existent places. Both cannot be true at the same time.

We cannot say these programs are not transparent and then talk about all the individual purchases families are making. That has to be transparent for you to be able to make those arguments. It is kind of a shell game people are playing when they talk about transparency.

When you say, “Here are ways in which ESA programs are not transparent,” your research is a perfect example of the opposite. Transaction-level data, you have published papers that offer transaction-level data on every purchase in the ESA program.

Susan Pendergrass (11:59)
Trust me, there are hundreds of thousands of records.

Mike McShane (12:00)
Right, hundreds of thousands of records that are available for anybody to look at.

I think this is actually good. We need to have discussions about what should be included in these programs and what should not. It is an education savings account, not just a savings account, so we have to draw the borders around what is an educational purchase and what is not.

We live in a big, vibrant democracy, so we need to have these discussions. Should you be able to buy a trampoline, or a Lego set, or whatever? Let’s talk about it. That’s fine. Maybe we decide in some cases it is allowed, and in some cases it is not.

This is part of transparency and accountability. You are democratically accountable, we need to participate in this.

But I am still blown away by the number of people who claim these programs are not transparent, when what we know about what parents are doing is more granular and more detailed than any public school district, any charter school network, almost any institution you are going to see. You just do not get transaction-level data on anything.

We can debate whether those are good purchases or not good purchases, but to say they are not being transparent is wild to me.

Susan Pendergrass (13:09)
No, I mean, my kids all went to public school. They certainly went to amusement parks. They certainly watched a lot of movies. They would not want anyone scrutinizing every, you know, you have 30 teachers buying 30 whiteboards. Decisions were made that were not the best.

I did not see anything in the transaction-level data that made me think, “This is outrageous.” And who am I to say woodworking is not an okay thing for your child to learn? Swimming lessons, I had to swim. I do not know.

I do not want to get into that conversation because I assume the best intentions for parents. I cannot understand why a parent would invest the time and effort to get into these programs to simply buy themselves a trampoline, and not really care if their kids are reading or not. I do not understand that, but that is what…

Mike McShane (14:04)
Right.

Susan Pendergrass (14:15)
…they are throwing mud at the wall to try to discredit. Clearly, it is what parents want.

I am baffled that, when you look at politics in the United States right now, those on the left just refuse to accept this fact. It is a fact. Parents want to choose their school.

There are certainly Democrats for education reform, and plenty of people working hard from the left, but the general approach feels very last century. The teachers’ union saying, “Nobody wants this, we have to stop it at all costs. We have to put a halt to this and put more money into the public school your address sends you to. We need to fund those fully first before we can ever let kids out.” That is such a failed argument to me.

Mike McShane (15:18)
Look, this is why “accountability” and “transparency” are two of the words for 2026. Opponents to choice have figured out they cannot just go out hammer-and-tongs against it, or directly say, “We are against choice.” People do not learn lessons in politics, but they learn that one.

I was looking at the gubernatorial candidate just to Missouri’s north in Iowa. It was interesting. There was an interview with the Democratic candidate for governor, Rob Sand. He would not come out and condemn the ESA program outright. The interviewer perceptively drilled down and asked, “Are you saying you are not opposed to this program, you just want changes?” He never said yes to that. He has never said, “I am for this program.” If you read between the lines, he is saying, “I am not for this program, but I cannot come out and say it.”

His pivot was immediately, “I am just talking about accountability and transparency.” He wants private schools to follow every single one of the same rules that public schools do, and expects them to somehow do better.

Part of it is, these are folks working in red states who need to make arguments that appeal to conservatives. Accountability appeals to conservatives. Fiscal responsibility appeals to conservatives, not wanting to waste tax dollars. So it is smart strategy. People need to see what it is.

If this is a blue state, these exact same people are making arguments that appeal to progressives. But you are in a red state, so they are trying to make arguments that appeal to you. If you think about it for a little bit longer, what they are saying does not hold a lot of water.

