Susan Pendergrass speaks with Doug Burris, retired Justice Services Director and Chief United States Probation Officer, about criminal justice reform in Missouri and St. Louis. They discuss Missouri’s risk-based approach to sentencing and supervision; why building more prisons may not reduce crime; low violent-crime clearance rates in St. Louis; the case for bail reform and expanded electronic monitoring; the Safer Supervision Act before Congress; and more.

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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00):
Welcome to the podcast, Doug Burris, who has been in and around criminal justice reform. I know you’ve been making a lot of pushes nationally, and you’ve worked within Missouri. What I want to talk about today is that in St. Louis city and county, folks are really celebrating this reduction in crime. Murders are down, and therefore we are on the verge of solving this issue. But it doesn’t feel that way to people who live there. I know you ran the county jail for a while and you’ve been closely involved in what’s going on there. What is your perspective on the St. Louis region in terms of where things stand today, in the middle of 2026, when it comes to criminal justice reform and identifying and clearing crimes?

Doug Burris (00:57):
Well, first of all, Susan, thank you for having me as a guest on your show. It’s greatly appreciated. I’m such a fan of the Show-Me Institute. To answer your question, there has been some progress, but I think what we have done is taken baby steps and we still need to walk and then run. There’s much work that needs to be done. I think the state of Missouri as a whole has been a great example of what can happen when criminal justice reform is done correctly. What was done with the Department of Corrections with prior work, including House Bill 1525, allowed for focusing on more high-risk cases and moving low-risk cases through the system quicker, getting them productive and out once they are. That’s what should be done more at the federal level, following what the state of Missouri did, and also at the local levels in the city of St. Louis. I think that’s exactly where we’re headed.

Susan Pendergrass (02:00):
So what did happen at the state level in Missouri? How did they shift their focus? It sounds kind of strange, but to make this system more effective and efficient, you need to find and lock up violent criminals, but people who are not violent criminals who commit a crime could be dealt with differently. What did Missouri do specifically?

Doug Burris (02:01):
Well, Missouri led the way for the rest of the country, as did Texas, where they implemented various reforms. One was making sentencing decisions and supervision decisions based on a risk level, where they had risk assessments that followed the science of criminal justice on who needs to be the most supervised and frankly the longest incarcerated, as opposed to the exact opposite. I’ll give two extremes of the situation. At the federal level, we have a grandmother who continues to cash her dead husband’s Social Security check, and that person ends up on federal supervision on the same caseload as a violent child predator. It’s really not necessary to have that woman on supervision when the real focus should be on the violent person. There is the Safer Supervision Act that’s before Congress right now, and we’re really hoping that gets passed so there will be more emphasis on supervising the people who are at highest risk, using risk assessments as a tool to determine that.

Susan Pendergrass (03:45):
And how long has Missouri been doing this? Do we know anything about how it has impacted the size of the prison population?

Doug Burris (03:53):
That’s a fantastic question. It’s been in play for about five years now. What has happened is the population of both the prisons in Missouri and the people on supervision has decreased, but the crime rates have not gone up. The same thing has held in Texas, which has done it for just a little bit longer than Missouri. So following the science really does work. And it’s at a considerable expense. It’s about thirty thousand dollars to house someone in a Missouri prison, and in a federal prison it’s over forty-two thousand dollars. It might be cheaper to send these people to college than to send them to jail or prison. And of course there might be more good done too, because there have been all kinds of studies showing that people who get an education or vocational training have drastically lower recidivism rates. That’s what we really need to be focusing on, and not the grandmother I talked about earlier.

Susan Pendergrass (04:58):
Well, it seems to me that a lot of states, including red states, are moving toward the idea of just building more and bigger prisons and locking everybody up, because if you want to show that you really care about crime, you demonstrate that you are ready to lock everybody up. But that’s not effective or efficient, right?

Doug Burris (05:21):
No, that’s exactly right. And unfortunately we’re seeing that in our neighboring state of Arkansas, where they’re constructing a new prison expected to cost one billion dollars to open the doors. One billion dollars. And then to operate it, if their annual rate of housing someone in prison equals Missouri’s, it will cost about a hundred million dollars a year to operate. And again, we’re going to have people in there who could be supervised in the community or given opportunities like drug treatment, job training, and education, things that will have people contributing to the tax base rather than taking from it.

Susan Pendergrass (06:03):
How do you convince people that a risk assessment is going to work when they want all the criminals off the streets?

Doug Burris (06:10):
Well, it’s twofold. One is we have to educate people that putting someone in prison is going to cost tens of thousands of dollars every year, and in the end they may come out more angry and less able to adapt to the community. The other thing is to follow the science. Look at what Missouri has done and what Texas has done, where they have lowered the prison population and crime has actually gone down. This is something other states should be following as well. We can’t keep everyone in prison forever. We just can’t afford it. And not only that, but it’s also inhumane. The cost would be astronomical if we start keeping people in prison for low-risk crimes that in some cases have no victims.

Susan Pendergrass (07:10):
A couple of things came up in the last legislative session. Governor Kehoe passed a violent crime clearance rate grant program, but the legislature hasn’t funded it. What are your thoughts on that?

Doug Burris (07:27):
When it comes to violent crime, I’m all in favor of keeping the most violent people in as long as possible and perhaps even for life. The question is where can we find ways to save money with those who aren’t violent? That’s what we really need to be focusing on. When you’re supervising a violent person but you also have nonviolent people on your caseload, it really just doesn’t make sense.

Susan Pendergrass (08:01):
Well, I was just thinking specifically about trying to direct some funds toward clearing crimes, because even though murders are down, clearance rates on murders are still pretty low in St. Louis, in the thirty to forty percent range. I would think that the same people who are interested in locking everybody up would like to clear more of these crimes. If you look at carjackings, most of those go unsolved. Maybe one in ten is cleared. While we focus on risk assessment, which is a great idea, there are other things we could be doing, like working harder to clear the crimes that are committed.

Doug Burris (08:39):
Absolutely. That makes complete and total sense, because when you’re talking about the worst of the worst, they don’t commit one crime and then never do it again. This is an excellent idea for putting resources toward making the community safer.

Susan Pendergrass (08:56):
Another thing that came up in the last legislative session was DNA testing people who are arrested, running their DNA and then disposing of it if they don’t match anything. I don’t think that went anywhere. I know there are a number of bills that have moved through trying to make Missouri a safer place. It wasn’t a really productive legislative session in 2026 in Jefferson City. A lot of things didn’t happen, but things are being attempted. What about St. Louis specifically? Having run the jail in the county, what do you think needs to be done there to improve residents’ feeling of safety?

Doug Burris (09:38):
I think more resources need to be directed at the court level, first of all, and at the investigative level like you talked about. But there are people in jail awaiting trial who have not been found guilty for three to five years. Can you imagine what it would be like to be in a place where you don’t see the sun for three to five years? You don’t feel the sun on your face or the hug of a loved one. I saw some of those cases where people were headed to trial and after three to five years the case just goes away. I think we need to really focus on giving the courts resources, and that includes both prosecutors and public defenders. Public defenders have some of the highest caseloads in the nation here in Missouri. If someone is innocent or can be dealt with quickly and given a path to become a productive citizen, that’s what we really should be focusing on.

Susan Pendergrass (10:37):
What about the bail system? Does that need reforming?

Doug Burris (10:41):
Yes, I really think so. That’s one of the things some other states have done that has shown incredible results: using a risk assessment at bail. The federal system does that currently, and I think it’s still underutilized. There are things that can be done with that risk assessment in terms of supervision strategies, but I think the judge needs to know the absolute risk of that person and what can be done to address it when making a decision on bail.

Susan Pendergrass (11:14):
Can’t we put more people on monitoring? I hate to suggest everyone gets an ankle monitor, but can’t we monitor more people while they’re awaiting trial rather than having to house and feed them?

Doug Burris (11:31):
Yes, absolutely. That’s an area that needs to be expanded. In the St. Louis County jail, for example, which is the largest jail in Missouri, there are three hundred people in custody right now who are low risk. We’re spending about a hundred and twenty dollars a day to keep them in jail, potentially for years. Low-risk people, if you follow the science, can typically be supervised in the community.

Susan Pendergrass (12:06):
So do you think that if we were to implement all of these reforms, do a risk assessment on every person charged, only lock up the violent criminals, and let people await their trial at home, that St. Louis would feel more safe or less safe?

Doug Burris (12:07):
Well, I think with proper supervision you’d have to do it right. You just can’t let everyone out. Utilizing the risk assessment would really be the key, because someone may be charged with a low-risk crime this time, but they could be on parole for a prior murder or rape or something along those lines. That’s why you really need to look at the risk assessment to determine the appropriate strategies for releasing people.

Susan Pendergrass (12:42):
Yeah. This just seems to be a growing sector of our economy and a growing slice of the budget pie. Missouri has budget problems. We’re putting so much money toward this idea of reducing crime, and for some reason people still just don’t want to walk to their car alone at night. I know there’s a lot of general public disorder in St. Louis, graffiti, homelessness, panhandlers, that also contribute to it. I wish I could understand a reasonable, cost-effective approach to

Doug Burris (13:26):
Yes.

Susan Pendergrass (13:37):
improving those conditions, because I know other cities have and I believe St. Louis can do it, but we have this reputation of being a crime-ridden city, and I think that’s so unfortunate.

Doug Burris (13:47):
Right. I completely agree with you. The truth is the answer isn’t to lock everybody up. The United States has the second highest rate of incarceration on the planet, only behind North Korea. The Department of Justice reports that if incarceration rates remain the same, one out of every fifteen adults in the United States will serve a prison term. One out of every fifteen. And that’s a prison term for a felony conviction, not a jail term for a DUI or a bad check. The costs are astronomical: thirty thousand dollars a year to house someone in a Missouri prison, paid for by the taxpayers. There have been proven strategies for getting people in and out of the criminal justice system. Ninety-three percent of those who remain employed on supervision successfully complete supervision. Those who remain unemployed throughout their supervision have a more than fifty percent failure rate. Getting people a decent job where they can care for others and find meaning is really one of the keys to lowering crime.

Susan Pendergrass (14:45):
Yeah. And there are public-private partnerships, and partnerships through religious organizations and other programs that have been shown to work, if we would free them up.

Doug Burris (15:13):
That is so true. Chuck Colson’s old organization, Prison Fellowship, is one of the best with the programs they offer in prisons and to people when they get out. It has proven, particularly in Iowa, to show drastic reductions in recidivism.

Susan Pendergrass (15:25):
Wow, that’s great. So I’m surprised to hear that Missouri has led the way on prison populations. I thought there was consideration about building a new prison, but I believe it’s not happening. Is that right?

Doug Burris (15:55):
Yes, that’s exactly right. Our prison population has actually decreased in the last few years.

Susan Pendergrass (16:03):
Wow, that’s really surprising to me. But good to hear. So what are you looking for the governor or the state legislature to do in the coming years?

Doug Burris (16:12):
I think they should build on the reforms that have already been proven to be successful. The one thing you mentioned that I think is frankly brilliant is the idea of working to close open violent crime cases, because on the violent cases, the chances are it’s not one crime they committed and then they go to work the next day and never commit another crime. I think that would be something fantastic for the state legislature to do.

Susan Pendergrass (16:37):
And at the federal level, what are you hoping to see done?

Doug Burris (16:46):
The Safer Supervision Act, as I mentioned before, is actually a bipartisan act, but it’s being led by the right right now. The conservatives are the ones who have introduced it into Congress. The Department of Justice is in favor of it. It would make the assessments we talked about more prominent, and it would also give people incentives to do things right, like getting a college education or a good-paying job and paying off restitution, where they can get off supervision earlier. That makes complete sense. But also, almost everyone convicted of a federal crime now is given supervision, like the grandmother I mentioned earlier who cashed her dead husband’s Social Security checks after he passed. This would allow for a more

Susan Pendergrass (17:33):
Mm-hmm.

Doug Burris (17:42):
thorough assessment at the time of sentencing, for the judge to not put people on supervision who don’t need it. That would clear up resources so more time could be spent on the people who really need to be supervised, as opposed to those who don’t.

Susan Pendergrass (18:01):
Yeah. A lot of the sentencing reform we hear about involves mandatory minimums, which force judges into incarcerating people whether they want to or not. I assume that’s not something you would support.

Doug Burris (18:16):
No. I worked in the federal system for twenty-three years and saw the damage that mandatory minimums have done. For instance, with crack cases, I saw a judge sentence someone who was selling five grams of crack. A gram is equal to about a sugar packet you put into your coffee, and five grams carried a mandatory five years. And then you would have people with no mandatory minimums who robbed a bank and did a shooting receive lower sentences than drug cases. Thankfully there were two reductions in the crack mandatory minimums, applied retroactively. Over 23,000 people had a resentencing, and when they were released, they did not offend at higher levels than those who served their full terms. That was money well saved. The judge has a better idea on sentencing someone when they have all the facts of the case before them, rather than relying on a statistical report done ten years prior that says, because he was convicted of this crime, he gets this sentence.

Susan Pendergrass (19:17):
Yeah. Right. Well, I’m relatively new to this area, but I think it’s all pretty fascinating. We struggle enough to get people to live in our cities, and if they don’t feel safe, that’s not going to help. I look forward to learning more about this area of policy and following more closely what Missouri and St. Louis specifically are doing. I would like to have you come back and talk about it again when there are real policies being considered, because it’s not going away and there’s a lot to learn.

Doug Burris (20:11):
Well, I appreciate it. I enjoyed my forty-year career in the criminal justice system, and hopefully I’ll be the only guy you’ve ever met who has been in more prisons than John Gotti.

Susan Pendergrass (20:16):
Hopefully. Thank you so much, Doug. I really appreciate it.

Doug Burris (20:27):
Thank you, Susan. It was a real honor.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Risk, Reform, and Public Safety in Missouri with Doug Burris appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Tim Carney, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, about why American culture may be making it harder to have and raise children. They discuss the long-term consequences of the declining U.S. birth rate, how intensive parenting culture may be driving childhood anxiety, the “travel team trap” and the arms race of youth sports, what cities and communities can do to become more family-friendly, and more.

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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00): I’m really looking forward to this conversation with Tim Carney. Thank you for joining us. You’re a senior fellow at AEI? I listened to a podcast the other day with a demographer from the University of Pennsylvania, and it was really good. I think they have a pretty strong department. He said that the United States reached peak child in 2012 or 2013, and basically

Tim Carney (00:06): That’s about right.

Susan Pendergrass (00:24): numbers have been going down on babies ever since. We definitely see that in Missouri. That was our biggest kindergarten cohort, and numbers are going down. I have five grandchildren under the age of five, and it seems to me this is going to be the policy conundrum of their generation. What do you think?

