Clerk with a Camera: Municipal Checkbook Hall of Fame

Posted on July 22, 2022January 13, 2026 by Abigail Wagner

The initial response to the Show-Me Institute’s municipal checkbook Sunshine Law request from the city of Linneus, a small town with a population of less than 300 in north central Missouri, was familiar to me. Even though we had only been receiving emails about our request for less than 24 hours, I had already seen several of Missouri’s smaller cities respond in the same way.

“We don’t have any of our records on electronic format,” the email read. “Everything is done by hand on paper.” I typed up my standard response to this type of email, asking Linneus’s clerk to copy and mail the city’s expense records if she could, and to inform us what she thought the copies, work, and postal service fees would cost so we could make a budget decision before she started working. I assumed that, like several other small towns before, Linneus would send an estimate, I would note it in an ever-expanding spreadsheet, and the case would be left alone until the municipal checkbook team could decide whether we would fund the inquiry.

Linneus’s city clerk, Patricia Brandes, had a different idea. After telling me she didn’t know what the cost for over 100 copies would be at the Linneus courthouse, she sent me one of my favorite emails of the entire municipal checkbook project.

“Maybe I could try taking pictures of them with my phone and email them to you. Would that work?”

That did work. Patricia sent me the cellphone photos later that day, and you can see all 64 of them for yourself in Linneus’s folder on our online drive. Although they may not be as instantly readable as the Excel sheets and PDFs sent in by some of our state’s municipalities, the images still reveal Linneus’s dedication to transparency. Patricia turned in every page of the city’s pen-and-paper operating expense record from July 2021 to July 2022, including amounts paid and names of vendors. What’s more, she was willing to take time to think of a creative, free solution that fulfilled our request, despite the limited resources of a city as small as Linneus. That’s a clear demonstration of the culture of transparency our project hopes to find in all of Missouri’s municipalities, and reflects well on Linneus’s city government’s commitment to serving the public.

The Suspense Isn’t Exactly Killing Me

Posted on July 20, 2022January 13, 2026 by Susan Pendergrass

I guess we should be concerned that the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) is keeping their district accountability system on hold for another couple of years, but does it really matter? Should we be holding our breath with anticipation as DESE fiddles, once again, with the metrics they use to determine whether school districts in the state are accredited?

Let me put it another way: If I told you that last spring, upon DESE’s recommendation, the State Board of Education reinstated fully accredited status to Kansas City Public School District, where 12 percent of students scored at a Proficient level or higher in math and 25 percent did so in English/language arts (ELA), what would be your takeaway? Would you think any more highly of the district knowing that it has DESE’s seal of approval? Or would you think instead that accreditation must not have much to do with how successful the district has been at preparing students to succeed?

DESE doesn’t appear to be very picky about which schools qualify for full accreditation. The Ferguson-Florissant School District, for example, is now fully accredited despite the fact that only 8 percent of students scored Proficient or higher in math, and 20 percent did so in ELA.

On the other hand, DESE seems to be tireless in its quest to perfect its system for evaluating school districts. It changed the test it uses four times in five years—making it difficult if not impossible to compare student test scores from consecutive years. And now, amid all the upheaval caused by the pandemic, it is replacing the Missouri School Improvement Plan (MSIP) 5 with MSIP 6. It’s an awful lot of trouble to go to just to tweak a system that has consistently accredited 99% of Missouri school districts. And that work will take time—nearly a decade will pass before school districts receive a new accreditation update from the state.

None of this is to say that the MSIP 5 shouldn’t be replaced; the Show-Me Institute has repeatedly pointed out its shortcomings. Under that system, districts needed to get at least 70 percent of their possible points to be accredited. However, there were multiple opportunities for “extra credit”—including all of the points for academic growth—and plenty of non-academic points at play. That explains why accreditation has been so easy to come by, and so far removed from the academic success of students.

Under MSIP 6, academic growth is now officially counted in the point total, but academic indicators still only comprise 48 out of 100 points. Districts can now earn points for creating a Continuous School Improvement Plan. They get points for “reflecting upon current practices and data.” They get points for having the “required documentation.” All of which is to say that districts with troublingly low academic performance are still quite likely to be able to get full accreditation.