Susan Pendergrass (17:41)
Yeah, and with this federal tax credit program, even though every state has to decide whether or not they are going to take the money, it is going to be a weird shifting of resources. If I live in a state that says, “We are not going to take the money,” that is fine. I can give my $1,700 to a scholarship group in any state. I will just send my $1,700 to another state.

Some states, like Virginia, the governor, one of the last things he did when he left was opt in. Now the new governor is going to have to make this weird choice. Do I want to go against it? If you looked at any poll of parents, any poll, you would know they want to be able to choose where their kids go to school. Do you really want to be the person that withdraws?

Mike McShane (18:21)
Yeah, when she seems to be in a perfect position to just say, “Oh, the last guy did this on the way out, so I guess we are going to do it.” Once they do it for a year and everybody is fine with it, it is just, “Oh well, whatever.”

Susan Pendergrass (18:33)
I do not know. I did not do it.

I think it is going to be really interesting because, again, the way we started this, there is a groundswell. I do not think you are going to turn it back. If you stay on the side of saying it is better when kids can only go to their assigned public school, you are in quicksand. You are going to bury yourself.

Mike McShane (19:03)
Yeah. The only thing I would say, and it was another one of my six words, is “rage bait.” It is always lingering in the background for me. I am seeing it more and more, all day, every day, stuff that shows up in your feed deliberately to upset you, terrify you, whatever.

Rage bait is unpredictable. You never know what is going to catch fire and cause a big shift. There is obviously potential for rage bait content, as we mentioned, we have crossed one and a half million, hundreds of thousands of people in various states, with lots of flexibility in what they can buy. People making bad decisions, people stealing things, it is totally possible that happens. Something egregious could happen.

With a large enough population, even very improbable events can happen. One fear I do have is that something rage-bait-y happens and people lose their minds over it.

But this is the key, if one parent in Arizona does something crazy, that does not mean the other 1,499,999 parents around the country should not have the right or opportunity to do this. We have to be able to say, “This is rage bait, this is not actually what is happening.”

Susan Pendergrass (20:51)
Yeah, we have talked about this. Those of us who have pressed for school choice for so long have said, “We will do anything you want, take our arm. We will put all our data out there, we will be as transparent as possible.” And your colleague, Marty Lueken, had a Substack about this recently, like, “We will take half the money. We do not need all the money, half the money will be…”

Mike McShane (21:08)
For sure.

Susan Pendergrass (21:19)
…150 percent transparent. We will jump through all these hoops just to get this thing that everybody wants, and it is from that transparency that we are going to get those stories. We are going to pay for that.

Mike McShane (21:29)
Yeah. It is important for people to be more attuned to the rage bait they are getting. People ask, “Have you seen this thing that happened in this place?” And I am like, okay, yeah, even if it did, what do you extrapolate?

A teacher in Sacramento did something crazy. There are north of a hundred thousand schools across America. There are north of three million public school teachers. At any given moment, someone is doing something dumb. I do not know what to extrapolate from that. It could just be one crazy person.

This is not just education. Across public policy, you point to one person in the military doing something terrible to delegitimize the military in general. Do not fall for this.

To be fair, sometimes we in the school choice movement, or education reform, have done rage bait of our own. People have used social media to point out, “My gosh, look at this assignment that a second-grade teacher in Poughkeepsie did, this is why we need school choice.” People have done that.

The measure with which you measure will be measured back to you. If you live by the sword, die by the sword.

Susan Pendergrass (22:54)
John Oliver did a story on charter schools. Remember, it was the guy in Florida that was letting a charter school be a nightclub at night? There is no way that is representative of charter schools.

Mike McShane (22:58)
Yeah, I remember that.

Susan Pendergrass (23:10)
That was an example I found shocking, but it is not representative. And you are right, they will find those stories.

Mike McShane (23:13)
Yeah, totally. We should all use less rage bait. We should not use rage bait to say just because one teacher in one place did something dumb, that is an indictment of public education in general. Nor should we allow the same thing to be done in reverse, which is, because one family did something crazy, we should not have choice at all.

