Susan Pendergrass, David Stokes and Elias Tsapelas join Zach Lawhorn to discuss the newly added spending data at MoSchoolRankings.org, takeaways from the State of the State Address and a new court decision on applying the City of St. Louis earnings tax to remote work.
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Susan Pendergrass speaks with Brian Riedl about the U.S. hitting the debt ceiling and what happens next.
Brian Riedl is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, focusing on budget, tax, and economic policy. Previously, he worked for six years as chief economist to Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) and as staff director of the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Growth. He also served as a director of budget and spending policy for Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign and was the lead architect of the ten-year deficit-reduction plan for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.
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Earlier this month, I expressed my general optimism that Missouri’s 2023 legislative session would be a good one, focused on transparency and reform. Now after the governor’s State of the State address yesterday, I’m not so sure. The word “transparency” showed up zero times in the governor’s prepared remarks, and the word “reform” showed up twice—once in a heading that had seemingly nothing to do with the section’s content, and once referring to a past jobs program. Such thin gruel is especially shocking, given the governor’s own regrets about the transparency and reform initiatives that didn’t pass last year.
But boy, is there a lot of spending—some of which might be justified, such as expanding Interstate 70—but the emphasis on expanding government made the speech basically indistinguishable from a speech by a tax-and-spend liberal. The governor didn’t propose a single meaningful change to the state’s failing education system or suggest a single reduction in government. Nothing about further tax cuts. Nothing about anything truly aspirational, reform minded, or geared toward good governance at all.
It’s understandable that the governor would want to pursue some form of legacy initiative or project near the end of his final term. Frankly, redoing I-70 should be plenty. But programs that permanently expand the reach of Missouri’s welfare state—like a universal pre-K program that the Heritage Foundation has eviscerated time and again—run completely against the small government view that many politicians in Missouri had historically given lip service to.
Perhaps in future speeches and press availabilities, the governor will expand upon his State of the State remarks, adding back in some of the reform-minded small government conservatism. The legislature has been advocating for a variety of these small government reforms, and I thought the governor’s office was in agreement. The governor can, and should, do better.
On December 1st, Representative Brad Pollitt pre-filed a bill that would expand educational opportunities in the state of Missouri. This bill includes the “Public School Open Enrollment Act,” and would be an important step forward in enabling Missouri parents to choose where they send their children to school.
Under this new open enrollment program, Missouri school districts that choose to participate could receive transfer students from any public school in the state. While this bill would put Missouri on the path to education choice, policymakers could do a lot more to provide students with greater interdistrict choice by making district participation in the program mandatory. Not only would a mandatory program give parents and students a much greater number of educational opportunities, but it would also increase competition among schools and districts, which would lead to higher-quality schools that better serve the needs of students.
Director of Education Policy Susan Pendergrass created model legislation for what we are calling the High-quality Interdistrict Choice Act to demonstrate what a mandatory open enrollment program would look like. If implemented, such legislation could make Missouri a national leader in school choice rankings.
Believe it or not, the average amount spent per student in Missouri last year was over $13,000. Do you ever wonder where more than $250,000 spent on a classroom of 20 students goes? So did we—so we built a website to help answer this question. The average teacher salary is just over $52,000. Even with benefits, that leaves a lot of money. Maybe it goes to books, computers, administration, utility bills, buses, and gasoline. Maybe it goes to legal fees and advertising, professional development for teachers, travel to conferences and membership fees.
Of course, public education has a lot of moving parts and they all cost money. But it’s public money—our money. That’s why the Show-Me Institute decided to build a website that would allow anyone to see how every dollar was spent in 2021 in each of the 551 public school districts and charter school local education agencies in the state. MOSchoolRankings.org, which already has two years of school and district report cards with letter grades, now also shows where every dollar came from and how it was spent. These data were already available on the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) website as Annual Secretary to the Board (ASBR) reports. We simply put them into a single data file and built a portal to make it easy for users to dig into the numbers.
Did we include spending on land, buildings, or other capital? Those are in the ASBR, so, yes. Did we include principal and interest payments on debt? Yes, we did. Did we include district revenue from athletic event admissions and bookstore sales? We did. Did we include revenue that one school district pays to another school district? We did. Did we include revenue that parents pay as tuition to send their children to a school outside their district? We did. Did we include revenue from bond sales that are issued to build things? We did. If the district reported it to the state as a source of revenue or as an expense, we included it.