Tim Carney (00:44): It is certainly the biggest story of the next thirty years, policy, cultural, economic, everything. Another way of putting it: the number of births in the US peaked in 2007. Those kids born in 2007 either graduated last year or are graduating this week. Colleges know this very well. They’re all bracing for it. What about ten years from now when the workforce starts significantly shrinking?

Susan Pendergrass (01:03): Yeah.

Tim Carney (01:11): What about the towns that are built around a public school, elementary school, middle school, high school, and those start shrinking? Particularly in rural places, they’re seeing consolidation, two different public schools or two different Catholic schools consolidating. Can schools adjust to being small? How much is this a self-reinforcing spiral? When there are fewer kids, people aren’t used to seeing kids around. Yes, absolutely. It’s the biggest story of the next thirty years.

Susan Pendergrass (01:37): In your new book, Family Unfriendly, I think it’s interesting to juxtapose these two things. At the same time, we’re making it so much harder to raise kids in our culture, and we’ve raised the expectations for each and every one of them so high that people who are considering having kids find it daunting. It used to be, when I was young, people had six or seven kids and just hoped for the best. Everyone did okay. But now every child has these insane expectations, and I sympathize. If your child doesn’t roll over by six months old, they need occupational therapy now. That did not used to be the case. Doesn’t that work against it?

Tim Carney (02:12): Yes. A lot of economists have been praising quality over quantity parenting for years. Isabel Sawhill is an economist I’ve worked with for years, but I think she’s dead wrong when she says this is good, that people are choosing fewer kids so they can invest more in each one. That sounds right, but then you realize

Susan Pendergrass (02:33): Okay.

Tim Carney (02:53): the American Pediatrics journal says the number one cause of the epidemic of childhood anxiety we’re facing right now is lack of unsupervised play. So parents who are giving their kids the best of everything, making sure they’re not just wandering around the neighborhood, making sure they’re safe and busy with violin lessons and enrichment activities and a special private pitching coach for softball, that’s supposedly high-quality parenting. But it comes with low-quality results, which is very anxious kids, as well as stressed-out parents. People ask how my wife and I do it with six kids. I like giving answers about the special cool systems I have, but the real answer is a lot of times we just don’t.

Susan Pendergrass (03:41): Yeah. I feel like I’m probably going to say a lot of unpopular opinions on this. I never liked elite sports or travel sports, but I see travel sports going nationwide now. People from Texas are going to Florida, going to California for travel sports, which I always thought was kind of insane because it didn’t work for my family. We would normally have tournaments at Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. I also see kids being absorbed into the adult world more. Craft breweries have children trying to find something to do there, which is not a very normal environment for them. High-end restaurants have little kids in them, and I just feel like that takes away from the time when they’re supposed to just be kids.

Tim Carney (04:28): I actually think mixed-age mingling is something we need more of. Sometimes when I need to get work done, I’ll go to the local craft brewery to get away from my kids, and then somebody else has all their kids there. But those kids aren’t asking me any favors, so I’m fine with it. I think it’s good that we’re building places for parents to bring kids. The way I put it, though, and again

Susan Pendergrass (04:35): Okay. Yeah. That’s right.

Tim Carney (04:58): my local brewpub allows for this, but we need places where parents can bring kids and ignore them. I brought my kids to the brewery on a cold winter day when they couldn’t be outside because it was ten degrees and forty-mile-an-hour winds. I start the book with a story, in contrast to

Susan Pendergrass (05:05): Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Carney (05:27): high-intensity travel sports, of a program that we saw and then emulated in the Catholic parishes when we lived in Maryland, which was called Friday Night on the Field. There was T-ball and coach-pitch baseball, so this was kindergarten, first grade, second graders. Maybe 10 percent of the dads were coaching. The rest of them, if they were there, were hanging out with other dads. And the kids who were older

Susan Pendergrass (05:53): Yeah.

Tim Carney (05:56): were running around or playing wall ball. The kids who were younger were on a playground. When my wife found out what was going on there, she said, you are bringing all six of the kids to this while I stay home and rest. So I brought the kids there. I maybe had a baby in my carrier, ignoring the other four while one of them played T-ball. And that was exactly what suburban parents needed. Not this high-intensity mom and

Susan Pendergrass (06:08): Yeah, sure.

Tim Carney (06:22): child attached at the hip, but the whole family is there, it’s mixed age, and the children have freedom. This is a really important part of it in so many ways. One, that childhood is expansive and not just intensive. Two, that raising kids isn’t this hyper-intensive, constant thing. There was a commercial I cite in the book about Mother’s Day and how we need to honor mothers more. But it goes way overboard. It says they pretend they’re hiring for a job, and the requirements include you’re never allowed to sit down and you don’t get to eat meals until all of your colleagues are out for the evening. Being a mom is exhausting, and there are days where you don’t sit down, but come on. This is just not true.

Susan Pendergrass (07:00): The hardest job in the world. Yeah. I have three kids that are pretty close together. It was rocky there for a while, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. As a practical matter, how do you change culture? If the prescription is to back off on intensive parenting, it feels more like an arms race where people say, maybe I don’t even agree with it, but if every other kid is going to Kumon Math, my kid has to go to Kumon Math. What do you do?

Tim Carney (07:36): It’s a tragedy of the commons sort of thing. I discuss it particularly in sports. In chapter one I call it the travel team trap. The reason it’s a trap is you get stuck without wanting to. I know lots of people whose kid just wants to play JV baseball, but the coach says they have to play fall baseball too. But I’m a football player. If you’re saying I’ll miss some reps and the other guys might get ahead of me, well

Susan Pendergrass (07:57): Yeah.

Tim Carney (08:05): that’s one thing. But then the coach says you’re shirking if you’re not playing year round. We have sought out schools and programs that explicitly do not do that, but we had to seek them out. It’s harder to be a backup point guard on a varsity basketball team if you’re going to play three sports, so you might get cut from the team. To some extent the parent is just saying, I really just want them to make the team, and that’s why I’m doing this.

With the academics, there’s a similar dynamic. We put our daughter, who was struggling in math, in a remedial program, something like Kumon. When we showed up, we realized, this was in Northern Virginia, specifically McLean, which is a wealthy area. Nobody else there was remedial. Everyone else there was an A student whose parents wanted their third grader

Susan Pendergrass (08:52): I see. Okay.

Tim Carney (09:03): to be at the sixth-grade level so they could get into Thomas Jefferson, the special super-magnet high school.

Susan Pendergrass (09:08): Yeah. If kindergarten is the new second grade and preschool is the new kindergarten, where does it end? I just feel like we’re overwhelming parents. You said it’s raising anxiety in kids. It’s definitely raising anxiety in parents too. It’s making people not want to be parents. It feels very stressful right now. There are books and apps, and there’s even a book on how to be a more free-range parent, which is strange to me. Does somebody need to be told how to do this? You just let them go outside.

Tim Carney (09:46): No, it does take work. And another thing is, to quote what a wise woman once said, it takes a village to raise a child. Being free-range is easier when other people are doing it. We used to back up to a big playground, and nine times out of ten my kids were the only ones there unsupervised. I actually got an email from a neighboring parent. It wasn’t criticism. It was saying your kids are great and it’s great that you let them run free, and asking if I could talk to them about letting their own kids run free. If you’re in a neighborhood where there are kids but they don’t come out, you might have to build organized activities. We didn’t do that growing up. We just played stickball. My mom wouldn’t organize it. We did it on our own. But now parents might have to be more involved. It’s a little bit of labor, but you connect the families, connect the kids, build the trust.

Susan Pendergrass (10:19): Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Carney (10:44): The community, and we talked about policy. I’m in DC. Everybody wants it to be a federal bill, this or that. The fact is it’s a cultural thing, as I said, and the community is going to have to have these organic, or sometimes deliberate and intentional, structures to help parents raise kids. The more parents who are walking around the neighborhood, the safer the neighborhood is. The more parents making it clear that their kids are going out and should come home when the streetlights turn on, the more that’s known, the safer it is. Remember when you and I were young, other people’s parents would correct us when we were wrong? Now, I have close friends I know I can do that with, but a lot of parents say they’re terrified of correcting someone else’s kid because they’ve been screamed at by the other parents. Your kid was

Susan Pendergrass (11:25): Mad at us. Yes.

Tim Carney (11:41): about to shove gravel down the throat of her two-year-old sister at the playground. And that’s my job too, if I’m right there. That social trust and community takes work. There are people who say it takes a village, and they can’t find their village. You have to build your village. I’m one of those conservatives who really believes that.

Susan Pendergrass (11:54): Are we willing to do the work? Do you see people doing it?

Tim Carney (12:09): We’re too individualistic, and that’s part of all of this. But I’m also one who believes the burden is really on you. You can’t wait for somebody else to do it. You build the community, and then you can sit back and bear the fruits of your labor as a neighbor yells at your kid so you don’t have to.

Susan Pendergrass (12:25): You’ve also talked about building family-friendly communities. There’s a conundrum we face in Missouri: no one wants to live in downtown St. Louis. A lot of cities face that, and St. Louis is probably at the forefront. We’re in the top five for cities in decline, and St. Louis and Pittsburgh are going to serve as examples, because

Tim Carney (12:28): Yes. Mm-hmm.

Susan Pendergrass (12:53): we hit that death spiral with more deaths than births a while ago, and all of our demographic trends are going to be out ahead of everyone else. People are going to look to us. But parents don’t want to raise their kids in the city of St. Louis. And if you don’t have children, you just keep getting older. Tell me a little bit about what has happened to make cities unfriendly to families and what they could do to change it.

Tim Carney (13:19): I’m a believer that we need all of the above. I’m very pro-suburbs. That’s where I raised my kids, that’s where I went to high school. But before high school I grew up in Manhattan, and I’m very pro raising kids in cities if you can do it. The number one thing is crime, or crime and disorder. You saw this a lot during the 2020s when people would say, who cares if people are hopping over the turnstile, so what if people are smoking pot, that homeless guy sleeping on the corner isn’t going to do anything. All those little things that adults can, maybe they shouldn’t but can, turn a blind eye to are disturbing to kids and disturbing to parents. Crime and disorder needs to be put in its proper place.

But then also, this is something where liberals tend to be better than conservatives: walkability and public amenities. I don’t mean my ability to walk to work or to my favorite cocktail bar. What I really mean is my ability to walk my baby in a stroller somewhere nice, and my eight-year-old and ten-year-old’s ability to walk together to a cool park, and more importantly to walk together to their friend’s house. Cities can actually do that better than suburbs to some extent, because they can put in those amenities, which are playgrounds, parks, and other things. That means traffic. Cars have to slow down. This is something I’m really studying now at AEI. The federal government has a walkability index, and it’s laughably bad. It’s published by the EPA, so it doesn’t actually show you

Susan Pendergrass (14:45): It’s about car exhaust.

Tim Carney (15:10): whether your kids can walk somewhere without getting run over by a car. We’re trying to see if there’s a way to improve this. That’s part of the built environment. That’s explicitly a government duty. Are the roads too wide? Are the cars too fast? Are there crosswalks? Are there trails? Because once you can let your kids walk around without getting run over by cars and without running into meth heads, their childhood is so much better. And your family life is so much simpler.

Susan Pendergrass (15:41): What about safety? I think it was you mentioning something like setting up safety zones within which families could have some reasonable degree of comfort that police respond and that crime is being attended to.

Tim Carney (15:58): A big part of raising kids, in my view, is you want to give them a sort of walled garden and let them be free in that garden. Every year that garden gets bigger, and at some point you realize the walls are gone and they’re out in the world. For me, this was a back campus at St. Bernadette’s and St. Andrew’s, the parishes where we had these programs. The kids were running free, but unless there was a kid who was going to run into traffic, and there are those kids, and probably some of your viewers and listeners have one who they know is a flight risk, in general they were going to be safe. When I would leave my kids alone in a museum, I tell the story of my son Sean, who three times I’ve totally lost him, but it was always in a botanical garden or a museum or someplace similar,

Susan Pendergrass (16:33): Yeah.

Tim Carney (16:55): where someone would say, hey, who are you with, four-year-old? And then slowly expanding that realm of freedom. You can walk around the neighborhood but can’t cross over Route 50, and then slowly it gets bigger and bigger. Community norms are really what make that possible. That two-year-old shouldn’t be walking down the street alone. That six-year-old is fine.

Susan Pendergrass (16:57): Yeah. Who are you with? But haven’t we kind of ruined that with the twenty-four-hour news cycle where everybody believes their children are at risk of being abducted by a stranger at every moment?

Tim Carney (17:35): Yes, and this is part of the problem I run into. When I say we need to let kids be free to run around like we Gen Xers were, people say it’s so much more dangerous now. It’s not. Statistically, almost the whole country has gotten over the violent crime wave that came with the George Floyd unrest and COVID lockdowns. That caused a spike in all the cities, and every place in the country right now is much, much safer than it was in 1984 when I was six. By a long shot. Every parent’s worst nightmare is their child getting abducted by a stranger. These cases happen, they end up in the news, and so we all think they’re happening all the time and all around us. Evolutionarily, we don’t have a brain that can understand a country of 340 million people.

Susan Pendergrass (18:08): Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Carney (18:32): So if there are three major cases a year and people talk about it for a few weeks, it seems like there’s some kid who got kidnapped half the year. It happens fewer than a hundred times a year. If you see numbers saying children are abducted ten thousand or a hundred thousand times, those are bad situations, but they’re not stranger abductions. In almost every case, the boyfriend goes off with the kid without the mom’s permission, or the grandparents have custody and then the mom comes and takes the kid. These are not good situations, but they’re not a kid who was left alone at a playground and then shoved in the back of a white van.

Susan Pendergrass (19:20): To the extent that we could bring any of that back, and this is where I’m a little pessimistic, I think kids learn decision-making in a way that isn’t being taught now, so that we end up working with people who never made an independent decision in their life. I certainly was out and got hurt and had to figure out: am I hurt enough to go home? Am I hurt enough to keep going?

Tim Carney (19:37): Ask a boss who has hired somebody right out of college recently. Yes.

Susan Pendergrass (19:45): Got a flat tire or whatever, we had to make decisions on the fly. I just don’t think we’re building that type of independence and resilience into our kids, and it’s a loss at the global level.

Tim Carney (19:58): Absolutely. Employers should all really be getting behind what you and I are saying right now, because if they want to hire a kid out of high school or college who can make a decision. I always remember the time I used to mow lawns in high school. Once I showed up at a lawn across town, used his mower, and it just didn’t start.

Susan Pendergrass (20:05): Yes.