Susan Pendergrass (23:49)
That leads to another one of your words, “slop.” There is so much talk about AI in schools and what to do about it. Is one person going to figure this out for every school everywhere, or are we all going to figure it out individually?

Mike McShane (24:03)
Yeah, I played out the scenario I am worried about. I do not know if it will happen in 2026, but it might.

We have heard a lot about AI in schools, students cheating, which is real and worrisome. But the specific scenario I have not heard as many people talking about is the prevalence of AI video, and the ability to create videos of things that did not happen.

How many, if you have a student in a classroom, after taking a picture or a short, unrelated video of their teacher, they can put it through a series of prompts, “Hey, have this teacher do,” and then insert whatever horrible thing, say something horrible, do something horrible.

Susan Pendergrass (24:34)
Yeah.

Mike McShane (24:53)
And if you are not savvy, and I will be the first to say I think I am a savvy consumer of the internet, I have been fooled or very close to fooled. AI videos of animals doing things, dogs protecting people from bears, or that one recently that went around with a bald eagle that had ice on its beak that someone knocked off, whatever.

Susan Pendergrass (24:58)
It is like a parlor game, right? No dogs are going off diving boards, just to clarify. The rabbits on the trampoline, these are not happening. But you are right.

Mike McShane (25:20)
People who are not as savvy, the thing I spelled out was, someone does that, and then suddenly the next PTA meeting is flooded with people because this viral thing went around. The superintendent or principal has to say, “This did not happen, it is not real.”

If you do not have the media literacy, it is like one person’s word versus another. “We saw it happen, it is on video.” “No, it did not happen, it is AI.” How we adjudicate those things, and how it could be weaponized by teenagers, or by bad actors, all of that stuff will happen. Whenever a new model is released, everyone tries to break it immediately, they are much more creative than I ever was.

I am worried for teachers, worried for schools, worried for school board meetings. It could be anything. It could be taking video at a football game and saying something happened that did not. Even if it all works out eventually, the time and energy wasted dealing with it…

Now, again, I am hoping more and more schools, this could be a real kick in the rear end to get phones out of schools and say, “We are not going to have phones in schools, because people are going to be making AI videos of their teachers.” That is one of a thousand reasons we should not have phones in schools.

But it is not the only place kids are interacting with one another, or with teachers. So we have to be really skeptical when we see that video of that teacher, or that student, or that principal doing something. Take a deep breath and ask, “Is this video real? Does this pass the smell test? Does this sound like something a teacher would actually do?” I am increasingly worried about that. There are many other things people worry about that I do not really worry about, but AI video in the context of schools, bad news bears.

Susan Pendergrass (27:53)
Yeah, I think we are going to have to start adjusting our thinking to only believing things that happen in front of our face, things we can touch. The prevalence of, you know, Amazon ads now, they are… I mean, I went to get my haircut and somebody was holding up a picture, and she was like, “Okay, well, that is not a real person.” We are going to have to default to disbelief if it is on a phone or on a screen. If it is happening in front of you, you can touch it, you can believe it. But the rest of it, I think we are going to become extra skeptical, because I do not believe much stuff anymore.

Mike McShane (28:22)
Totally. Are schools going to need CCTV cameras everywhere? Are we going to be oddly surveilled in a lot of different ways, just for CYA? “If people are going to be making up fake videos, we need the real video of what is going on.” I do not know how that is going to go, but…

That was the “rage bait” one, my plea to people, please do not fall victim to rage bait. It is pinging parts of our brains that we should not. I get wrapped up in it too. “My God, I cannot believe that is happening.” Then you take 10 seconds and you are like, “Wait, why am I fired up about this road rage incident in South Carolina?” Someone cut somebody off on the highway. Who cares? I am not there. It is not my deal.

I think this “slop” stuff is also something we are going to have to be really cautious about and thoughtful about, because it could cause lots of problems.

Susan Pendergrass (29:35)
Yeah, but then people are like, “I am not going to allow AI, I am going to check it.” I think AI, we are going to have to accept, right? We have to live with it.