But here’s the real kicker: DESE is going to go through the laborious calculations of MSIP 6 for each district, and then it’s going to make an accreditation recommendation to the State Board of Education. The recommendation will be based on the Accreditation Score, but also on “previous department MSIP findings” (whatever those are), on financial status, on statutory and regulatory compliance (whatever that involves), and on the employment of an “appropriately certified” superintendent. In other words, we will have State Board meetings like the one earlier this year that reinstated Kansas City Public Schools full accreditation, and the decision will be subjective.

So it doesn’t bother me that it will be a couple of more years before we are officially reminded of how stubbornly DESE and the State Board of Education refuse to face reality. What bothers me is that Missouri’s accountability system, if you can call it that, is heading in the wrong direction. It is becoming less academic, more watered down, and more about the adults in the system rather than the children in the schools.

Supreme Court Reins in Federal Bureaucracy in EPA Case

Posted on July 15, 2022January 13, 2026 by Patrick Ishmael

One of the first things most kids learn about American government is that it has three branches: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. Generally speaking, the legislature writes the laws, the governor or president executes those laws, and courts resolve disputes over the laws. In recent decades, however, the power to write, execute, and litigate the “law” in the federal government has often fallen to a growing administrative state in the executive branch. Is American law whatever an alphabet soup of federal agencies says it is? Sometimes, yes, and in recent years increasingly so.

Well, buried at the end of an uneventful year for U.S. Supreme Court Rulings is a little case called West Virginia v. EPA. In 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Obama administration wanted to comprehensively regulate “greenhouse gases” at American power plants under the Clean Air Act, so it adopted what it called the “Clean Power Plan rule.” The rule put pressure on dirtier coal power plants to shutter and promoted alternative energy plants. The problem with that is the Clean Air Act had only ever been used to enable the regulation and oversight of individual power-generating facilities; Congress had not authorized the EPA to unilaterally reorganize all power-generating capacity of the United States at the grid level.

After seven years of legislative wrangling, constant litigation, and a couple of presidential administrations, the Supreme Court affirmed that the EPA had indeed exceeded its mandate under the Clean Air Act. The court found that when a “major question” like nationwide energy generation is to be decided, Congress must render its decision directly or clearly authorize an agency to act on its behalf, consistent with the law. Here, Congress had not spoken directly or made such a clear delegation to the EPA to give it such expansive powers, and because it had not, the EPA’s dramatic rulemaking was invalid.

To be clear, the court’s ruling doesn’t suggest that the federal government can’t regulate “greenhouse gases,” but it does make clear that if the federal government is going to regulate them, Congress needs to clearly authorize it. That’s a win for small and accountable government; this ruling preserves the constitutional norms of our republican form of government. Each of the three branches is constrained by the Constitution; new laws must be passed through Congress, not by bureaucratic fiat.

How do you stop out-of-control regulations like this? Ideally, by requiring some form of legislative action for them to continue. Regulatory reform is a dense and oftentimes boring policy area, but if I were to suggest one change consistent with state and federal constitutional divisions of power, I think it’d be appropriate for every regulation enacted by an agency to come with a sunset date. The sunset provision would wipe the regulation clean if not adopted and passed into law by Congress or a legislature. That way, every regulation would eventually have to get an up or down vote by the people’s representatives, or else disappear.

Regardless, the Supreme Court’s finding in West Virginia is an important one that hopefully will remind lawmakers that they alone should be making “the law”—and that they can, and should, be held accountable for both the laws they pass directly and any regulations that descend from the statutes they enact.

The Scooter Ban Revisited (Or Not)

Posted on July 14, 2022January 13, 2026 by Abigail Wagner

When I wrote about the downtown Saint Louis ban on scooters a few weeks ago, city officials were planning to return them to the streets with new restrictions after about two weeks. That two-week deadline came and went on Monday, June 27. The ban is still in effect in mid-July, and there’s no news on if the aldermen plan to even address the scooter issue any time soon.