Tim Carney (20:21): He was not home. He had a number on the fridge. I called and said, Mr. Zellinger, your mower’s not starting. And he said, good news is I don’t come home until Monday. So you have between now and then to get the lawn mowed, and I’m confident you’ll figure out a way to do it. It wasn’t an assignment. It was a responsibility. The best way to give your kids a responsibility that’s not an assignment they can just beg out of is to let them be free. And all of a sudden they’re like, wait a second.

Susan Pendergrass (20:40): Yes. Right.

Tim Carney (20:51): I need to be there in twenty minutes. How do I make that happen? Or I’m lost, how do I get unlost? And again, the children suffer. It’s not just that they go through life happy and dumb. They end up more anxious because life will inevitably bring them these problems. There is an epidemic of childhood and adolescent anxiety, according to

Susan Pendergrass (20:56): Yeah.

Tim Carney (21:19): HHS, and it’s caused by the fact that kids don’t have enough freedom in childhood.

Susan Pendergrass (21:29): I want to circle back to actionable items. What can we do about it, realistically?

Tim Carney (21:33): On the parental freedom side, there’s not that much the government can do except build better sidewalks, crosswalks, and pathways. Housing reform is interesting here. I’m a big believer in suburbs, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be more dense. One thing that’s really freeing is when you can buy a house in the neighborhood you want to live in,

Susan Pendergrass (22:01): Yeah.

Tim Carney (22:01): because your mom lives there and you have grandma to babysit. That’s a huge predictor. So many people in Washington think everybody needs universal daycare paid for by the government. Most people want mom to work a little less and grandma and grandpa to chip in, with neighbors to fill the gaps. More housing is what enables that to happen. But for the most part, we need more robust community institutions and more robust community connections. And every parent out there has to think: maybe I’m going to be the one who does this. There’s a field across the street from your house. Start a soccer league, bring food, run a grill. This is exactly what we did with T-ball. Throw in some money to pay for it. Buy the burgers at Sam’s Club or Costco and feed everyone. Bring your six-year-old to play soccer. This is not his or her path to a college scholarship. It’s a fun thing for the families to do. But you have to start it. We started it because we saw somebody else had started it. A lot of this is going to be on an individual level. On the policy side of supporting families, there’s a lot of debate about a child tax credit, a baby bonus, universal child care, and requiring employers to give parents parental leave.

Susan Pendergrass (22:58): Yeah. A lot. Leave.

Tim Carney (23:22): I write about that a lot at AEI. AEI scholars disagree about it. In the book, what I argue is we need a child tax credit, and it needs to be a little bigger. A family of eight making a hundred thousand dollars should not be paying the same taxes as a family of two or three making a hundred thousand dollars. That should be reflected in the tax code, because this isn’t just some consumer thing. It’s not like saying, I bought a Tesla, I deserve a tax credit. It’s saying, we’re eight people, we need to eat eight people’s worth of food, and the tax code should reflect that. But on the other programs, forcing employers to offer certain benefits or creating government-run childcare, I don’t think any of that works.

Susan Pendergrass (24:02): I mean, the Nordic countries do all of it and they have population decline.

Tim Carney (24:05): They have worse population decline than we did. There was a slight uptick, and one of the arguments I make is that subsidized childcare is not really a family subsidy, it’s a work subsidy. Notice who’s lobbying for it as these things bubble up. It’s going to be the Chamber of Commerce. I’m fundamentally a family guy. I think we need work. Part of fulfilling our human dignity is doing work. But that doesn’t always have to be paid work. In the book I defend stay-at-home moms and dads. I really think our society should be oriented around families. Now that’s a little heretical these days because, well, what if you choose not to have a family? Fine. There have always been people who chose not to have families. But that doesn’t mean families can’t be the central organizing principle of our culture.

Susan Pendergrass (25:04): More people now are choosing not to have families. And a lot of cities are pursuing those people, the childless professionals with Top Golfs and loft apartments.

Tim Carney (25:10): I quote a local official in Family Unfriendly saying families are a cost and businesses are an asset. Families come in, they pay income taxes and property taxes, but then they require sewage, they require schools, they complain that the playgrounds and the sidewalks are in bad shape. Businesses are mostly revenue. Washington, DC has explicitly said they don’t just want anyone to move in. They want the college-educated 22-to-28-year-old, meaning a person who gets to spend every dime of disposable income in the restaurants and bars and shops in DC. And if you look at the housing being built in Falls Church, right near me, it’s all studio and one bedroom, because that’s what the local government wants: more singletons who go out and spend their money. Sometimes we do things that are really bad for the economy. My wife makes homemade dinner. We almost never go out. A lot of our activity doesn’t involve paying anyone. The kids are just playing wiffle ball. All of that is horrible for the economy.

Susan Pendergrass (26:19): Yeah. Falls Church used to be such a big attraction for young families because of the schools. I’ve seen the shiny buildings going up recently, and I’m shocked by it. That’s interesting to me.

Tim Carney (26:44): I think it’s good to build more housing. But if it helps boomers sell their single-family homes to move into apartments, then it frees up family housing. This is a really complicated thing. We need more housing, but so many of the YIMBYs just want massive apartment buildings with as many apartments as possible, and that’s family unfriendly. What we really need, in my opinion, is slightly more dense suburbs,

Susan Pendergrass (26:54): Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Carney (27:14): a starter home that somebody can buy. That’s basically impossible to build, especially in a high-cost area like this, or in the nicer suburbs around St. Louis and Kansas City. You’re not going to build them because of the regulatory overhead. If I build a single-family house and sell it for two hundred thousand dollars, that’s not worth it. I’m either going to build a McMansion or an apartment building.

Susan Pendergrass (27:26): They’re not building them. No. They’re doing the six hundreds. Yeah.

Tim Carney (27:41): Getting rid of a lot of the regulations that make it impossible to build a starter home is one of the best things that states and counties can do.

Susan Pendergrass (27:49): I really appreciate you coming on to talk about it. It’s a thorny issue. Countries that have really tried their best to encourage people to have more children haven’t been successful. This is going to be one of the biggest policy conundrums of the next few decades. The earlier we start talking about it, the better. I’ve been talking about it for at least five years in Missouri. We just had our smallest high school graduating class two years ago. People ask, where did the people go? They didn’t go anywhere. The babies haven’t been born, and we need to get used to it so that we can start thinking about how to solve it. I love a lot of your ideas. We have to think about solutions to this because if it feels overwhelming to have children, then people won’t have them.

Tim Carney (28:41): That’s exactly right.

Susan Pendergrass (28:42): Family Unfriendly. And your other book was Alienated America.

Tim Carney (28:44): Family Unfriendly. And Alienated America, which is about the collapse of community, which is upstream from this problem.

Susan Pendergrass (28:53): Lack of social capital and all of that. I think these are going to be some of the most important issues we can think about going forward. I really appreciate you coming on to talk about it.

Tim Carney (29:00): Thank you, my pleasure.

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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.

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 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.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Todd Davidson, Vice President of Programs at the State Policy Network, about how artificial intelligence is reshaping the think tank world. They explore what AI is good at and where it falls short, how organizations like the Show-Me Institute can use it to become more productive without losing their edge, why face-to-face relationships will only become more valuable as AI-generated content floods the internet, how a Hawaii think tank used an AI agent to help fire victims submit legislative testimony, what good policy looks like in an AI-driven energy landscape, and more.

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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00) Great, well, thanks so much for joining us this morning. Todd Davidson of the State Policy Network, to talk about the topic du jour: artificial intelligence. Thanks so much for coming on to talk about it. I’m afraid to even say anything out loud about AI because by next week it’ll be…

Todd Davidson (00:11) Yeah, happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Susan Pendergrass (00:18) Nothing really ages — it changes so fast. But I did just read that Mark Zuckerberg has an AI agent who is performing his CEO duties for him. Did you see that? Why not, right?

Todd Davidson (00:28) I saw that, yeah. And then he can just kick back, go down to his Hawaii bunker and just let Facebook run itself.

Susan Pendergrass (00:37) Yeah, I mean, I still haven’t really dabbled in agentic AI, but I know it’s right there and I’m going to want to do it soon. We’re going to talk about AI in the think tank world, but I have to check legislation and hearings and see how those things are going every day. I can well imagine an AI agent doing that for me.

Todd Davidson (01:01) Yeah, if it’s properly trained. So ShowMe Institute, to give the audience broader context, is a member of State Policy Network, and we have sister organizations like ShowMe in states across the country. The Libertas Institute, which is based out of Utah, did exactly what you’re talking about. Connor Boyack, the CEO, built a legislative tracking system that then feeds into their scorecard where they keep track of legislation. He said it took him about eight hours of work to code the agentic AI, but now it does the work automatically. Of course it needs fine-tuning and always has a final human observer that verifies everything, but it’s being used for those purposes right now across the country.

Susan Pendergrass (01:59) So we’re in the think tank world, and it’s probably more of an art than a science at the state level. Tracking the policies — first of all, thinking about the policies that we think would be best for Missouri, then doing a bunch of research on those policies, then creating content on those policies, then trying to talk to legislators and hope that they see our point of view, and that they enact actual laws that reflect those policies. That’s a really labor-intensive job. Which parts of that could you see being picked up by AI?

Todd Davidson (02:33) I’m by no means an expert on AI, but I work with someone who is. What has been explained to me is that AI is very good at synthesizing information. It’s very good at predicting — it essentially predicts the next word. It takes all these inputs and predicts the next set of words, which comes out to us as sentences. So if you are able to give it certain inputs — say, I want you to look at these bills, I want you to look at these things — and give it a sort of walled garden, it can then be prompted to produce any type of analysis that you want. The reason you want that walled garden is because AI can still hallucinate. It can make stuff up. Actually, this just went viral last week: a lawyer down in Georgia went before the Georgia Supreme Court and had AI produce her entire argument. It cited five fictitious cases, and the judges called that out. So you have to give it constraints and say, here are the data inputs, now summarize this for me. And it can get you a pretty solid first draft of that summary. Of course, you’re still going to need a human to go through and edit it and add voice and texture to it. But summarizing that data, saying tell me which of these align with our principles or does not align with our principles — it would be very good at that kind of thing. What it’s not going to be able to do is the creative part. When you think about what is the policy that we want to design for Missouri, what does Missouri need — it’s not at the stage where it could do that. That’s where you would still want Show-Me Institute experts to be crafting those kinds of things. But if something’s already out there and existing, you can summarize it and score it based on criteria pretty easily.

Susan Pendergrass (04:35) So given how quickly firms are moving towards AI — and in fact mandating AI because it’s such a time saver and productivity increase — how does a think tank position itself in that world? There’s so much talk about AI just replacing all of our jobs. Maybe it does replace my job — I don’t know. I’ve heard podcasts generated by AI in my voice, so it could be doing this job right now. I would like to think it wouldn’t be as great, but how does a think tank position itself? What’s our value add in that scenario?

Todd Davidson (05:12) Start by going back to what your mission and objective is. ShowMe Institute — and by the way, I am a resident of Missouri and a big fan of the Show-Me Institute, both from my SPN perspective and from my Missouri resident perspective — we have principles: free markets, a robust civil society, a thriving economy. We want the feds to get out of the way in a lot of cases. We want the government to get out of the way. And then how we execute that mission is through policy change, mostly at the state level, though I know you also work at the local level. So state and local policy change is the objective. How do we go about that? We produce research and then we advocate — in some cases talking directly to policymakers, communicating out to the public through op-eds and things so that the public then talks to lawmakers. And ultimately we get policies passed that lower the income tax, reduce barriers to work, and provide more options for kids in schools. So what AI is going to do is make research and content much easier to produce. By research, again, I mean that summarization kind of research — it’s going to make that kind of stuff extremely easy for folks to produce. Everybody’s going to have a research assistant. What AI cannot do is personal relationships. It will never be able to do that. What it also cannot do is tour the entire state of Missouri, know all of the history and relationships and connections of people throughout the state. So I believe Show-Me Institute and all of the affiliates across the country that are state and local based are going to have an advantage because you’re in your community. You know people, you know policymakers, you know community leaders, you know people that are affected by your policies. And that’s something AI is not going to be able to do. AI can look at the statistics and arguments and academic literature, and it could put together a brief, and that could be useful. It would make your job more efficient — you’d be able to produce those things in a fraction of the time you do right now. But then with that extra time, I would use it to go out and build stronger relationships in the communities, and then use those relationships towards policy change.

Susan Pendergrass (07:51) What about grassroots? More grassroots-type stuff?

Todd Davidson (07:55) Grassroots very much. AI is going to have an interesting relationship with grassroots. In one way, it actually makes it easier for grassroots individuals to engage their legislature. On the other hand, it’s going to create a flood of grassroots engagement digitally. So face-to-face grassroots engagement is going to have more impact. I’ll tell you a story: Hawaii had the terrible fire that destroyed Lahaina a few years back. Hawaii has terrible building codes — it’s incredibly hard to build homes there. That town was completely destroyed, so the state needed to relax its building codes in order for homes to be rebuilt. Well, they weren’t making this change. Show-Me’s sister think tank, called the Grassroots Institute of Hawaii, built an AI platform that allowed individuals to submit testimony to the legislature. Testimony has a higher bar, right? You can email your lawmakers pretty easily, but testimony goes into the legislative record and has to follow a certain format and be structured in a certain way. That’s not something that grassroots individuals were very equipped to provide. So a think tank would typically provide the testimony and then get grassroots supporters to send emails to lawmakers. What Grassroots Institute of Hawaii did was build an AI agent so that an individual could say, “Hey, my house was burnt down, I need these things,” and the AI agent would turn that into testimony and submit it directly to the legislature. It resulted in a skyrocketing number of testimonies being filed. Because of that, the legislature said, “Wow, we’ve heard from 500 constituents — we’ve never heard from that many constituents before.” So they relaxed their regulatory regime, and now homes are being built in Lahaina much faster.

Susan Pendergrass (09:48) Did they know that AI was doing it? Were legislators thinking, okay, this is AI?

Todd Davidson (10:12) That is why they went through testimony. Legislators’ email inboxes — they’re not reading their emails anymore, right? They get thousands of them. But through testimony, the AI was not making up the stories. The people had to fill out the content and explain their story. The AI was just structuring it in a way to make sure that it got submitted as testimony. I do think that is a bit of an arms race. At some point the same thing that has happened with email will happen — there will just be thousands of pieces of testimony and you won’t be able to read all of them. So there was a bit of a first-mover advantage. And once that becomes ubiquitous, I do think what you predicted is going to happen, where legislators just say, well, this is AI-facilitated. And that’s where it’s going to have to go back to face-to-face, bringing those people in.