Mike McShane (29:41)
Yeah, we are going to have to realize this is just part of it. There will be so many great things that come out of it, the creativity it will unleash.

In our own Substack, a bunch of the graphics we do are AI generated. I could not, I laugh, I have young kids, they are better drawers, I am horrible at it, but I can do this stuff with a couple of prompts in ChatGPT. “Hey, make me…” and they can be funny. You can do someone in the style of a famous painter and suddenly it is a Renaissance painting of me.

That is incredible productivity. The fact that I do not have to have a graphic designer, I can basically do it myself and put out essentially a small newspaper with some contributors and a bit of AI. That is an insane productivity increase, and it is incredible, but we have to be cautious of the downsides.

Susan Pendergrass (30:48)
Finally, your last word, “supply side.” In Missouri, folks will say, “Well, we do not need private school choice in our rural areas, there are no private schools,” as though the supply of private schools is fixed. It is treated like a natural result of how much interest there is, the kind of people who live in the community, and what is there is there, without thinking that if parents suddenly had $7,000 or $8,000 to spend, maybe somebody would open a new school.

Or not even a new school. Maybe somebody would open a visual arts business, or a soccer academy, tutoring, dyslexia therapy, whatever it is they think parents want or need. You would be free to be an entrepreneur in that space. That piece is largely overlooked, because it is like, “We have this many private schools with this many seats, so we can only have this many scholarships.” It is like, no, that is not fixed. Do you think we are going to see a lot of changes in that area?

Mike McShane (32:00)
Yeah, because another dimension where people think things are fixed is not only the number and locations, but the shape of what schools look like. “We are not going to have a private school in this small area because we cannot have a brick-and-mortar building with 30 rooms and 250 kids.” That is not what we are talking about.

If you can get 10 kids together at $8,000 apiece…

Susan Pendergrass (32:26)
There are no buildings.

Mike McShane (32:36)
…you can do a lot of interesting stuff. Especially if you can get space donated, leverage resources in the community, maybe some online stuff, and a local teacher. You could put together a heck of an education on $80,000 or $100,000.

It is happening. What makes it challenging to talk about is that it is happening across different dimensions. At the same time we are talking about Catholic schools growing and starting new schools in a traditional sense, two blocks away in some rented bungalow people are creating a Montessori micro school.

Because these things get spoken about in national terms and in a thousand-word news story, we struggle to discuss multiple dimensions. Existing schools are growing, new schools are emerging, and those new schools are going to look different. Some will grow, some will shrink, all these things can be happening at once.

Our job as researchers and observers is to do a lot of descriptive work, describe what is happening. There has been a push in earlier generations of school choice research toward causal results, horse-race comparisons, “Are they better than public schools?” “Is this type of private school better than that type?” But the only reason we were able to do that in 1998 is because, for a hundred years before, people did descriptive work to know, how many schools, what are they doing? Then you can talk about who is doing better, because you have to decide what they are doing, where they are, who is attending, are there differences.

It is almost like we are starting over.

Susan Pendergrass (34:39)
Yeah.

Mike McShane (35:01)
…doing that basic descriptive work. What is actually happening? What are people doing?

Susan Pendergrass (35:08)
Yeah, I know somebody who started a school in a barn on their property, and the parents came and converted the empty barn to a school. I know somebody who started a mobile school, basically in a big van, so that the school came to their house one day a week. And I know someone who started one in a high-rise in Queens. It is only limited by people’s imagination, basically, right?

And a like-minded group of parents. There are more people homeschooling now than used to be, so you could do this individually, but there are many more opportunities to do it. Parents, what emerged from the pandemic, at least, is they want their kids home maybe two days or three days. That is popular, and people are finding that two days out of the house creates unique opportunities in that space.

I think it is limited by people’s imagination, and some curriculum standards, and perhaps some accountability. But if you can meet those, I think we are seeing this idea.