I believe that the public sector should make it easy for citizens to see how their money is being spent. I don’t believe that the powers that be should tailor spending numbers to include some things and exclude others. So we’re providing everything, and users can decide what they consider to be relevant. Heck, we even made the entire data set of nearly 500 variables for each district available for download. And the DESE accounting manual can be accessed on the site.
Of course, when you look at the numbers for a district, you may have some questions. Those are questions that ought to be answered by superintendents, school boards and DESE.
Not long ago, Missouri was a national leader in telemedicine. Governor Parson was among the first to waive unnecessary restrictions on telemedicine as part of the state’s response to COVID-19, and those waivers played a key role in allowing the service to flourish. But the waivers have since expired, and our elected officials have yet to take the action necessary to ensure continued easy access to telemedicine. Missouri is falling behind, as numerous states and even the federal government are recognizing the important role telemedicine should play in health care going forward.
As I’ve written repeatedly, the growth in telemedicine services was one of the few silver linings of the pandemic, and all it took was the government getting out of the way. Prior to 2020, most forms of health coverage, including Medicare and Medicaid, covered telemedicine services only in some circumstances. Various laws and regulations restricted where telemedicine services could be accessed and who could provide them, which drastically limited their benefits. But once the COVID-19 public health emergencies were declared, many of these restrictions were waived, and millions of people nationally tried remote health care for the very first time.
At the end of 2022, as Missouri turned the corner on the pandemic, Governor Parson allowed the telemedicine waivers to expire. Though telemedicine usage was lower at that time than it was during its 2020 peak, it was still far more popular than it was before the pandemic. There is no doubt that some medical services could be better in person, and there are some potential risks for fraud and abuse with remotely offered services. But after multiple years of telemedicine proving its place as a reliable health care option, bringing back old barriers that were shown to drastically limit health care access should have been out of the question.
All things considered, I was optimistic last year that Missouri’s legislature would at least make the waivers permanent, if only because that would maintain a level of access to health care that Missourians had grown accustomed to. But, as with many other priorities this past legislative session, telemedicine reform failed to make it across the finish line.
As this year’s legislative session gets underway, our elected officials have a fresh opportunity to make things right on telemedicine. Giving Missourians the increased options and access they had in the very recent past seems like a perfect place to start.
A version of this commentary was published in the Columbia Daily Tribune.
Over the past few years, Missourians have gotten a better understanding of the term “shortage.” Whether it was soup or toilet paper, we can all remember those empty shelves at the grocery store at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Maybe that’s why the term “teacher shortage” has many policymakers on edge these days. There’s just one problem: in education, the term “shortage” doesn’t mean what you think it means.
Take the “shortage” of elementary school teachers in Missouri for example. In 2021, the Springfield School District wanted to hire 55 elementary school teachers. They received 2,155 applications from individuals with the appropriate certification. Yet, for one reason or another, they left six positions vacant. This is a teacher shortage.
The problem is the misleading way in which the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education presents the data. In the “Teacher Shortage Report for Missouri,” released in December 2022, DESE defines shortage areas as “those content areas within the state for which positions were filled with inappropriately certified teachers(s) or left vacant due to the absence of certified candidates.”
This is possibly the broadest definition of what it means to have a shortage. If a school district hires a private school teacher with 10 years of experience and a bachelor’s degree in elementary education? Shortage. They hire an individual with an MBA to teach high school business, but he does not have certification? Shortage. Let’s say they hire someone with a high school mathematics certification to teach elementary or middle school mathematics. Shortage. Keep in mind, the state has dozens of teacher certification areas, and being certified in one does not qualify you to teach another. With this broad definition, DESE suggests Missouri was short 532 elementary school teachers (Grades 1–6) in 2022, making this the highest shortage area.
Let’s put that into perspective using raw, unweighted data provided by request from DESE. In 2022, there were 2,015 job openings for elementary school teaching positions. Districts received over 21,000 applications, more than 18,000 of which had the appropriate certification. Of course, teachers may apply for more than one job. In all, 32 elementary positions were left vacant. Thirteen of those vacancies were in the Riverview Gardens School District alone.
There is a teacher shortage—it’s just not as widespread as most believe. In total, across all certification areas, Missouri had 258 positions left vacant in 2022. These vacancies were spread across 74 of the state’s 550+ school districts, but nearly half of all vacancies were in just five school districts: Hickman Mills (17), Kansas City (17), St. Louis Special School District (19), Hazelwood (27), and Riverview Gardens (47).