Susan Pendergrass (11:08) I think you’re absolutely right. As more video content comes out and we all realize it’s AI — I just don’t really believe that any videos are real anymore. I don’t really believe pictures are real. I don’t really believe music is real. And it doesn’t necessarily bother me that much, but I think because of that skepticism and unwillingness to believe in digital content, things happening in real life right in front of us are going to take on higher and higher value, so that we know for sure that if I’m speaking to a legislator, it is me saying it and what’s coming out of my head. That’s about the only way we’re going to know if something is real — or the default is just going to become AI-generated.

Todd Davidson (12:01) 100%, I absolutely agree. And that’s where I think organizations like ShowMe are well positioned. Because you’re in the state of Missouri, you can be in Jefferson City or you can be in St. Louis or Kansas City in those face-to-face relationships. It’s going to make your government affairs personnel far more valuable, your fundraisers who can be face-to-face with donors far more valuable, grassroots activists that are face-to-face. It’s going to put a premium on face-to-face interactions for sure. I agree — there’s going to be so much content out there. You’re still going to need content because that gives you credibility, it gives you what you’re going to talk about. But then you’ve got to pair that with the face-to-face interaction, otherwise it’ll just get ignored.

Susan Pendergrass (12:47) And you can definitely see the gap when people are generating stuff through AI and they don’t know the subject matter enough — like you said about the attorney. But there is definitely a role for humans to say, I mean, I do this all the time with AI: I’ll say give me five of these things, give me five infographics or something like that. But the human has to know which one is the best or which one makes the most compelling argument. AI simply really can’t do that. So while some people would love to believe that AI is going to run the world, I do believe there is an emerging role for human discernment to know which AI products are better than other AI products. Would you agree with that?

Todd Davidson (13:32) Yeah, 100%. I think the sweet spot is utilizing AI to make yourself more efficient or do things that you don’t like doing. But then that raises you up into that discernment phase where you’re the one making the call. I do this all the time — I’m having conversations with AI to increase the outputs. I should not spend any time making infographics. I’m not good at it. But I can have a conversation with AI where it produces that infographic much more effectively than I could. I’ve also found that, if you put the prompting on it, it can help you find those particular sources that you’re looking for. Say you want to write a survey on school choice research — it can help you gather all of those materials much faster. But then you have to make sure that it’s of high quality.

Susan Pendergrass (14:35) What do you think about the current pushback on AI-generated pictures? Do you think that is just a learning phase we all need to get through? Some top artists on Spotify have been determined to be AI-generated.

Todd Davidson (14:57) Really?

Susan Pendergrass (14:59) Yeah. The number two Christian artist is just AI, and across all genres there are artists with millions of subscribers who are just AI-generated music based on what AI knows we all like. So we do like it. Does it matter that there’s no real person writing the music? I don’t know.

Todd Davidson (15:12) It’s kind of sad. Yeah.

Susan Pendergrass (15:21) I know the initial reaction is, that’s sad. But then after a while you’re like, I don’t know.

Todd Davidson (15:26) There is going to be intense pushback to all things AI. AI is very unpopular right now. I saw some polling just last week that showed it is the number one concern of voters. There will be a populist pushback against AI. We’re seeing this pushback against the data centers. There’s even polling that showed a plurality of the population believes it’s immoral to use AI. And I think it gets at the core of some of what you’re talking about here — yes, there’s this very popular, satisfying music, but it loses some human element because there’s not a human behind it. I do think we’re going to see a lot of pushback to AI on multiple dimensions. There’s that cultural dimension. There’s the economic anxiety dimension right now: a fear that AI is driving up energy costs, a fear that AI could take my job. There’s going to be pretty significant pushback. Right now we’re mostly seeing that in anti-data center efforts, trying to stop the building up of data centers across the country. I was looking at some Democratic pollsters today who were pitching that Democrats should advocate for a guaranteed job, guaranteed income, guaranteed healthcare, and a guaranteed home if you lose your job to AI. That kind of populist messaging is going to resonate with a lot of the public. What is the response going to be to that? What are the other solutions that we could advocate for that both allow the continued growth and opportunity and also allow continued innovation around AI, because we’re going to need AI to continue to develop?

Susan Pendergrass (17:30) It’s already here. I mean, we’re doing this in reverse order. And I think my opinion is that massive new technologies always get pushback — like the car. People were on their horses, and then we started designing roads for cars. Calculators got a lot of pushback, the internet got a lot of pushback. But ultimately people decided that they liked it better. I think AI is the same — we just have to figure out how to work with it. And I know that it is threatening to take a lot of jobs, but I see it more as a good thing. It gives us an opportunity to become the expert over AI. AI is not going to be the expert — we still need the human component. Like you said, face-to-face interactions. Legislators are still going to know what Missourians want and how to represent their constituents, and those are real-world issues. The data center pushback is because I don’t want to look out my window and hear a buzz and see a data center — I don’t want all that land going to data centers. That’s a real-world, in-person issue. But I just think we’re going to have to learn to work with it. I don’t think robots are going to — maybe this is where I don’t want to say things out loud — but maybe the robots will take over the world, I don’t know. But personally I feel like it is helpful to get a lot more content out, because you don’t know what’s going to resonate with stakeholders. Whether it’s a video or an infographic or a report or a different type of content, the fact that we can generate these things much more quickly I think is a benefit to us, and it makes the in-person time more meaningful to me.

Todd Davidson (19:11) You’re absolutely right. When a new technology comes out there’s going to be pushback, and organizations like ours have to figure out what’s the policy framework that allows that innovation to thrive without getting in the way. And fortunately we have a lot of those policies already. Like Avery, your colleague at Show-Me Institute, talks a lot about energy. One of the biggest pushbacks on AI is that it’s driving up energy costs. There’s some research that shows that’s not quite what’s happening. What’s happening is a lot of green policies that got passed in the 2010s are coming to roost — the renewable portfolio standards and those things are really what’s driving up energy costs. But even still, what can we do to make energy more affordable and reliable, even with a bunch of data centers added to the grid? And Avery’s got good policy on this: expanding nuclear power, expanding the use of reliable energy sources.

Susan Pendergrass (20:23) It’s separating out consumer electricity from data center electricity. You can carve these things differently.

Todd Davidson (20:29) Yeah, that’s another one — where the data center has its own power source. So there are policies out there that can mitigate it. And on the job question, unfortunately AI is happening at the same time that we’re having a continued cost of living and inflation issue. It’s one more thing that is driving anxiety. It’s not the root cause of what’s going on — we’ve got other factors that we need to address to get inflation under control, particularly on the energy side.

Susan Pendergrass (21:08) Yeah, but I do think it’s great that we have so many opportunities to expand or improve how we do things. In our little corner of the world, which is think tanks, we’ve been doing things kind of the same way for a long time. So I think a new approach to how we do business is a welcome change, and I think we could be a lot more effective.

Todd Davidson (21:38) Yeah, I think we’re going to see far more productive think tanks on the research side. On the litigation side, I was talking to Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. They litigate a lot of cases. With the advent of AI, every lawyer essentially got a legal clerk right away. They went from nine lawyers and a handful of legal clerks to nine lawyers who each now have their own AI legal clerk. It’s dramatically expanded the number of cases they can take on. And the same thing on the research side. On the marketing side, production of content is going to be quite a bit easier and more cost effective as well.

Susan Pendergrass (22:26) Well, I appreciate having a chance to talk to somebody who has a positive perspective on it, because I do hear a lot of doom and gloom when it comes to AI. I was reminded by somebody that many of the scenarios in movies and books about AI are very dystopian, but perhaps it’ll be utopian. We don’t know. It’s all in how we approach it, right?

Todd Davidson (22:48) Yeah, it is. It’s going to be an exciting new world that we live in and we’re right on the frontier.

Susan Pendergrass (22:54) Anyone with little kids, like you — who knows what the world’s going to look like when they’re going to college. So you’ve got to stay flexible, right? Well, thanks so much, Todd. I appreciate you coming and talking to us about it. We’ll have to talk about it again sometime soon when the whole thing has changed.

Todd Davidson (23:02) Yep, stay flexible and always be learning. Yeah, sounds good. Thanks, Susan.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

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Susan Pendergrass and Patrick Tuohey join Zach Lawhorn to discuss their new report, The Public Safety Climate in the City of St. Louis. They explore what the data actually show about crime trends over the past two decades, how St. Louis compares to similar cities like Cincinnati and Memphis, why crime perception lags so far behind the data, the challenges facing the 911 system and police staffing, why public disorder in high-traffic neighborhoods may be doing as much damage to the city’s reputation as violent crime itself, what it would take to make residents actually feel safer, and more.

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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 Patrick Tuohey from the Show Me Institute. Today we’re going to be talking about some work that the two of you have done on public safety and crime, specifically in the city of St. Louis. But before we get into the project, I want to talk to you both about your perception of crime as people who have both lived in and frequently visit the city of St. Louis. So Susan, I want to start with you. Before you started this project, before you started looking at the data, when someone said “Is the city of St. Louis dangerous?” what was your perception before you started this project?

Susan Pendergrass (00:38) I only moved to the city of St. Louis in 2015, so there’s a long period of time before I lived there. I was in D.C. for part of that, and my perception before I moved there was that it was dangerous. The Ferguson incident had just happened and I knew that there was a lot of crime. But then when I moved to St. Louis, my husband and I decided to live in the city itself and we loved our neighborhood. It was the coolest with this super cool house built around the time of the World’s Fair. It was amazing. But I never felt really safe. We started leaving our car doors unlocked because our cars would get rifled through. We had a smash-and-grab right within two weeks. I called to report the smash-and-grab and was told that they don’t take reports on them. That was new for me. We had to keep a lot of lights on outside. We didn’t really walk our dogs after dark. I felt like lots of times I would go by police cars sitting on corners idling, but it didn’t necessarily make me feel safer because I wasn’t sure how much they were doing. I also realized people run stoplights, run stop signs, use the right parking lane to pass, and that was all new for me. So I got this feeling that the rule of law wasn’t enforced very well in the city, and that just doesn’t feel good as somebody who has bought a house there and lives there.

Zach Lawhorn (02:06) Patrick, as someone who lives in Kansas City across the state, two questions. What do you think the perception is over there on the western half of the state? And then as someone who comes into St. Louis regularly, what was your perception of the safety situation in the city?

Patrick Tuohey (02:22) A lot of the issues that Susan and I explored in this paper bore out here in Kansas City. I’ve lived in cities my whole life. I understand that every city is going to have the parts you don’t want to go to, the parts that are rougher than others. Kansas City certainly has that. I’ve had my car broken into here in my driveway a number of times, no real damage, and it’s not something I reported to the police. As far as traveling to St. Louis, I’ve been going to St. Louis since the late nineties. Before I lived in Kansas City, I was in Washington, D.C. And I loved St. Louis. I still do. I would visit Creve Coeur, the Central West End, sometimes stay at the Westin downtown. But living in D.C. and growing up in D.C., I understood that every city is going to have the places that you don’t want to go. I understood that St. Louis often gets ranked higher than it should because the city’s footprint is so small. But it never felt to me that what was going on in St. Louis was way outside the normal limits of what we see in U.S. cities. There are those dangerous parts and you generally know not to go there. There is kind of an urban decline, which can be seen in a lack of services, graffiti, uncut grass. But I didn’t navigate St. Louis or think of St. Louis any differently than I thought of Kansas City, Washington D.C., Boston, or any other place I had been.

Zach Lawhorn (04:03) Yeah, and I’m glad you brought up the population of the city, the MSA. It seems like when there are national or even local news stories written on crime statistics in St. Louis, people will point out that if you’re not talking about the larger metropolitan area, you get down to actually a pretty small population number for U.S. cities. So for this work that we’re going to be talking about, can you define what area you guys looked at? When we say murders are a certain number, what area are we specifically talking about?

Patrick Tuohey (04:38) We looked at the city of St. Louis specifically, just those few square miles. We did not look at the metropolitan area and we did not look at the county. It is fair to want to combine all that data into one region, but oftentimes I think people want to do that to mask the seriousness of homicide and violent crime and property crime in the city. And that’s what we wanted to talk about. What is true in St. Louis is not unique to St. Louis. Kansas City has a crime problem that is not reflected in our metropolitan area. That’s true in Washington D.C., Atlanta, Los Angeles, everywhere. So I understand why people who live in St. Louis feel that you can cook the numbers by just looking at the city, but that’s true in every urban environment.

Susan Pendergrass (05:30) We also compared St. Louis to four other cities, and one of them in particular, Cincinnati, ended up being very similar. We wrote a paper and at the back of the paper there’s a table with variables on which we compared them. Similar size, similar poverty, similar median income, very similar. So to say that St. Louis is this very unique outlier and is the only city in the United States that has this situation where, essentially 100-plus years ago, St. Louis was so much better and more metropolitan and forward-thinking than the rest of the state of Missouri, and safer and wealthier, that they drew a line around the city of St. Louis and said we are going to be our own thing and we’re going to have our own police. It was called the Great Divorce. Now that line, the arrows are sort of pointing different ways, where St. Louis County isn’t necessarily excited to absorb the city of St. Louis and its services, systems, police departments, and 911 systems, because it is a uniquely crime-ridden area in parts. So while it would be nice to, as Patrick mentioned, just water down all the numbers by mixing them into a safer pot, it would really mask what’s going on.

Zach Lawhorn (06:47) Susan, you used the word “unique” there to describe the setup. Patrick, does that genuinely make it harder to talk about this topic? In the last few months you’ve had some public events, and we’re going to talk about those in a minute. But as you’ve gone through this process, do you think the unique setup has made it harder? Is there more throat-clearing and definitional work that goes into it?

Patrick Tuohey (07:12) I don’t know that what St. Louis is dealing with is unique. Yes, the city has a particularly small footprint. It is as if you drew a line around just the bad neighborhood in your community and tried to use that small footprint to describe the whole area. I get that argument. But if it’s true by a matter of degree, it’s not uniquely true of St. Louis. And it’s something that the city needs to deal with and understand rather than try to paper over. As Susan said, there are real problems in the city. Their population decline is only exacerbating those problems because there’s less revenue. And frankly, the history of the city going back decades has been that the image of the city is dysfunctional, and not just on public safety, on lots of issues. So although I understand that people say they don’t just want to talk about the city when it comes to crime, St. Louis, while it’s got lots of opportunities and strengths, doesn’t do itself any favors by combining all this stuff and whistling past the graveyard. People in this country know that St. Louis has a crime problem. You don’t solve it by redirecting people.

Zach Lawhorn (08:30) Okay, and let’s talk about that crime problem. Susan, when we use the word “crime” in this context, what are we talking about? Murders? Car break-ins? Lay it out for us.