I am not trying to be anti-traditional public school, but I butted up against this when my kids were little. “We are the only ones who know how to do this, so you have to accept our way of doing it because it is tried and tested and comes out of our schools of education at the universities.” This is the one and only way you have to teach the number line in third grade. “This is how it has to be, we cannot vary it because we are the great equalizer of civic society in the United States.”

Your boss, Rob Enlow, really shut me down on this. It has not panned out. We only read and do math less well each year.

I cannot imagine that letting all these flowers bloom is going to have a worse result. If we fast forward 20 years and look at median earnings and educational attainment rates, and we let this thrive, I think the outcome would improve. I do not see how it goes down.

Mike McShane (37:23)
That is the thing. You mentioned the interesting times we are living in now. So many of the “parade of horribles” choice opponents talked about forever, polarization, balkanization, people retreating to silos, it is like, hey guys, that already happened without choice. You cannot blame choice, because choice did not exist yet for that to happen.

Lots of people pushing each other in the streets went to public schools. Statistically, these are public school graduates having large problems with one another.

The conservative in me says things can always get worse. The fundamental progressive view is things can always get better, and the fundamental conservative view is things could always get worse. That strand in me says, yes, things could get worse. But across a lot of these dimensions, academic outcomes, civic outcomes, there is a lot of room for growth, and not nearly as much bottom end to fall out. So the risks associated with giving people more choices are not nearly as severe as proponents of the traditional public schooling system make it out to be.

Susan Pendergrass (38:58)
Yeah. Well, in Missouri, 40 percent of our fourth graders are below the basic level in reading, which means they cannot read at all. They cannot read. They are illiterate.

Would 40 percent of parents, if given the money to spend on their child’s education, have a nine-year-old and say, “Turns out they cannot read. I tried and tried, we just did not get there. They just cannot read.” I do not think so.

I know this is not the perfect solution, that accountability through parental choice is the answer. I am not saying that. But I do not think that if parents were truly put in charge, four out of 10 would just say, “Gosh darn it, this kid is never going to read, there is probably a lot of opportunity in the service industry.” I do not think so. I think that would be a much better check on the system.

Interesting stuff. Thanks so much for joining us. I really appreciate it, always.

Mike McShane (39:42)
Yep. Yeah. I agree with you. Agreed, 100 percent.

Susan Pendergrass (39:59)
So great to talk to you. What is your Substack called?

Mike McShane (40:02)
Informed Choice, so people can check that out. Informed Choice on Substack. Subscribe, it would be great.

Susan Pendergrass (40:05)
Yeah, it is really interesting. Great. Thanks so much.

Mike McShane (40:10)
Thanks for having me.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post The Six Words Driving the Education Debate in 2026 With Mike McShane appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This is a much-needed improvement to school accountability in Missouri. Parents and community members will finally have access to clear information about how their local schools are performing.

Following the governor’s address, I wanted to re-up my post about school report cards from last May, which helps to explain why the letter-grade requirement is sorely needed and how it improves upon our current school report card system.

It is printed in full below.

———

Information Overload and Missouri School Report Cards

Have you ever started reading the warning label on an over-the-counter drug like aspirin or ibuprofen? Ever finished one? Probably not.

Drug warning labels are classic examples of information overload—so packed with details that they become practically useless. Unfortunately, the school report cards produced by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) suffer from the same problem.

In theory, these report cards should help parents and community members quickly understand how their local schools are performing. When well-designed, they can promote transparency and inform decision-making. But if a school report card is not organized and does not emphasize the most important information, it functions like a drug warning label. It can include a lot of detail but be of little practical value.

If you’re curious to see this for yourself, here is a link to the school report cards made available by DESE. Choose a district, then a school, and you can scroll through a vast amount of information. However, after you’ve taken the time to look through it all, you may realize you haven’t learned very much. DESE’s report cards may be comprehensive, but they fail to deliver what busy families need most: clear, accessible information about school quality.