Although policy on scooters hasn’t changed in the last month, it has become clearer that scooters weren’t as much to blame for the Saint Louis crime spike as the Post-Dispatch suggested in the article that inspired my first scooter post. An article from the same source on June 27 quoted several downtown business owners and residents who all agreed that although teenagers on scooters may have been a traffic disturbance, the real danger wasn’t young riders disobeying the rules of the road.

The owners of the downtown Insomnia Cookies location have moved closing time to midnight from 3 a.m. and no longer accept cash because of robberies by armed youths. The owner of NAPPS Natural Hair Salon has seen an increase in crime among adults who come downtown to party. Some residents report seeing children who aren’t yet teenagers carrying guns near apartment buildings. Clearly, teens on scooters aren’t the biggest threat to public safety and commerce downtown. The ban on scooters for the last few weeks has been a band-aid solution to what is often literally a bullet-hole problem.

There are changes that should be seriously considered to improve the scooter situation, such as the rider age and speed limit restrictions suggested by rental companies, which I discussed in my prior post. But a complete ban on scooters seems to be putting the cart before the horse. Safety in downtown Saint Louis is a problem with no simple solutions, but aldermen should start by finding a solution to the scooter issue that doesn’t punish law-abiding residents and visitors instead of scapegoating a useful means of public transit.

Municipal Checkbook Project Returns

Posted on July 13, 2022January 13, 2026 by Patrick Ishmael

Four years ago, Show-Me Institute researchers sent Sunshine Law requests across Missouri, asking cities how they were spending their tax dollars. Some of the responses we received were startling, like a $35,000 bill from the city of Battlefield and $25,000 from Hollister to get their spending records. Meanwhile, much larger cities such as Springfield and much smaller cities such as Strafford gave us their records for free.

As it turns out, the ability to produce a city’s “checkbook register” isn’t dependent on city size. In fact, the willingness to share with the public how tax dollars are being spent seems far more likely to hinge on city culture than anything else.

And now with the benefit of some time having passed since our last inquiries of Missouri’s cities, we thought it was appropriate to check in and see how their cultures of transparency were holding up. The good news is spending records are already rolling in from cities across the state; the bad news is that once again, some cities are still giving us the runaround, if they respond at all.

If you don’t see your city yet on the online drive we’ve set up, there’s still the possibility it will appear there eventually; we are receiving new submissions all the time, so stand by for updates. And if you have concerns about how your municipal government is spending money in general, be sure to hit us up. My colleagues and I will be talking about both the positive and negative stories learned from this transparency project over the next few weeks, and if you have local knowledge that you think would be useful to that narrative, we’re all ears.

Missouri Supreme Court Takes Solid Step Toward Greater Transparency

Posted on July 13, 2022January 13, 2026 by Patrick Ishmael

The run-up to the July 4 holiday weekend featured a torrent of positive developments in Jefferson City. We’ve already talked about the planned adoption of a massive income tax reform by the state’s executive and legislative branches. But earlier that week, the state’s judicial branch also broke some good policy news. The public will have extensive access to documents filed in the state’s court system from their own personal electronic devices, starting next year. According to the state supreme court’s press release:

“With the assistance of Missouri’s Court Automation Committee, a statutory entity comprised of members from all three branches of government, the judiciary has been working toward this goal for a number of years,” Chief Justice Paul C. Wilson said. “Today’s orders will ensure court documents that are currently open to the public will be truly accessible to the public. These improvements will fundamentally change the way individuals access public court documents, while balancing the need to protect confidential information and ensure the overall security and reliability of our underlying case management system.”

The rule changes will not go into effect until July 1, 2023, partially due to the constitutionally required waiting period for certain court rules. The waiting period also gives the Court the opportunity to work with The Missouri Bar to educate attorneys, court staff, parties or anyone else offering documents for filing in any Missouri state court to keep unnecessary confidential information out of otherwise public documents and, when confidential information must be included, to redact that information to protect it from disclosure.