Susan Pendergrass (08:42) We have violent crime and property crime. Violent crime is murders, aggravated assault, and robbery. Property crimes are larceny and motor vehicle thefts. In our report, we break them all out separately. Murders are the one crime area that the media likes to focus on: how many murders, which city is the murder capital, did we have 150, did we have 200, are they down? They are certainly down in the last two years, to be clear. Murder rates are down. Aggravated assault rates are not down by as much. And sometimes the difference between aggravated assault and murder is how fast the ambulance drives. We still have a lot of violent crimes against people happening. We certainly have a lot of motor vehicle thefts. That’s an area of crime that spiked during COVID, particularly for Kias and Hyundais, and it’s come down, but it’s still a very high number. While it is wonderful that crime has come down across these areas in many cases, the numbers are still pretty high, particularly on a per capita basis, which is how we translate all the crime rates so we can compare them with other cities.

Zach Lawhorn (10:00) So you said crime is down. Is it fair to classify it as it was really bad and now it’s just bad? It was terrible, now it’s just bad. How would you summarize what you found with the drop in crime?

Susan Pendergrass (10:13) Crime’s been dropping since the 80s, so we had much worse crime decades ago. It’s been dropping, it spiked during the pandemic, and it is continuing basically down. Now, when you look at the murder rate per capita in the city of St. Louis, it is still on a slightly upward trend, the number of murders per people, and that could be driven by the fact that Missouri is losing population at a pretty good clip. We have more deaths than births. So on a per capita basis maybe not quite the same, but in terms of actual numbers, crime has been coming down for some time. Crime overall peaked in the late 80s and 90s.

Zach Lawhorn (10:58) Patrick, we talked about your perception and the relevance of many other cities. Did that surprise you, the finding that crime is down? Or was that kind of what you expected?

Patrick Tuohey (11:09) No, the data showing that crime in St. Louis was down wasn’t a surprise. It’s certainly been nice to see that it’s been down year after year. This doesn’t appear to be just a one-off good year. And I’ve known that the mayor and the police chief have been talking about these positive numbers for a while. What I was really interested in with this paper was perception of crime. That’s what I’ve really wrestled with, both at events in the city and in the county. It is a difficult problem to overcome because you can have good numbers like St. Louis has and yet people still rely on that decades-old impression. That’s not something you can address just by waving away the numbers downtown. You have to wrestle with it. You have to admit it, and you have to figure out how do you get people to accept good news, and then how do you make them confident that that good news is going to continue? It’s so easy these days, especially with cities, to just be a pessimist and to say that things are down and won’t ever continue to go down. It is a problem that St. Louis has, but St. Louis isn’t alone in having it. The news on crime is good all over the country, yet perceptions about crime all over the country are still very much with us.

Susan Pendergrass (12:43) There’s a survey question that’s often asked: do you feel safe walking outside alone at night? And those numbers aren’t down. As Patrick mentioned, you have graffiti and trash not being picked up and panhandling and homelessness. Those numbers aren’t necessarily down. But we did look at St. Louis on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, and it is true that out of 16 neighborhoods, four or five have basically no crime, they’re crime-free. But then there are some other pockets that have most of the murders concentrated in one neighborhood. So it isn’t equal across all the neighborhoods. There are some that have very little crime, but it’s hard to convince folks of that when they drive through the ones that have public disorder and still don’t feel safe.

Zach Lawhorn (13:29) Susan, as a researcher trying to ultimately figure out why things happen, you mentioned that crime is down across the country. Would it be easier if it was just a few select cities, so you could actually go and say what is Boston doing different, what is Memphis doing? Does it make it harder to find the “why” since it seems like it’s kind of across the board?

Susan Pendergrass (13:45) Yeah. There have been other periods of time when crime has gone down and then gone back up again. I personally believe, and this is not based on any research I’ve done, that cameras being absolutely everywhere makes it harder to commit crimes. You cannot basically travel through the world anymore without being on a camera somewhere. Police body cams probably make it harder to commit crimes too. I feel like we’re getting into more of a surveillance state, and maybe that’s what’s bringing crime down. I’ve heard that Detroit has brought crime down faster than other cities, that Pittsburgh is feeling safer, Chattanooga is feeling safer, Memphis feeling less safe. So it would be worthwhile to look into some of these differences. But I don’t think our research has yet pointed to a clear reason why it’s happening.

Patrick Tuohey (14:41) Let me follow up on that because Susan’s exactly right, and I think your question gets to that point. Crime is down nationwide, down in all cities if I remember correctly, and we don’t really know why. And it’s not just Susan and I that don’t know why. Susan has spoken with public safety and crime experts from all over the country, and that’s really frustrating from a public policy research point of view, because you would love to have that outlier, that one city, maybe Boston or Omaha, that tried something novel and got results unlike everybody else. But crime is so difficult because there are so many contributors. Some people want to point to the availability of guns. Some people want to talk about root causes. Some people want to talk about the number of police, the severity of crime, the clearance rate, population growth, new development, basic services like picking up the trash and making sure the streetlights work. And all of those things are right, all those things contribute. So it’s really difficult to figure out which one is driving the change. And sometimes, as Susan pointed out, you may just get a dip and there’s no explaining it. In 2014, in Kansas City, our mayor and police chief at the time came out and had a press conference because they were so proud of the homicide drop the previous year. There was a lot of back-slapping and self-congratulation. Then when the homicide rate went back up the next year, you couldn’t get those guys to answer a basic question. Policymakers are, and maybe rightly so, really shy about claiming credit, because they don’t want to be called to task a year later when the numbers reverse. The good news is that the numbers are trending down, and that’s always good. The frustration is it’s very difficult to figure out why and then make recommendations. We’re all kind of scratching our heads. Although again, this is a good problem to have. The numbers are heading in the right direction and we ought to be happy about that.

Zach Lawhorn (16:58) Patrick, to get a better idea of the perception side, you did the hard work of going to the people. In January and February you moderated events. We had one in the city of St. Louis and one in St. Louis County. There are full recordings of the events available at showmeinstitute.org. You had a panel of experts and spent a lot of time getting feedback from attendees who lived in the city and the county. What were your takeaways? Are they buying that crime is getting better?

Patrick Tuohey (17:33) No, in a word, they don’t. We gave them a short survey before the event. A lot of them believed that crime was important, certainly, but they didn’t necessarily believe that crime was getting better. They weren’t necessarily optimistic that crime was going to be better in St. Louis City in the next five years, and that was certainly true in the county. I wanted to press these audience members: what would it take for you to believe this good news? And I think sometimes they just didn’t want to believe anything. We got the frustrating line: “there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.” That’s a cute thing to say, but it really doesn’t help you explain your own view. If you’re just going to say you believe it’s bad and always going to be bad, that doesn’t get us anywhere. We were happy to have representatives from the Circuit Attorney’s office at both events, and they struggle with this too. They can do a better job. They can prosecute more and different cases, they can do it faster. The police can certainly improve their clearance rate. But public policymakers in those cities, in every city, are going to have to realize that they may have to continue that grind, doing the hard work of lowering crime, and they’re not going to get the attaboys from the people in their city or the communities around them. That’s just a reality. One of the panelists talked about how perception of crime is often a lagging indicator. When crime goes up, people feel it immediately. But when crime goes down, it may take a few years. The tough news for the people who lead St. Louis City is you may have to keep doing this for another 10 years before you get any credit for being successful. And that’s really tough in politics because people want that immediate payoff, that immediate

Susan Pendergrass (19:15) You

Patrick Tuohey (19:31) applause, that immediate press conference and support.

Susan Pendergrass (19:34) Patrick and I have been thinking about the things that could happen that could make a difference, that could maybe make people feel safer. Number one: when you see a crime happening, you need to be able to have faith that you can report it and somebody will respond. And that is not happening right now in the city of St. Louis. We’ve called several times about crimes and nobody showed up. You need to have faith in the 911 system, and the 911 system needs to function. We have about 28 different systems in the county. They’re building a new 911 center in the city that’s going to consolidate services, but it’s not finished. It’s going to be some time before it’s fully functioning. We also need to know that the police will be able to solve these crimes. They need resources. They need to be able to do DNA testing and rape kits and DNA. They need money to do those things. They need detectives. We need to know that these crimes can get solved, and then we need to know that the crimes are prosecuted. I think if these pieces on the front end, not just the “lock them up” approach, but on the front end, people would feel safer if they felt like they could call somebody and somebody would respond and something would happen. I’m not sure that’s happening right now. And until it does, people, especially when they start having small children, are probably going to move out.

Patrick Tuohey (20:59) What we’ve known since at least 1961, when Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is that you sometimes just need eyes on the street. Shop owners, pedestrians, people walking around. Cameras can reduce crime, but they’re kind of abstract and tucked in corners. When a street is vibrant, when it’s got people living there, when you’ve got kids playing in the street and families on the porch, there’s that sense of being watched, being seen. But because St. Louis has been in this population spiral, how do you bring people back into the city? The city talks about economic development subsidies all the time, but that’s about bringing in amenities and employers. Maybe what the city needs to do is figure out how to bring in people. And oftentimes it’s the non-crime-related policies, the housing policies, the regulations, the tax structure, that keep people out. Crime is one of those, but the city could open itself up to urban homesteaders who want to come in and rehab these old houses. What has struck me about St. Louis for the decades I’ve been going there is just the absolutely beautiful old neighborhoods, the incredible housing stock. Susan talked about living in a house that was built for the World’s Fair. There are gorgeous neighborhoods in St. Louis, and it’s the barriers to entry, red tape and government regulation, that are keeping people out, I have to believe. Crime is one of them, to be sure. But I am confident there are people who would love to move into those old houses and revitalize those old neighborhoods, because they’re just so gorgeous and so walkable. And it’s been done in other cities. DuPont Circle in Washington D.C. was a slow process of rehabbing neighborhoods block by block, and now 30 years later it is a vibrant community.

Zach Lawhorn (23:03) Susan, you mentioned the 911 system. I know in the report you don’t get into specific solutions, and I know we’re still kind of in the measuring-the-problem stage and trying to figure out next steps, but beyond the 911 system, are there any areas you’d consider low-hanging fruit worth considering moving forward?

Susan Pendergrass (23:25) The legislature passed and the governor signed a violent crime clearance grant program last year that cities like St. Louis could apply for, funding to hire detectives, do DNA testing, collect data, and other activities directly focused on solving crimes. The legislature has not appropriated any money for that program. If they did, St. Louis could apply for those funds. We also have, and I don’t know the exact number as I say this, but at least 100 open police positions in the department. Those are hard to fill. The policies that have been tried, like no longer requiring officers to live within the city and across-the-board raises, none of those have really made a difference. So we need recruitment and retention policies that could actually work. And as I mentioned with the 911 system, triaging calls and making sure the correct agency responds when a crime has been committed. There are community violence intervention programs that have been tried in some places, and using neighborhood-by-neighborhood data to focus in on where crimes are really happening. Those are all things we’d like to explore further: what is the cost of these programs, what is the likelihood that they’ll improve things, and what are some feasible ways to get them done.

Zach Lawhorn (24:54) So there’s the PR part of it. The city’s got a PR problem. There’s the need for more cops. We need people to be able to call 911. We need people to actually be prosecuted for crimes. That all seems doable.

Susan Pendergrass (24:58) Yeah.

Zach Lawhorn (25:06) Where do you think the city of St. Louis is at right now? Are we in a good place? Are we in just an improved place where it could still be a few years? How are you feeling about public safety in the city of St. Louis right now?

Susan Pendergrass (25:21) I don’t want to be a wet blanket. I love the city of St. Louis and I want it to succeed wildly. But I’m concerned that they’re going to say murders are down and these other crimes are down, but people are still running stop signs and stoplights, there are still panhandlers, and trash still isn’t being picked up. They’re not really fixing the small things that make people feel safe. They’re sort of focused on these big numbers. It could be like a school improving ACT scores. You have to be really careful if you’re just focusing on one aspect, because these big crime numbers being down could be hiding a lot of other stuff that really needs to be done and focused on. So I’m cautiously optimistic, I guess.

Patrick Tuohey (26:05) I’m optimistic because crime is going down everywhere, and I think it will probably continue to go down at least for the next few years, for reasons that may have nothing to do with the management of St. Louis. Part of it is because Susan and I have been reviewing the research for the last few months, and there is so much out there, primary research on crime and secondary, that talks about exactly the things Susan hit upon: the environment, picking up trash, cleaning up graffiti, fixing sidewalks, making sure the streetlights are lit. We know so much more about what drives crime, or at least what can ameliorate it, that even if we don’t know the specifics of what’s going on now, city leaders and state leaders are much more aware of what they can do to make communities not just safer but feel safe. And again, it is frustrating because you can say the numbers are down, but until people feel safe and want to go downtown and take advantage of what the city has to offer, we’re not going to see that public perception change. So yes, I think the public perception is accurate in as much as that is what people feel, but I don’t think it reflects what’s actually going on in St. Louis or in the county.

Zach Lawhorn (27:20) And we will leave it there. The report, The Public Safety Climate in the City of St. Louis, is available at showmeinstitute.org. If you want to watch the full recordings of the events that Patrick moderated, those are available right now at showmeinstitute.org. Susan, Patrick, thank you very much.

Susan Pendergrass (27:36) Thank you.

Patrick Tuohey (27:36) Thank you.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post The Public Safety Climate in the City of St. Louis with Susan Pendergrass and Patrick Tuohey appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

While 2025 was a record-breaking year for the St. Louis as homicides fell to new lows and overall crime dropped by 16 percent. However, there remains a persistent gap between reported data and public perception. Even as the major numbers like homicides and carjackings decline, other issues keep the public on edge. Offenses such as aggravated assaults and vehicle thefts remain high, reminding residents that the threat of violence and serious property crime is still present. Finally, visible signs of disorder like graffiti and aggressive panhandling reinforce the feeling that the city is not yet fully under control.

As this report makes clear, there is more work to be done before St. Louisans and visitors to the city will feel safe walking alone at night. But some potential policy solutions have emerged from this analysis, and we look forward to continuing the conversation.