Now, contrast the Missouri report cards with this report card for Briarmeadow Charter School in Houston, produced by the Texas Education Agency. At the very top, letter grades in four categories are displayed prominently:

• Overall Rating: A

• Student Achievement: A

• School Progress: A
• Closing the Gap: A

With just a glance, you know where this school stands.

Texas is not alone in this approach. States such as Florida, Illinois, and Louisiana also use summary performance indicators on their school report cards to give the public a clear picture of school quality. Unlike Missouri, these states are courageous enough to rate schools based on performance, and most importantly, publicly identify schools that are failing to educate their students.

It’s no coincidence that students in states with strong transparency and accountability policies, including clear and informative school report cards, consistently outperform Missouri students academically. These policies are key drivers of school improvement, and without them Missouri is only likely to fall further behind. School report cards that are informative about actual school performance are a simple way to get our state moving in the right direction.

The post Meaningful School Report Cards are on the Way appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcasts 

Listen on SoundCloud

Find Vlad’s book here: bit.ly/3KQzCJv

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post No Adult Left Behind, How Politics Hijacks Education Policy with Vlad Kogan appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

David Stokes, Elias Tsapelas, and Avery Frank join Zach Lawhorn to discuss the expiration of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies, new federal proposals aimed at lowering healthcare costs through cost sharing, employer coverage reforms, and prescription drug transparency. They also break down the latest installment of David Stokes’ Free Market Guide for Missouri Municipalities on parks and recreation, the role of user fees and outsourcing, national polling on public school open enrollment and why parents strongly support it, what they are watching as the 2026 legislative session approaches, and more.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcasts 

Listen on SoundCloud

Link to the national survey: yeseverykidfoundation.org/new-national…2-education/

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post ACA Subsidies, Parks Policy, and Open Enrollment in Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Right now, Missouri only classifies a school as unsafe if it has a high rate of violence and a high number of expulsions for three years in a row. Because expulsions almost never happen, the conditions are almost impossible to meet. As a result, no school is ever designated as unsafe, and families aren’t allowed to transfer out.

Changing one word, from “AND” to “OR,” would finally make the rule work the way federal law intended.

What doesn’t work

Since the law passed, there have been nearly 19,000 violent incidences in Missouri schools and over 4,000 weapons violations. In 2024, more than 12,200 Missouri students attended schools that had at least one violent incident in each of three consecutive years, 2022, 2023, and 2024. Even with these numbers, the state has not identified a single school as unsafe.

Missouri schools expelled zero students in 2024 and only five students in 2023. With so few expulsions, the Unsafe School Choice Option almost never applies, even in schools with serious safety problems.

The simple fix: change one word

In places like Poplar Bluff, University City, and the City of St. Louis, students face serious safety problems each year, yet their families have never been told about their rights.

Missouri should replace the word and with or.
A school should be designated unsafe if it has serious violence, or a high expulsion rate, or weapons violations.

This one change would help families learn when a school is unsafe and allow them to use the transfer option that federal law gives them.

More About the USCO

This one-pager explains how Missouri’s overly narrow definition leaves families without the protections ESSA guarantees and outlines steps policymakers can take to fix it.

The post One Word Could Let Missouri Students Leave Unsafe Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Jokes aside, I came across a recent poll from the yes. every kid. foundation that reminded me of a vital pairing for holding education systems accountable: understandable information and comparable information.

The poll is nationwide, but the results apply to Missouri. Parents want to hold schools accountable, but they need high-quality information to engage.

Our annual Blueprint has consistently emphasized the importance of building informational resources that are both understandable and comparable. Missouri provides some data, but there is no central, user-friendly landing place where parents can easily access and evaluate information about the quality of their children’s schools.

For instance, this data dashboard from DESE reports a number of understandable statistics for the year, but you cannot compare districts to each other. Some DESE sources are difficult to decipher and navigate altogether. And if a parent truly wants to compare districts and years, they will need to break out their Microsoft Excel skills.

Using DESE’s dashboard, a parent can see that 58 percent of Parkway C-2 students scored proficient or advanced in mathematics on the Missouri Assessment Program. But is that good? Isn’t 70 percent usually a passing score? How does it compare to last year? How does it compare to other districts across the state? Should a parent be concerned, or encouraged?