Giving the public access to the actual documents filed in Missouri courts may seem like a narrow transparency victory, and in some respects, it is. The average Missourian will probably only take advantage of the new document transparency system a handful of times in their lives; for example, they might want to closely monitor a local court case that may impact their own lives, but may not get the scrutiny or news coverage of higher-profile litigation.

Yet enabling robust oversight of government functions, even if used intermittently at the individual level, is a key good government reform. The purpose of transparency initiatives like this one isn’t to push every Missourian to constantly watch every function of government; ain’t nobody got time for that. But such reforms empower individuals and communities with the opportunity to oversee the governing system that serves them when they do have concerns.

In general, government should have to demonstrate why certain documents can’t automatically be made public rather than require the public to ask first, as is generally required under the state’s Sunshine Law. The state court system’s shift in policy is a positive step in this rethink of what government transparency should really look like.

Governor Parson Opens Door to (At Least) One Special Session

Posted on July 12, 2022January 13, 2026 by Patrick Ishmael

Over the last month, there were rumblings in the media and on Twitter that not only might Governor Mike Parson veto the tax rebate bill passed by the legislature during this year’s legislative session, but that a special session—a reconvening of the House and Senate to pass more bills—might be called by the governor, as well. Rumors of a veto started almost immediately after the legislature finished its work in May, but doubts remained about whether the governor would really veto tax relief in an election year, especially after a gas tax hike.

But six weeks of veto rumblings rolled into a veto thunderclap early this month when most Missourians were preparing for the July 4 holiday weekend. That Thursday, the governor not only vetoed the rebates but also declared his intent to reconvene the legislature in a special session to pass an even more extensive overhaul of Missouri’s income tax:

“We have managed our state resources responsibly and our consistent investment in workforce development and infrastructure is providing a strong foundation for Missouri. Now is the time to take additional steps to help alleviate the strain on Missouri families. Permanent tax cuts that provide real relief to families, senior citizens, the working class, and small businesses every year is a better answer to the inflationary pressures we face, and we look forward to getting it done,” Parson said in the statement.

Parson’s plan includes reducing the individual income tax rate, increasing deductions and allowances for taxpayers and further simplifying the tax code, to create the “largest tax cut in state history,” according to the release.

Under the proposal, the first $16,000 of income for single filers, or $36,000 for joint filers would not be taxed at all, according to a release about the proposal from the Missouri Republican Party.

Special sessions are not unusual but they aren’t terribly common, either; the time and extra cost of bringing legislators back to the capitol often compels elected officials to put off even important reforms until regular legislative business resumes in January. That the governor won’t wait until 2023 to institute tax reform is encouraging.

As to the substance of the proposal as I currently understand it, I am broadly excited by it. Show-Me Institute analysts have long supported eliminating the state income tax, and by increasing the standard deduction for all Missouri filers while simplifying the tax code and reducing the income tax rate, the governor’s current proposal sets out a straightforward framework for dumping the tax over time from both “the top” and “the bottom” of the tax code. My hope is that the legislature’s plan also includes at least a handful of triggers for further tax relief in future years.

I’d be remiss, of course, if I didn’t also suggest that income tax reform should be only one of perhaps a handful of special session topics that could be addressed in the session. Notably, one major regret the governor admitted to after the legislative session was that curriculum transparency legislation didn’t get done this year; this seems like an easy topic to address when the legislature gets back together.

It remains to be seen when exactly the special session will be called, but the odds are it will be called concurrently with the veto override session scheduled for September, when legislators will already be back at the capitol. Hopefully, the special session leads to good tax policies for the state at a minimum, and ideally an opportunity to call up additional topics. Fingers crossed.

The Missouri School Rankings Project

Posted on July 7, 2022January 13, 2026 by Susan Pendergrass

UPDATE as of March 12, 2025, MoSchoolRankings.org now has the latest 2023–2024 performance data for every Missouri school and district—plus updated spending data at the district level. See how your school is performing and find out where education dollars are going.

Missouri Has an Education Emergency

Missouri schools are failing to teach the core subjects of reading and math and the most recent test scores show that students are falling further behind.