Click here to read the full report

Key Takeaways from the Report

• Most types of crime in St. Louis have declined consistently over the past 20 years. The major exceptions are homicide, which has declined from its COVID spike in 2021 but remains on a slightly upward trajectory on a per-capita basis, and motor vehicle theft, which spiked substantially in 2020.
• Although St. Louis once had considerably higher per-capita rates of aggravated assault, larceny, burglary, and robbery than Kansas City or Springfield, the three cities — the largest three cities in Missouri — are now quite similar.
• When compared to similar U.S. cities (Louisville, Cincinnati, Memphis, and Mobile), St. Louis’s crime rates (with the exception of homicide and motor vehicle theft) follow similar trends. The one exception is Memphis, which has become more dangerous than St. Louis in recent years.
• Since 2021, St. Louis has improved its clearance rates for homicide, aggravated assault, robbery, and burglary. Clearance rates for homicide have been as high as 70 percent in recent years.
• Motor vehicle thefts largely go unsolved in St. Louis; over the last 10 years, just one out of 10 has been cleared annually.
• Estimates of the number of Missourians who were victims of crime, compared to reported crimes, suggest that as many as 50 percent of violent crimes and 65 percent of property crimes in the state may go unreported. So, although the number of reported crimes has declined in recent years, total crimes committed may not have.
• Although it happened over a decade ago, the shooting of Michael Brown and the subsequent “Ferguson Effect” have had an impact on the relationship between St. Louis police officers and the community. A lack of trust in the police force may still be contributing to crimes going unreported.
• The St. Louis 911 system has been plagued by staffing shortages and other challenges that have left response times below national targets. Construction of a new 911 center is underway, but it has been delayed.
• Media sensationalism around violent crime, and homicides in particular, in St. Louis led to distorted perceptions regarding public safety (or the lack thereof) in the city.
• While violent crimes, including homicides, are concentrated in a few of the poorest neighborhoods in St. Louis, crimes of public disorder, such as vandalism, vagrancy, trash in the street, and aggressive panhandling are concentrated in the downtown and Central West End neighborhoods, where visitors are more likely to spend time. This may contribute to St. Louis’s reputation as a dangerous city to visit.

Watch Full Recordings of the Public Events

The Public Safety Climate in the City of St Louis –  January 21, 2026:

The Public Safety Climate in the City of St Louis – February 10, 2026:

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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 Patrick Tuohey from the Show Me Institute. Today we’re going to be talking about some work that the two of you have done on public safety and crime, specifically in the city of St. Louis. But before we get into the project, I want to talk to you both about your perception of crime as people who have both lived in and frequently visit the city of St. Louis. So Susan, I want to start with you. Before you started this project, before you started looking at the data, when someone said “Is the city of St. Louis dangerous?” what was your perception before you started this project?

Susan Pendergrass (00:38) I only moved to the city of St. Louis in 2015, so there’s a long period of time before I lived there. I was in D.C. for part of that, and my perception before I moved there was that it was dangerous. The Ferguson incident had just happened and I knew that there was a lot of crime. But then when I moved to St. Louis, my husband and I decided to live in the city itself and we loved our neighborhood. It was the coolest with this super cool house built around the time of the World’s Fair. It was amazing. But I never felt really safe. We started leaving our car doors unlocked because our cars would get rifled through. We had a smash-and-grab right within two weeks. I called to report the smash-and-grab and was told that they don’t take reports on them. That was new for me. We had to keep a lot of lights on outside. We didn’t really walk our dogs after dark. I felt like lots of times I would go by police cars sitting on corners idling, but it didn’t necessarily make me feel safer because I wasn’t sure how much they were doing. I also realized people run stoplights, run stop signs, use the right parking lane to pass, and that was all new for me. So I got this feeling that the rule of law wasn’t enforced very well in the city, and that just doesn’t feel good as somebody who has bought a house there and lives there.

Zach Lawhorn (02:06) Patrick, as someone who lives in Kansas City across the state, two questions. What do you think the perception is over there on the western half of the state? And then as someone who comes into St. Louis regularly, what was your perception of the safety situation in the city?

Patrick Tuohey (02:22) A lot of the issues that Susan and I explored in this paper bore out here in Kansas City. I’ve lived in cities my whole life. I understand that every city is going to have the parts you don’t want to go to, the parts that are rougher than others. Kansas City certainly has that. I’ve had my car broken into here in my driveway a number of times, no real damage, and it’s not something I reported to the police. As far as traveling to St. Louis, I’ve been going to St. Louis since the late nineties. Before I lived in Kansas City, I was in Washington, D.C. And I loved St. Louis. I still do. I would visit Creve Coeur, the Central West End, sometimes stay at the Westin downtown. But living in D.C. and growing up in D.C., I understood that every city is going to have the places that you don’t want to go. I understood that St. Louis often gets ranked higher than it should because the city’s footprint is so small. But it never felt to me that what was going on in St. Louis was way outside the normal limits of what we see in U.S. cities. There are those dangerous parts and you generally know not to go there. There is kind of an urban decline, which can be seen in a lack of services, graffiti, uncut grass. But I didn’t navigate St. Louis or think of St. Louis any differently than I thought of Kansas City, Washington D.C., Boston, or any other place I had been.

Zach Lawhorn (04:03) Yeah, and I’m glad you brought up the population of the city, the MSA. It seems like when there are national or even local news stories written on crime statistics in St. Louis, people will point out that if you’re not talking about the larger metropolitan area, you get down to actually a pretty small population number for U.S. cities. So for this work that we’re going to be talking about, can you define what area you guys looked at? When we say murders are a certain number, what area are we specifically talking about?

Patrick Tuohey (04:38) We looked at the city of St. Louis specifically, just those few square miles. We did not look at the metropolitan area and we did not look at the county. It is fair to want to combine all that data into one region, but oftentimes I think people want to do that to mask the seriousness of homicide and violent crime and property crime in the city. And that’s what we wanted to talk about. What is true in St. Louis is not unique to St. Louis. Kansas City has a crime problem that is not reflected in our metropolitan area. That’s true in Washington D.C., Atlanta, Los Angeles, everywhere. So I understand why people who live in St. Louis feel that you can cook the numbers by just looking at the city, but that’s true in every urban environment.

Susan Pendergrass (05:30) We also compared St. Louis to four other cities, and one of them in particular, Cincinnati, ended up being very similar. We wrote a paper and at the back of the paper there’s a table with variables on which we compared them. Similar size, similar poverty, similar median income, very similar. So to say that St. Louis is this very unique outlier and is the only city in the United States that has this situation where, essentially 100-plus years ago, St. Louis was so much better and more metropolitan and forward-thinking than the rest of the state of Missouri, and safer and wealthier, that they drew a line around the city of St. Louis and said we are going to be our own thing and we’re going to have our own police. It was called the Great Divorce. Now that line, the arrows are sort of pointing different ways, where St. Louis County isn’t necessarily excited to absorb the city of St. Louis and its services, systems, police departments, and 911 systems, because it is a uniquely crime-ridden area in parts. So while it would be nice to, as Patrick mentioned, just water down all the numbers by mixing them into a safer pot, it would really mask what’s going on.

Zach Lawhorn (06:47) Susan, you used the word “unique” there to describe the setup. Patrick, does that genuinely make it harder to talk about this topic? In the last few months you’ve had some public events, and we’re going to talk about those in a minute. But as you’ve gone through this process, do you think the unique setup has made it harder? Is there more throat-clearing and definitional work that goes into it?

Patrick Tuohey (07:12) I don’t know that what St. Louis is dealing with is unique. Yes, the city has a particularly small footprint. It is as if you drew a line around just the bad neighborhood in your community and tried to use that small footprint to describe the whole area. I get that argument. But if it’s true by a matter of degree, it’s not uniquely true of St. Louis. And it’s something that the city needs to deal with and understand rather than try to paper over. As Susan said, there are real problems in the city. Their population decline is only exacerbating those problems because there’s less revenue. And frankly, the history of the city going back decades has been that the image of the city is dysfunctional, and not just on public safety, on lots of issues. So although I understand that people say they don’t just want to talk about the city when it comes to crime, St. Louis, while it’s got lots of opportunities and strengths, doesn’t do itself any favors by combining all this stuff and whistling past the graveyard. People in this country know that St. Louis has a crime problem. You don’t solve it by redirecting people.

Zach Lawhorn (08:30) Okay, and let’s talk about that crime problem. Susan, when we use the word “crime” in this context, what are we talking about? Murders? Car break-ins? Lay it out for us.

Susan Pendergrass (08:42) We have violent crime and property crime. Violent crime is murders, aggravated assault, and robbery. Property crimes are larceny and motor vehicle thefts. In our report, we break them all out separately. Murders are the one crime area that the media likes to focus on: how many murders, which city is the murder capital, did we have 150, did we have 200, are they down? They are certainly down in the last two years, to be clear. Murder rates are down. Aggravated assault rates are not down by as much. And sometimes the difference between aggravated assault and murder is how fast the ambulance drives. We still have a lot of violent crimes against people happening. We certainly have a lot of motor vehicle thefts. That’s an area of crime that spiked during COVID, particularly for Kias and Hyundais, and it’s come down, but it’s still a very high number. While it is wonderful that crime has come down across these areas in many cases, the numbers are still pretty high, particularly on a per capita basis, which is how we translate all the crime rates so we can compare them with other cities.

Zach Lawhorn (10:00) So you said crime is down. Is it fair to classify it as it was really bad and now it’s just bad? It was terrible, now it’s just bad. How would you summarize what you found with the drop in crime?

Susan Pendergrass (10:13) Crime’s been dropping since the 80s, so we had much worse crime decades ago. It’s been dropping, it spiked during the pandemic, and it is continuing basically down. Now, when you look at the murder rate per capita in the city of St. Louis, it is still on a slightly upward trend, the number of murders per people, and that could be driven by the fact that Missouri is losing population at a pretty good clip. We have more deaths than births. So on a per capita basis maybe not quite the same, but in terms of actual numbers, crime has been coming down for some time. Crime overall peaked in the late 80s and 90s.

Zach Lawhorn (10:58) Patrick, we talked about your perception and the relevance of many other cities. Did that surprise you, the finding that crime is down? Or was that kind of what you expected?

Patrick Tuohey (11:09) No, the data showing that crime in St. Louis was down wasn’t a surprise. It’s certainly been nice to see that it’s been down year after year. This doesn’t appear to be just a one-off good year. And I’ve known that the mayor and the police chief have been talking about these positive numbers for a while. What I was really interested in with this paper was perception of crime. That’s what I’ve really wrestled with, both at events in the city and in the county. It is a difficult problem to overcome because you can have good numbers like St. Louis has and yet people still rely on that decades-old impression. That’s not something you can address just by waving away the numbers downtown. You have to wrestle with it. You have to admit it, and you have to figure out how do you get people to accept good news, and then how do you make them confident that that good news is going to continue? It’s so easy these days, especially with cities, to just be a pessimist and to say that things are down and won’t ever continue to go down. It is a problem that St. Louis has, but St. Louis isn’t alone in having it. The news on crime is good all over the country, yet perceptions about crime all over the country are still very much with us.

Susan Pendergrass (12:43) There’s a survey question that’s often asked: do you feel safe walking outside alone at night? And those numbers aren’t down. As Patrick mentioned, you have graffiti and trash not being picked up and panhandling and homelessness. Those numbers aren’t necessarily down. But we did look at St. Louis on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, and it is true that out of 16 neighborhoods, four or five have basically no crime, they’re crime-free. But then there are some other pockets that have most of the murders concentrated in one neighborhood. So it isn’t equal across all the neighborhoods. There are some that have very little crime, but it’s hard to convince folks of that when they drive through the ones that have public disorder and still don’t feel safe.

Zach Lawhorn (13:29) Susan, as a researcher trying to ultimately figure out why things happen, you mentioned that crime is down across the country. Would it be easier if it was just a few select cities, so you could actually go and say what is Boston doing different, what is Memphis doing? Does it make it harder to find the “why” since it seems like it’s kind of across the board?

Susan Pendergrass (13:45) Yeah. There have been other periods of time when crime has gone down and then gone back up again. I personally believe, and this is not based on any research I’ve done, that cameras being absolutely everywhere makes it harder to commit crimes. You cannot basically travel through the world anymore without being on a camera somewhere. Police body cams probably make it harder to commit crimes too. I feel like we’re getting into more of a surveillance state, and maybe that’s what’s bringing crime down. I’ve heard that Detroit has brought crime down faster than other cities, that Pittsburgh is feeling safer, Chattanooga is feeling safer, Memphis feeling less safe. So it would be worthwhile to look into some of these differences. But I don’t think our research has yet pointed to a clear reason why it’s happening.

Patrick Tuohey (14:41) Let me follow up on that because Susan’s exactly right, and I think your question gets to that point. Crime is down nationwide, down in all cities if I remember correctly, and we don’t really know why. And it’s not just Susan and I that don’t know why. Susan has spoken with public safety and crime experts from all over the country, and that’s really frustrating from a public policy research point of view, because you would love to have that outlier, that one city, maybe Boston or Omaha, that tried something novel and got results unlike everybody else. But crime is so difficult because there are so many contributors. Some people want to point to the availability of guns. Some people want to talk about root causes. Some people want to talk about the number of police, the severity of crime, the clearance rate, population growth, new development, basic services like picking up the trash and making sure the streetlights work. And all of those things are right, all those things contribute. So it’s really difficult to figure out which one is driving the change. And sometimes, as Susan pointed out, you may just get a dip and there’s no explaining it. In 2014, in Kansas City, our mayor and police chief at the time came out and had a press conference because they were so proud of the homicide drop the previous year. There was a lot of back-slapping and self-congratulation. Then when the homicide rate went back up the next year, you couldn’t get those guys to answer a basic question. Policymakers are, and maybe rightly so, really shy about claiming credit, because they don’t want to be called to task a year later when the numbers reverse. The good news is that the numbers are trending down, and that’s always good. The frustration is it’s very difficult to figure out why and then make recommendations. We’re all kind of scratching our heads. Although again, this is a good problem to have. The numbers are heading in the right direction and we ought to be happy about that.

Zach Lawhorn (16:58) Patrick, to get a better idea of the perception side, you did the hard work of going to the people. In January and February you moderated events. We had one in the city of St. Louis and one in St. Louis County. There are full recordings of the events available at showmeinstitute.org. You had a panel of experts and spent a lot of time getting feedback from attendees who lived in the city and the county. What were your takeaways? Are they buying that crime is getting better?

Patrick Tuohey (17:33) No, in a word, they don’t. We gave them a short survey before the event. A lot of them believed that crime was important, certainly, but they didn’t necessarily believe that crime was getting better. They weren’t necessarily optimistic that crime was going to be better in St. Louis City in the next five years, and that was certainly true in the county. I wanted to press these audience members: what would it take for you to believe this good news? And I think sometimes they just didn’t want to believe anything. We got the frustrating line: “there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.” That’s a cute thing to say, but it really doesn’t help you explain your own view. If you’re just going to say you believe it’s bad and always going to be bad, that doesn’t get us anywhere. We were happy to have representatives from the Circuit Attorney’s office at both events, and they struggle with this too. They can do a better job. They can prosecute more and different cases, they can do it faster. The police can certainly improve their clearance rate. But public policymakers in those cities, in every city, are going to have to realize that they may have to continue that grind, doing the hard work of lowering crime, and they’re not going to get the attaboys from the people in their city or the communities around them. That’s just a reality. One of the panelists talked about how perception of crime is often a lagging indicator. When crime goes up, people feel it immediately. But when crime goes down, it may take a few years. The tough news for the people who lead St. Louis City is you may have to keep doing this for another 10 years before you get any credit for being successful. And that’s really tough in politics because people want that immediate payoff, that immediate

Susan Pendergrass (19:15) You

Patrick Tuohey (19:31) applause, that immediate press conference and support.