These are all important questions, and sadly, the answers require a lot of digging.

Thankfully, parents can find the answers to these questions on our own website, MOSchoolRankings.org.

There, Parkway C-2 is ranked as one of the better districts in our state: 133 out of 551 overall. In fact, its math score is the 37th best in the state. But it’s not all peachy in Parkway, as its low-income math scores ranked 378th in the state, and the overall mathematics score declined from the prior year. These statistics give meaningful context for parents to more accurately hold schools accountable.

Our website serves as a valuable resource for the state, but DESE ought to provide a similar tool—one that is even more comprehensive and accessible—using the state’s greater manpower and authority.

Taken together, survey data and practical experience point to the same conclusion: Missouri’s education system needs to be more accountable to parents. Achieving that goal requires creating resources that are both understandable and comparable.

The post Accountable, Understandable, and Comparable appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass is joined by Cory Koedel, director of education policy at the Show-Me Institute, and Avery Frank, policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute, to discuss Missouri’s early literacy crisis. They walk through the need for a universal reading screener, the evidence behind third grade retention, why banning three cueing matters, how teacher preparation programs must change to align with the science of reading, what successful states like Mississippi have done, what Missouri’s current laws get wrong, and more.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcasts 

Listen on SoundCloud

Timestamps

00:00 The Literacy Crisis in Missouri
04:42 Strategies for Improvement
09:37 The Role of Testing and Accountability
14:21 Retention Policies and Their Impact
19:08 Legislative Solutions and Future Prospects

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Why Missouri Needs Early Literacy Reform with Cory Koedel and Avery Frank appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The Early Literacy Reform Model Policy Packet includes:

• An infographic with key facts about Missouri’s reading crisis
• Frequently asked questions for policymakers
• Full model policy language for early literacy reforms
• A detailed policy brief with research and state comparisons
• Contact information for policy experts

Read the full Early Literacy Reform in Missouri Model Policy Packet here.

The post Missouri’s Reading Crisis: 42% of Fourth-Graders Can Barely Read appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

For years, the Show-Me Institute has scrutinized the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) —not out of malice, but out of a desperate desire to see our students succeed. The state’s commitment to education is vast, in terms of both a constitutional mandate and billions of dollars. Yet, as we examine the latest DESE budget request, it’s impossible to ignore the contrast between the department’s boldness when asking for money and its apparent bashfulness about what it will deliver to Missouri’s students. This disconnect reveals a fundamental weakness at the heart of the agency and a failure to act in a way that provides clear, student-focused leadership and results-based accountability.

In its FY 2027 budget request, DESE is seeking just under $9 billion, $7.5 billion of which comes from Missouri’s public coffers, to execute its mission. A large portion of the budget revenue is distributed to districts through the Foundation Formula. Other big-ticket items are the state institutions for students and adults with disabilities, subsidizing childcare for eligible families, and offsetting district transportation costs. Beyond this, there is a laundry list of programs managed by DESE and funded by the state, such as virtual education, teacher of the year awards, and summer enrichment programs. “And while there is a thousand-page accompanying document that explains what each budget line item is, there isn’t any real explanation for why the money is being requested or how it furthers education in Missouri.

Ideally, the budget request should correspond to the Strategic Plan created by DESE, with each line item of the budget request connected to a stated goal of the agency. Unfortunately, the two documents are only very loosely connected, and the disconnect demonstrates a lack of transparent, performance-driven accountability.

According to the DESE Strategic Plan for 2023–2026, DESE’s vision is to improve lives through education via the four pillars of (1) early learning and literacy, (2) success-ready students and workforce development, (3) safe and healthy schools, and (4) educator recruiting and retention. To accomplish this, DESE has given itself the following five performance measures and three-year targets.