Missouri’s Department of Secondary and Elementary (MO DESE) has not offered the level of transparency regarding student performance that is necessary to create an education system focused on higher standards, reducing achievement gaps, and results-based accountability.

The status quo is leaving thousands of students behind without the fundamental skills to pursue higher education or compete in the modern labor market.

About the Project

In response to DESE’s failure to perform one of its most basic functions, we launched The Missouri School Rankings Project and MoSchoolRankings.org.

The mission of The Missouri School Rankings Project is to make student performance data more transparent by providing parents, policymakers, educators, and taxpayers with access to easy-to-understand information about every Missouri school and school district in order to motivate actions that will result in dramatic reforms to Missouri’s education system.

Visit MoSchoolRankings.org

Why School-level Data Matters

Parents Need Information to Choose

Parents need accurate information to make informed decisions about which school will best serve their children. MoSchoolRankings.org provides a detailed picture of student performance for each school.

Comparison Reveals Problems and Solutions

The MoSchoolRankings.org comparison tool allows users to compare student performance from up to 3 schools at a time.

By comparing schools that serve similar student populations, we can identify successful schools and learn from them.

The ability to compare individual schools also allows families who are relocating to make informed decisions about which districts or school boundaries to move into. The comparison tool also highlights that many Missouri families, who are not able to move, are trapped in low-performing schools and districts.

Public Rankings Increase Accountability

Accountability is vital to standards-based education reform. Publicly ranking schools make it more difficult to ignore poorly performing schools and schools whose performance is declining. This attention provides an incentive for all those connected with a school to focus on improving student performance and overall outcomes.

Spending Data

The public sector should make it easy for citizens to see how their money is being spent. The powers that be shouldn’t 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. 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. Now anyone can see how every dollar was spent in 2021, 2022 and 2023 in each of the 551 public school districts and charter school local education agencies in the state.

The Rankings

Each student performance metric is given a grade of A through F. The grades are combined to produce a grade point average, or GPA. Each school receives a GPA and is then ranked based on that GPA. Information on how grades, GPAs, and ranks are calculated can be found on the Grading Methodology page.

The performance rankings are based on data from the 2018-19 and 2020-2021 school year and are calculated using several performance metrics that measure student performance. These metrics are:

Student performance in ELA and mathematics
Low-income student performance in ELA and mathematics
Student growth in ELA and mathematics
A comparison of student performance in ELA and math to each school or district’s expected performance based on its enrollment of economically disadvantaged students
4-year graduation rate
ACT scores

If multiple schools or districts had the lowest possible score for an item (for example, if 0 percent of their students scored Proficient or higher in math), then they would share a rank.

Key Terms

Definitions and further explanations of the terms used to determine rankings can be found in the glossary section.

Some key terms to understand while exploring the portal are:

Achievement Levels

Below Basic—the student has only a minimal understanding of the material.
Basic—the student has a partial understanding of the material.
Proficient—the student has an adequate understanding and is able to apply subject matter as defined by the Missouri Learning Standards.
Advanced—the student demonstrates a thorough understanding and ability to apply subject matter.

Academic Growth

A statistical model used to identify differences in student academic growth from one year to the next among schools or districts with similar baseline scores.

Adjusted Achievement

For each school or district, the percentage of low-income enrollment was multiplied by the baseline rate and subtracted from the baseline. The result is the school’s (or district’s) predicted score. If a school’s (or district’s) expected score is higher than its actual score, it underperformed. If a school’s (or district’s) expected score is lower than its actual score, it overperformed.

Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI) and Targeted School Improvement (TSI)

Schools with these designations are low-performing schools.