Susan Pendergrass (19:34) Patrick and I have been thinking about the things that could happen that could make a difference, that could maybe make people feel safer. Number one: when you see a crime happening, you need to be able to have faith that you can report it and somebody will respond. And that is not happening right now in the city of St. Louis. We’ve called several times about crimes and nobody showed up. You need to have faith in the 911 system, and the 911 system needs to function. We have about 28 different systems in the county. They’re building a new 911 center in the city that’s going to consolidate services, but it’s not finished. It’s going to be some time before it’s fully functioning. We also need to know that the police will be able to solve these crimes. They need resources. They need to be able to do DNA testing and rape kits and DNA. They need money to do those things. They need detectives. We need to know that these crimes can get solved, and then we need to know that the crimes are prosecuted. I think if these pieces on the front end, not just the “lock them up” approach, but on the front end, people would feel safer if they felt like they could call somebody and somebody would respond and something would happen. I’m not sure that’s happening right now. And until it does, people, especially when they start having small children, are probably going to move out.

Patrick Tuohey (20:59) What we’ve known since at least 1961, when Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is that you sometimes just need eyes on the street. Shop owners, pedestrians, people walking around. Cameras can reduce crime, but they’re kind of abstract and tucked in corners. When a street is vibrant, when it’s got people living there, when you’ve got kids playing in the street and families on the porch, there’s that sense of being watched, being seen. But because St. Louis has been in this population spiral, how do you bring people back into the city? The city talks about economic development subsidies all the time, but that’s about bringing in amenities and employers. Maybe what the city needs to do is figure out how to bring in people. And oftentimes it’s the non-crime-related policies, the housing policies, the regulations, the tax structure, that keep people out. Crime is one of those, but the city could open itself up to urban homesteaders who want to come in and rehab these old houses. What has struck me about St. Louis for the decades I’ve been going there is just the absolutely beautiful old neighborhoods, the incredible housing stock. Susan talked about living in a house that was built for the World’s Fair. There are gorgeous neighborhoods in St. Louis, and it’s the barriers to entry, red tape and government regulation, that are keeping people out, I have to believe. Crime is one of them, to be sure. But I am confident there are people who would love to move into those old houses and revitalize those old neighborhoods, because they’re just so gorgeous and so walkable. And it’s been done in other cities. DuPont Circle in Washington D.C. was a slow process of rehabbing neighborhoods block by block, and now 30 years later it is a vibrant community.

Zach Lawhorn (23:03) Susan, you mentioned the 911 system. I know in the report you don’t get into specific solutions, and I know we’re still kind of in the measuring-the-problem stage and trying to figure out next steps, but beyond the 911 system, are there any areas you’d consider low-hanging fruit worth considering moving forward?

Susan Pendergrass (23:25) The legislature passed and the governor signed a violent crime clearance grant program last year that cities like St. Louis could apply for, funding to hire detectives, do DNA testing, collect data, and other activities directly focused on solving crimes. The legislature has not appropriated any money for that program. If they did, St. Louis could apply for those funds. We also have, and I don’t know the exact number as I say this, but at least 100 open police positions in the department. Those are hard to fill. The policies that have been tried, like no longer requiring officers to live within the city and across-the-board raises, none of those have really made a difference. So we need recruitment and retention policies that could actually work. And as I mentioned with the 911 system, triaging calls and making sure the correct agency responds when a crime has been committed. There are community violence intervention programs that have been tried in some places, and using neighborhood-by-neighborhood data to focus in on where crimes are really happening. Those are all things we’d like to explore further: what is the cost of these programs, what is the likelihood that they’ll improve things, and what are some feasible ways to get them done.

Zach Lawhorn (24:54) So there’s the PR part of it. The city’s got a PR problem. There’s the need for more cops. We need people to be able to call 911. We need people to actually be prosecuted for crimes. That all seems doable.

Susan Pendergrass (24:58) Yeah.

Zach Lawhorn (25:06) Where do you think the city of St. Louis is at right now? Are we in a good place? Are we in just an improved place where it could still be a few years? How are you feeling about public safety in the city of St. Louis right now?

Susan Pendergrass (25:21) I don’t want to be a wet blanket. I love the city of St. Louis and I want it to succeed wildly. But I’m concerned that they’re going to say murders are down and these other crimes are down, but people are still running stop signs and stoplights, there are still panhandlers, and trash still isn’t being picked up. They’re not really fixing the small things that make people feel safe. They’re sort of focused on these big numbers. It could be like a school improving ACT scores. You have to be really careful if you’re just focusing on one aspect, because these big crime numbers being down could be hiding a lot of other stuff that really needs to be done and focused on. So I’m cautiously optimistic, I guess.

Patrick Tuohey (26:05) I’m optimistic because crime is going down everywhere, and I think it will probably continue to go down at least for the next few years, for reasons that may have nothing to do with the management of St. Louis. Part of it is because Susan and I have been reviewing the research for the last few months, and there is so much out there, primary research on crime and secondary, that talks about exactly the things Susan hit upon: the environment, picking up trash, cleaning up graffiti, fixing sidewalks, making sure the streetlights are lit. We know so much more about what drives crime, or at least what can ameliorate it, that even if we don’t know the specifics of what’s going on now, city leaders and state leaders are much more aware of what they can do to make communities not just safer but feel safe. And again, it is frustrating because you can say the numbers are down, but until people feel safe and want to go downtown and take advantage of what the city has to offer, we’re not going to see that public perception change. So yes, I think the public perception is accurate in as much as that is what people feel, but I don’t think it reflects what’s actually going on in St. Louis or in the county.

Zach Lawhorn (27:20) And we will leave it there. The report, The Public Safety Climate in the City of St. Louis, is available at showmeinstitute.org. If you want to watch the full recordings of the events that Patrick moderated, those are available right now at showmeinstitute.org. Susan, Patrick, thank you very much.

Susan Pendergrass (27:36) Thank you.

Patrick Tuohey (27:36) Thank you.

The post The Public Safety Climate in the City of St. Louis appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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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.

Learn more about the book here: www.cato.org/books/fighting-freedom-learn

Susan Pendergrass speaks with James Shuls, fellow at the Show-Me Institute and head of the Education Liberty Branch at Florida State University, and Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute about their new book, Fighting for the Freedom to Learn: Examining America’s Centuries-Old School Choice Movement. They discuss how the fight for educational freedom long predates modern debates over public schooling, why early advocates viewed schooling as a family and community responsibility, and how today’s school choice expansion connects to America’s founding principles. The conversation covers the history of the common school movement, the roots of residential school assignment, and why educational freedom has always been central to the American story, and more.

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction

02:33 The Genesis of ‘Fighting for the Freedom to Learn’
05:41 Historical Perspectives on School Choice
08:04 The Evolution of Common Schools and Their Impact
10:59 The Role of Religion in Early Education
14:01 The Shift Towards Standardization in Education
16:43 The Need for School Choice in Disadvantaged Areas
19:29 The Historical Context of Property Taxes and School Assignment
22:17 The Recent Surge in School Choice Movements

Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00)
Certainly looking forward to this conversation with two very, very smart people: Dr. Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute and Dr. James Shuls of Florida State University. James, can you first tell us about this new center that you are in charge of at Florida State University? I think it’s innovative and really cool, and I’d like to hear a little bit more about it before we talk about your book.

James Shuls (00:21)
Absolutely. So I’m with the Institute for Governance and Civics, and it was created by the legislature a couple years ago. And while I would like to take credit and say I’m in charge of it, as you sort of said there, Susan, I’m not in charge of the Institute, but I’m one of the branch heads. So the IGC, as we call it, has four branches. We focus on economic liberty, constitutional liberty, conscience liberty, and education liberty. I’m the head of the education liberty branch.
And so part of what we’re doing is outreach to K–12 schools, helping to focus on civics instruction, improving knowledge and preparation for teachers as it relates to civics and governance and those sorts of things. At the same time, we’re writing about issues of educational liberty from a school choice perspective, which is exactly the topic we’re talking about today.

Susan Pendergrass (01:12)
Yeah, so you guys have a book that you just co-edited, Fighting for the Freedom to Learn: Examining America’s Centuries-Old School Choice Movement. How did you come up with this idea, and why did you decide to put this book together?

Neal McCluskey (01:27)
Sure, I’ll go with that. The idea behind the book stems from just about everything I ever do, which is I got angry about something, and I was like, well, somebody ought to do something about this. If you work in school choice advocacy for more than a day or so, you’ll quickly hear that school choice started by people trying to avoid desegregation in the South. And that’s always given as the origin. And even if somebody wants to say, well, you know, Milton Friedman wrote this essay in 1955—and he really wrote it before 1955—we know that that was really just taking advantage, at the very least, of this backlash against desegregation.
And it just drives me nuts. There is a very long, rich history of the idea and practice of school choice. So I thought, you know, somebody ought to do a book on that, and we can hit, sort of semi-chronologically, all the different eras in which this happened and the ebbs and flows. The Cato Institute and the Center for Educational Freedom, which I direct, also had something called the School Choice Timeline—this interactive online timeline that I put together also because I was angry. In particular, I wrote a chapter about the gap where not much was going on in school choice, and I wanted to explain the gap.
But we have lots of chapters—one on how progressives were really into school choice for a while, and how schooling worked before the common-schooling movement, and all sorts of stuff like that. The genesis was aggravation on my part, at least, about always hearing this narrative that school choice stems from efforts to avoid desegregation. And then I said, you know, James Shuls—there’s a guy who probably is angry a lot, too. Maybe he’d like to get in on this.

James Shuls (03:17)
Yeah, that’s right. Susan, I’ve been on the podcast before talking about some of my scholarship related to Virgil Blum. He was a real strong school choice advocate starting in the ’50s, did a ton of work, and gets absolutely no credit. I was angry that Friedman gets all the credit—he wrote this paper in 1955, yada, yada, yada—and then in the 1990s we get school choice programs. It’s like, well, a lot happened in that yada, yada, yada period that we’re not covering.
I had been writing about that when Neal came along with the idea to do the book. Part of what we’re doing as we frame this is saying: looking at school choice today through the current lens we have is the wrong way to do it. We think of school choice today as opting out of the public school system—but that only works to frame it that way if there is a public school system. Before common schools were around, people were still advocating for their kids, still trying to get schools created. So there was lots of stuff that wouldn’t fit the framework we have today.
What we’re saying in this book is these impulses for educational freedom have always existed, and we’re essentially tracing them from colonial times to today.

Neal McCluskey (04:36)
James’s stuff on Blum was also a major reason I thought, here’s a guy who could really contribute to this. I just stumbled on Blum in large part because of what James wrote. I was like, why do people not know about this guy?

Susan Pendergrass (04:41)
We did a whole podcast on it. I’ll tell you what makes me mad is that in the last month or two, tops, there have been articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post talking about low-income families—both in Florida and Arizona—generally Black and brown parents, who are participating in this right-wing conservative movement to kill the public school system because they think they deserve to be able to choose where their kid goes to school.
Even locally in political groups, people say, well, that’s a MAGA person, which means they support charter schools. When those two things get put into a sentence, it really makes my blood boil because I’ve been working in this space a long time. As we’re going to find out more, school choice is not a new thing at all. The latest iteration of it is not a MAGA thing or five years old or a COVID thing. Since at least 1990—at least 35 years—parents and activists like Howard Fuller were saying, hey, this isn’t right. We’re literally assigning kids to the worst schools and not letting them out. We ought to let them out.
Somehow this has become the Republican agenda to kill teacher unions and break up the public school system. Nothing could be further from the truth. That makes me mad. That’s why I’m really glad you guys put this book together. Let’s go back—not to the very beginning of the country—but pre–industrial revolution, pre–John Dewey, before standardized schools, attendance zones, and district lines. What did it look like, say 150 years ago? Did parents decide where their kids went to school, or did you have to go to a certain school because that was the one you helped pay to create? How did it work back in the day?

James Shuls (06:50)
I’ll jump in here because I’m awfully angry about this. Before common schools, there was a wide mixture of different types of schools. You had dame schools, private schools, public schools, and publicly funded private schools.
What you get in Charles Glenn’s chapter, “Emergence of the Common School Ideology,” is an understanding of the movement towards common schools. The impetus behind them was really to separate schooling from the family and the community and to use schools for social change. That’s the difference that comes in here—schooling would be used for social change.

Susan Pendergrass (07:29)
Mm-hmm.

James Shuls (07:35)
—to create and form Americans. Some people look at that and say it’s a good thing, but there are certainly negative side effects as well when you separate the impact of community and families. An interesting element that comes out in this book is that the common school ideology and the public school system that has come in its wake was created to form a certain kind of American citizen.
Then we get into Neal’s chapter, where Neal talks about the sort of gap where things aren’t happening. It’s because these systems were under attack. You see a reemergence in the 1950s—not just because of Brown and segregation—but because you start to have a return to some of these values and a return to trying to connect schooling and the family and the church.
When you look at school choice with this longer arc, rather than looking at the ’50s as your starting point, you see the various impulses that were leading pre–common schools, how common schools helped to squash some of those things, and how we’re starting to come back to a decentralized and pluralistic system.

Susan Pendergrass (08:50)
Certainly the common schools—also called public schools before 1900—were Protestant. They absolutely taught religion. They didn’t stop teaching religion until the Catholics started showing up. Then it was, yeah, maybe we get religion out of schools, right? Because we don’t want Catholicism in a public school. Public schools taught Protestantism; they just didn’t want to teach Catholicism. People think there’s always been separation—no religion in public schools—and that’s not true.

James Shuls (09:16)
That’s a key point in Matthew Lee’s chapter: Catholics turned to private schools. He would say it’s not necessarily school choice because the Catholics were saying you had to go to the Catholic schools—so no choice among Catholic schools. Nevertheless, the Catholic schools came up because the public schools were Protestant. Protestants went in—though not all in. There were some segments, which Neal could talk about, with the Lutherans.
By and large, Protestants supported the common school movement. Then there was a movement to secularize public schools. Again, that’s part of what happens in the 1950s with the return of Protestants starting to support school choice—because their capture of the public school system had been weakened and there were no longer Protestant schools.