Aside from the Special School District, which is a unique district that serves special-needs students in St. Louis County, the other four districts have a lot in common. They tend to serve students who come from low-income families who are black. For example, more than 97 percent of Riverview Gardens students are black.
The shortage narrative has been used to push for an increase to the starting teacher salary in Missouri. According to data obtained from the Missouri State Teachers Association, the average starting salary in these four districts is $40,075. That is well above the current state minimum of $25,000 and even above the proposed minimum of $38,000 that is currently before the Missouri legislature. Estimates suggest this increase would cost the state $21 million.
Such an increase could actually exacerbate the problems facing high-poverty, majority-minority school districts. If all the districts that currently pay less are forced to offer higher wages, Riverview Gardens, Hickman Mills, and other districts that struggle with teacher recruitment will lose the competitive advantage of higher salaries. Imagine: the state could spend $21 million and fail to even address the real shortage problem in Missouri’s most disadvantaged school districts.
Missouri’s teacher shortage is not equally felt throughout the state; it is most pronounced in high-poverty, majority-minority school districts. Accordingly, strategies to address the shortage should provide targeted support for the affected districts. This could include salary supplements for teachers in hard-to-staff schools, or it could mean intense marketing, recruitment, and human-resource support for these schools. An across-the-board increase in minimum teacher salary is not what Missouri needs, and it could very well do more harm than good.
In policy, as in our daily lives, our decisions have trade-offs. I can buy a new car and make payments or I could have more disposable income each month. The same is true when it comes to how we run our schools and compensate our teachers. Much of the public narrative lately has been about Missouri’s relatively low teachers’ salaries. Missouri ranks 47th in the average teacher salary, with an average of $51,557. The starting average teacher salary (news I broke on the Institute blog because no other media source had requested or reported the data) was $38,367.33 in 2022.
In that post where I corrected the record on Missouri’s actual starting teacher salary, I noted some additional facts related to Missouri’s staffing policies:
Missouri ranks 43rd in average salaries for instructional staff. Meanwhile, Missouri ranks 48th in student-to-teacher ratio, with 11.3 students per teacher. In comparison, Illinois’s ratio is 14.3 to 1, ranking the state 28th. In 2021, revenues for Missouri’s public schools were $15,809 per student, which is 31st overall nationwide. These data suggest that part of the reason Missouri’s teacher salaries are relatively low is due to staffing choices made by school districts themselves. It is funny when you question the narrative with facts how some people like to twist what you are saying. On Twitter, for example, one person responded by asking, “Are you upset the teacher/student ratio is so low, too?” That’s a strange interpretation. I’m just offering an explanation. It’s simple math really.
Missouri school districts could choose to hire fewer teachers and pay them more or hire more teachers and pay them less. They choose the latter.
Let’s work this out a bit more. Let’s assume everything remains constant (the number of students and the state’s payroll for teachers), but we change the student-to-teacher ratio. If Missouri were to match Illinois’ ratio of 14.3, Missouri teachers could realize a 26.5% increase in their salaries.
By choosing to hire fewer teachers, Missouri schools could choose to raise average teacher salaries from $51,557 to $65,244. This would push the Show-Me State’s ranking in average teacher salary up to 16th in the nation.
If we moved the students enrolled per teacher figure up to match Florida’s 19.6 to 1 ratio, it would result in a 73.4% increase in teachers’ salaries. This would raise Missouri’s average teacher salary up to $89,426 and would put Missouri second only behind New York.
All of the policy attention has been on Missouri’s minimum teacher salary of $25,000. According to the Missouri State Teacher’s Association, only one district in the entire state starts teachers at that rate (the Middle Grove School District, with 35 students).
Of course, raising a student-to-teacher ratio is not as simple as the mathematical exercise I’ve done here. Nevertheless, the point remains. School districts make staffing decisions and those decisions impact salaries as much, if not more, than the state-mandated minimum salary.
Note on the calculations used:
average salary = P/T = P/S x S/T, where S= students, P=payroll, T=teachers.
So if spending per student (P/S) is constant, salary varies proportionately with S/T. If MO had the same S/T ratio as Illinois then average teacher pay in Missouri could rise by 26.5% (100 x 14.3/11.3) with no change in spending.
James Shuls, Aaron Hedlund and David Stokes join Zach Lawhorn to discuss teacher pay in Missouri, the case for and against reforming child care policies, and a new report on modernizing the state’s unemployment insurance system.
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