Additional Information About Districts and Schools Includes:

Percent of low-income students
Percent of students with disabilities
Full-Time Equivalent teachers
Average teacher salary
Total expenditures
Total expenditures per pupil

About the Research

The Missouri School Rankings Project is led by Show-Me Institute’s Director of Research and Education Policy Dr. Susan Pendergrass. Before joining the Show-Me Institute, Susan Pendergrass was Vice President of Research and Evaluation for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, where she oversaw data collection and analysis and carried out a rigorous research program. Susan earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Business, with a concentration in Finance, at the University of Colorado in 1983. She earned her Masters in Business Administration at George Washington University, with a concentration in Finance (1992) and a doctorate in public policy from George Mason University, with a concentration in social policy (2002). Susan began researching charter schools with her dissertation on the competitive effects of Massachusetts charter schools. Since then, she has conducted numerous studies on the fiscal impact of school choice legislation. Susan has also taught quantitative methods courses at the Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies, at Johns Hopkins University, and at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. Prior to coming to the National Alliance, Susan was a senior policy advisor at the U.S. Department of Education during the Bush administration and a senior research scientist at the National Center for Education Statistics during the Obama administration.

Contact Us about the Project

Hazelwood, Bankruptcy, and Special Laws

Posted on July 1, 2022January 13, 2026 by David Stokes

The City of Hazelwood has announced that it is cutting back on the services it provides its residents. In related news, Hazelwood had a starring role in my new paper on special laws in Missouri. Is that a coincidence? Well, no, it isn’t.

Hazelwood’s biggest issue is that it is being held at figurative gunpoint by Robertson Fire District, a taxing district here in St. Louis that could qualify as one of the most obscure taxing districts we have. Robertson Fire District probably should not exist. The City of Hazelwood’s municipal fire department should be providing fire protection services to the entire city, but can’t because of a special law in Missouri that limits the ability of cities in St. Louis County that annex unincorporated areas to provide fire services in those areas.

Cities must pay taxes for the fire district to provide the fire services, which they do less efficiently than municipal fire departments. And it is much easier for fireman’s unions to get control of a fire district than a city government (though they can do that, too.). Anyway, Robertson has significantly raised its property tax rate—a rate that the City of Hazelwood, not just the residents within the fire district, must pay. These expensive bills from the high-spending Robertson Fire District are the primary reason Hazelwood is making the cuts mentioned at the start of this piece, and considering filing bankruptcy. From a Post-Dispatch story on the topic:

Median employee pay in the [Robertson] district was $116,066 in 2021, according to district salary records.

In 2021, the city paid Robertson $4.5. million out of a total budget of $30 million, and that does not include the cost to fund the Hazelwood municipal fire department, which covers other parts of the city.

The Robertson contract requires the city pay any fire district tax exceeding 99 cents for each $100 of assessed value. That cost has ballooned over the years, Hazelwood City Manager Matt Zimmerman told the Post-Dispatch in April. [Author’s note: The current rate is $2.41, much higher than $0.99, although the district claims it is going to lower it.]

This story is an example of a special law that is harming Hazelwood, and other cities, too. Cities within St. Louis County that incorporate or annex new areas should be allowed to provide municipal fire services within those areas. Frankly, Chesterfield should be operating its own city fire department; it could save Chesterfield residents a lot of money.

There is another special law, however, where Hazelwood gets the better end of the deal and uses that special authority to stick it to taxpayers. This law relates to hotel taxes. Hotel taxes within St. Louis County are pooled and used to fund tourism promotion, the downtown dome, and a few other things. The tax rate paid on hotel rooms everywhere in St. Louis City and County is 7.25 percent, on top of the normal sales tax rate. But a few cities (four to be precise, most near Lambert Airport) are allowed to have a hotel tax on top of that rate, and the most egregious one is Hazelwood, with a rate of five percent. The combined sales and hotel tax rate in Hazelwood is over 20 percent, and that is unjustifiable. (The other three cities’ extra hotel tax rates are all under one percent.)

In other words, throughout St. Louis City and County hotel taxes of 7.25 percent fund regional items, but a special law allows Hazelwood to charge an extra five percent to just promote Hazelwood. That needs to be changed and excessive hotel taxes need to be disallowed.

Live by the sword, die by the sword. I fully agree that Hazelwood’s primary financial problem is derived from a harmful special law that needs to be removed (the fire district law), but the legislature also needs to address the hotel tax that benefits Hazelwood unfairly.

I look forward to the Mayor of Hazelwood supporting both changes, not just one of them.