1. The percentage of students entering kindergarten ready to learn (from 54% to 60%).
2. The percentage of students scoring proficient or advanced on the English Language Arts state assessment (from 43.5% to 50%).
3. The percentage of students pursuing gainful employment after graduation (from 91% to 94%).
4. The three-year average of initial teacher certificates issued (from 3,662 to 3,850).
5. The three-year average annual teacher retention rate (from 89.9% to 91.2%).

Setting aside the fact that according to its Strategic Plan Scorecard it hasn’t hit any of the targets yet, this very short list of performance measures reflects an agency that is more focused on process and inputs than on measurable student outcomes. Where are the performance measures for math, science and social studies? What are the outcome goals for students with disabilities? Is all of the work of the 215 employees of the Office of Childhood to be measured by just the percentage of students entering kindergarten “ready to learn”? How does one even measure “gainful employment”? At the very least it seems like an easy number to game. How can we possibly measure the appropriateness of a 369-page, $9 billion budget request based on just these five items?

As they return to Jefferson City after the first of the year, it is time for the Missouri legislature to demand more from an agency asking for $9 billion. To hold DESE accountable and ensure taxpayer dollars are serving students first, the legislature should, at a minimum, require DESE to publicly issue an annual report that explicitly links every major budget request line item to a specific, measurable goal in its strategic plan. If a request does not directly advance a key student outcome, it should be subject to maximum scrutiny. And there should be repercussions for missing targets year after year.

The state constitution vests the responsibility for education in the legislature, not DESE. It is high time the legislature exercises its authority and forces DESE to replace its bureaucratic double-speak with real, measurable results for Missouri’s children. Our students deserve a budget that reflects a true commitment to their future, not one that simply preserves the machinery of a struggling bureaucracy.

The post It’s Time to Hold DESE Accountable appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

David Stokes, Elias Tsapelas, and Avery Frank join host Zach Lawhorn to outline what a responsible plan to eliminate Missouri’s income tax should include, from revenue triggers and spending restraint to rethinking other taxes. They also break down St. Louis County’s Bill 182 expanding prevailing wage and DBE mandates, Independence’s proposed TIF package for a new Wally’s gas station and what it says about corporate welfare, Missouri’s early literacy crisis and reforms like a universal third grade reading screener, mandatory retention, and banning three cueing, and what they are watching next on prefiled tax bills, data center policy, and rising property tax bills across the state.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcasts 

Listen on SoundCloud

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction to Missouri’s Income Tax Elimination Plan
02:52 Strategies for Reducing Income Tax Reliance
05:19 Understanding Missouri’s Tax System
08:26 The Importance of Competitive Tax Policies
10:53 St. Louis County’s Prevailing Wage Bill Discussion
13:45 Economic Implications of Tax Subsidies
16:24 Independence’s Wally’s Gas Station Development
19:28 The Flaws in Tax Increment Financing
20:20 Addressing Early Literacy in Missouri
27:54 Looking Ahead: Legislative Priorities

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Eliminating Missouri’s Income Tax, Subsidies for Gas Stations, and Early Literacy Reform appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Christy Wolfe, director of K–12 policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, about major shifts in federal education policy. They discuss recent Department of Education layoffs, the push to give states more flexibility through waivers, how Indiana is leading a new accountability approach, what it all means for states like Missouri, and more.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcasts 

Listen on SoundCloud

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post The Future of Federal Education Policy with Christy Wolfe appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post Unsafe Schools and Parental Empowerment with Tiara Jordan-Sutton appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post The Unsafe School Choice Option (USCO) appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Marty Lueken, director of EdChoice’s Fiscal Research and Education Center, about the 2025 Fiscal Fact Book. They discuss how much is really spent per student, where the money comes from, why staffing has grown even as enrollment has declined, the fiscal impact of school choice programs, and more.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcasts 

Listen on SoundCloud

Timestamps

00:00 Understanding School Funding in the U.S.
10:03 The Impact of School Choice Programs
20:30 Challenges and Misconceptions in School Funding

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post The Fiscal Facts Behind School Choice with Marty Lueken appeared first on Show-Me Institute.