Neal McCluskey (10:10)
Just as a pitch for the book: there’s so much good history in here that we won’t be able to talk about. You definitely want to get the book. It’s worth noting that for much of our early history—colonial period, early republican period, even into the common-schooling period—there wasn’t a separation people would recognize if you say, well, this is a public school and this is a private school. There were schools. There was education.
Government was sometimes involved in assisting private schools. Going back to British traditions, someone would provide—usually from the proceeds of owning land—funds to help maintain a school. In America, land was the one thing in superabundance, so that wasn’t as profitable. Governments would sometimes say, look, you’re running a school here; we’ll give you a little money to do it. There was often cooperation between government and schools.
The first voucher program that we’ve at least been able to catalog was in 1802 in Pennsylvania—specifically in Philadelphia. So this is not new. Go back more than two centuries and you had people like Paine and John Stuart Mill talking about helping people to consume education by funding parents so they can choose, not by funding schools.
Even as we have common schools, they were extremely localized. Think of the one-room schoolhouse—it was also the meeting house and often the church—serving pretty homogeneous communities. Even within what eventually became common schooling, there was a lot of differentiation where people could get the schooling they wanted. It’s only as progressives consolidate control that we move far away from that community-level, very small schooling.

Susan Pendergrass (12:13)
I thought it was so odd that Maine and Vermont have had town tuitioning of high schools for a couple hundred years. Where the town didn’t want to build a high school, they just paid tuition for their high school students to go to a different school the student picked. In some cases it’s a boarding school, even overseas. They were challenged in the Supreme Court within the last couple of years, even though those programs have existed for hundreds of years.
All of a sudden, people who don’t like the voucher idea went after Maine for town tuitioning, even though that program has been in place for so long.

James Shuls (12:53)
That radical right-wing bastion in Maine.

Susan Pendergrass (12:55)
—decided at a town meeting to do it. I think as you get into the earlier or middle part of the last century, you start building up this industrial education complex: we’re going to be the great equalizer; everyone’s going to have the same kind of school; 20 kids and a chalkboard and teacher; separate kids by age, not ability; common standards; and we’re going to be in charge of it.
Anyone who disagrees with what’s being taught there is seen as a radical who wants to break the system and doesn’t understand the importance of it. That’s what I feel has been happening lately, where any parent—my own experience: I homeschooled one of my kids and was considered a radical because why wouldn’t I accept that the public school to which he was assigned would be best for him? The idea that uniformity is what we need.
I still think there are a lot of people within the public education establishment who say uniformity is the key. We are clearly seeing a backlash, but the uniformity principle—maybe 75 years, maybe the 1950s—would you say?

Neal McCluskey (14:15)
It depends. In the early republican period, people like Benjamin Rush said we need schooling for everybody to make them into good citizens—into “republican machines,” his term. Horace Mann certainly wants to standardize people. Not because of Catholics at the beginning—they hadn’t come in at great numbers—but because he saw people coming in from the countryside.
New England industrialized first—relatively poor farming area, but lots of rivers to run factories. These early factories with big water wheels. Mann saw parents coming from the countryside and thought they were all idiots. He thought we needed to take their kids away from them and standardize them. So we started it even at the very beginning.
It gets even more standardized as more immigrants arrive and people get scared of them. One overarching theme of the history of school choice: it’s about people who do not fit into whatever mold the elites decide. Catholics didn’t fit the Protestant mold. In my research, Germans were most disturbing for people because they spoke German—people said, they really need to speak English. We have a thread of fear of Germans going back to colonial Pennsylvania.
The chapter on African Americans is particularly powerful: it talks about a system that never wanted to incorporate them. They needed freedom to get the education people were denying them. That’s the big theme—people who don’t want to be standardized or who are refused help need school choice to get something out of education.

Susan Pendergrass (16:13)
I’ll only say that’s true today. It’s ironic that the kids with the least options—the most disadvantaged kids in the worst schools—are the ones people openly talk about denying options to. Even in Missouri, when public school choice is considered, some of the lowest-performing districts say, okay, but not us. We can’t let kids out of our district because we’re one of the worst in the state and everyone will leave and take money.
They want to draw a line and say, whatever unfortunate child got assigned to this school, we cannot let them leave. That’s flipped on its head. That child needs choices as much as every other kid. They say, no, we have to lock those kids in and strap them to the deck of a Titanic. Why do you think that is, James?

James Shuls (17:07)
I’d say Ron Matus’s chapter on the progressive movement toward school choice is terrific for the points you’re making. There was a tremendous progressive move for school choice in the ’70s and ’80s that culminated in the early voucher programs.
They were making exactly the cases you’re making: we should not assign students to failing schools; school choice was progressive in that it allowed disadvantaged students to opt out and get the type of school that would meet their needs, and to bring competition into the marketplace. The progressives were making the case for school choice exactly because the most disadvantaged students needed it the most.
That’s why the recent idea that school choice is a MAGA movement is off. The progressives got there first, as Ron and others explain.

Susan Pendergrass (18:12)
One last thing. I have a hard time articulating to folks who believe there’s an ironclad connection between property taxes and school assignment that goes back to the beginning of time and must continue until the end of time: if you pay property taxes here, your kid goes to school here; if you don’t, your child doesn’t get to go to school there. I don’t want any kids coming into my kid’s school if their parents didn’t pay property taxes.
I think that is particularly strong in Missouri. In St. Louis County we have dozens of school districts within one county. People feel very strongly—even supporters of school choice—about this property tax/school assignment idea. They can’t get past it. What would you say to that? You lived in St. Louis, James; what do you say?

James Shuls (19:13)
We didn’t write the book through this specific lens, but if you read closely you see this: the system evolved over time. You had a radically decentralized system. Horace Mann and the common school movement advocated for state structures and more organization. Over time it evolved to the system we have today.
From the founding, the idea of residential assignment where local property taxes only follow the kids—and the high level of state and federal regulation—was not anyone’s early vision. It’s not the system most people would advocate if they could design it from scratch. We get wedded to the structures we have.
What we have to do is step back and ask, is this the way it should be? I think the answer is no. We shouldn’t have systems that restrict resources to small local communities and assign students, because we get the problems we all see: high-poverty districts with struggling schools and students assigned to terrible schools with little opportunity for the types of coursework and experiences that lead to success. The system we have isn’t inherently good just because it’s the system we have.

Neal McCluskey (20:57)
We probably needed a chapter on the history of taxation to answer this directly. My suspicion is that for a lot of our history we didn’t have a lot of income tax or other taxes, and drawing on the English tradition, we probably funded things at the community level with property taxes—very local and democratically controlled.
It’s not until the industrial era, with consolidation, that communities stopped running their own schools. My guess is that’s the history of a lot of this property-tax and local-tax funding. But things have obviously changed.
My colleague Colleen Hroncich always points out: it might have made sense to have local public schools when nobody had a car and most people walked places. You couldn’t travel 10 or 20 miles every morning to drop your kid off. That doesn’t make sense now—we have modern transportation—so we don’t have to be shackled to the school a mile or two away.

Susan Pendergrass (22:04)
See you next time. I also think that starting in the 1950s—partly because of Brown v. Board—states and then the federal government started tinkering with the distribution of tax dollars to districts to give more money to poorer districts and less to wealthier districts. That’s been going on with funding formulas. I’m not sure any of them have had an impact on poor kids or reducing achievement gaps, but they thought that moving levers at the state and federal level would get a different outcome.
In my opinion, wealthier districts with higher property tax bases and more local funding aren’t really impacted by those. Now they say, you can move kids around—but not from us—because we’re not part of that system where you move money around. We’re happy with what we’ve got. If you can afford to live here, fine; but they want to be left out of it.

James Shuls (23:10)
Sorry to interrupt you. I wanted to weigh in on that last point, because—reason to listen to the podcast and get the book—this is not in the book, but Virgil Blum had some correspondence with Milton Friedman back in the ’50s and ’60s. They weren’t closely associated; they were operating in different circles. But Blum sent Friedman something he had written and asked for feedback. Friedman responded.
One thing he said was, when it comes to the voucher idea, he thought it should start at the higher education level, not K–12. Then he said it should be at the level where the taxation or the money is supplied. So in K–12, that probably means vouchers should come from the local community, not from the state or the federal government.
So to your point: we had a system that relied more on local tax dollars, and Friedman was saying the vouchers should be local. But we’ve shifted over time to a system that provides a lot more money from the state and federal government than it used to. If you look across the country, every school choice program is a state system—very rarely do you have a district creating a voucher system. It almost always comes at the state level. Even Friedman was wrong from time to time.

Susan Pendergrass (24:44)
On that note, I know you have a chapter on this, but what about this explosion of school choice? Now it feels unstoppable. We have more than a dozen states with universal-ish programs. At least five states have truly universal school choice systems. Why now? Why has it picked up steam so fast after barely making progress through the ’90s and early 2000s?

Neal McCluskey (25:17)
Jason Bedrick has a particular take on it—which I think is probably right—but I think it has deeper roots. Generally, the idea is people are unhappy and increasingly unhappy with how they’re being served by public schools.
My theory—and I think a lot of people hold this—is that COVID made people realize that in a public school system, if a powerful minority or majority wants X and you want Y, someone loses. Many parents who wanted in-person school—generally well-heeled and used to getting what they want—suddenly couldn’t get it. They realized the system didn’t work for them even if they liked it in theory.
Anecdotally, in rich places like Montclair, New Jersey, people were at each other’s throats because many wanted mutually exclusive things. Then you had ideological battles over vaccination and mask requirements. Many say that virtual school let parents see what their kids were learning, and they didn’t like it—books like Gender Queer, how African American history is taught, etc. We haven’t shown concretely that anger was because of peeking into the classroom via Zoom, but it certainly coincided. People were angry.
Jason argues that, yes, people were unhappy, but it wasn’t really COVID; it was the strategy of reaching out to red-state parents in environments where you could get school choice, saying: public schools are teaching stuff you don’t like; you don’t want your kids trapped in that. All the big school-choice gains were in red states—the red-state strategy worked. Now the future is moving into purple and blue states. I think that’s right too, but the underlying driver is people realizing one system can’t fit everyone.

James Shuls (28:32)
I’ll weigh in here too. Friedman made the free-market case for school choice in the ’50s, and that case continued to today—choice, competition, rising tides lift boats. You also had the progressive case in the ’70s and ’80s—students shouldn’t be trapped in failing schools; create programs to help the most disadvantaged. Those arguments kept creating small, targeted programs, but not a wider audience.
A third element—cultural, right-leaning values—added a new coalition. It layered on top of the free-market and progressive cases. I wouldn’t say the movement is completely going to the right; it’s making arguments that appeal to those individuals.
If you go to a rural Missouri voter and say “choice and competition,” with one local public high school and one elementary school, that doesn’t land. If you say the most disadvantaged students in St. Louis and Kansas City need choice, the rural voter may not care. But if you weigh in on some conservative values, you reach a new audience. Maybe that’s part of what’s happened.

Susan Pendergrass (30:24)
Just a bigger tent. It’s clear we’ve only scratched the surface of your book—this is only a 30-minute podcast and there’s so much more in there. A lot of it is so intriguing—going back to the history of this country and realizing the system we have now is relatively new compared to the various systems we’ve had.
Parents don’t really care what the name is on the outside of the school. They care about how their kids come home at the end of the day—how much they appear to be learning. They want them challenged; they want them safe. That’s universal. Whatever system gets them there, they don’t care what it’s called or what it looks like. If they thought they’d get it out of a uniform system and now they don’t…
There’s so much in this book. You picked a lot of great authors—12 leading education scholars. When will folks be able to buy this book and read it themselves, and where?

Neal McCluskey (31:37)
It comes out November 11th. I think it’s available online—online bookstores everywhere—as well as the Cato website, Cato.org.

Susan Pendergrass (31:43)
And can folks reach out to you guys if they have any comments or questions?

Neal McCluskey (31:53)
As long as it’s nice stuff, they can reach out to me.

Susan Pendergrass (31:55)
I can’t promise them.

James Shuls (31:55)
The nice stuff can reach out to me; the negative comments go to Neal.

Susan Pendergrass (32:00)
Well, it’s great. Thank you so much for coming on and talking about it. It’s a fantastic book, and I highly recommend folks get it and read it themselves.

James Shuls (32:09)
Thank you.

Neal McCluskey (32:09)
Great, thanks.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

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If you want great schools, you have to have great teachers. Lots of other things are important. Strong school culture, appropriate instructional materials, good curriculum, robust relationships with parents, all necessary. But it is the person, the actual human being, that puts all of that into play that is most important.

Mimicking the Tennessee Teacher Evaluation Model

Missouri could better support teachers by providing meaningful guidance and feedback. One promising model comes from Tennessee.

Launched in 2012, the Tennessee Educator Acceleration Model (TEAM) was designed to help educators improve. Teachers frequently express a desire to improve, but often lack resources or guidance on how to get better.

By using announced and unannounced in-class observations, academic growth data, and student performance data, TEAM calculates a teacher score (1–5 scale) that provides information to teachers and school leaders about teacher performance. The goal is not to punish teachers, but to coach them and help them improve. Observers identify one strength and one area for improvement in each lesson, keeping the process constructive, focused, and encouraging. The Tennessee Education Research Alliance at Vanderbilt University found that teachers in schools with stronger implementation of TEAM improved faster than those in schools with weaker implementation.

The evaluation promotes ongoing dialogue about what happens in the classroom and how it affects student performance, and provides a basis for professional advancement—e.g., high-performing teachers can be identified through TEAM for mentoring roles.

Initially, there was strong pushback against teacher evaluation in Tennessee, which is not surprising. At its launch, only 28 percent of teachers believed TEAM would improve student outcomes, and only 38 percent believed it would improve teacher performance. But those numbers changed quickly once teachers actually experienced TEAM, rising to 71 and 76 percent, respectively, by 2019.

Missouri should consider emulating Tennessee’s commitment to rigorous and constructive teacher evaluation. If we’re serious about improving school quality and student outcomes, we need to be serious about improving teacher quality.

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Mr. Collins did not appreciate my conclusion. He called it “misleading and inflammatory,” and wrote that I was dealing in “political spin.”

I welcome the opportunity to respond. Collins wrote:

The claim that PortKC’s NDA signals secrecy is misleading and inflammatory. The NDA applies only during early negotiations, and thus, to protect complex deals before terms are finalized. That is standard in any serious public-private partnership. It doesn’t block legal disclosures, doesn’t hide information from taxing jurisdictions, and doesn’t erase public accountability. It protects taxpayers from leaks that can tank deals or drive-up costs.

PortKC literally—and I am not being figurative—requires in writing that applicants sign an NDA. I do not know what the justification is for requiring secrecy, but I do know that it is not “standard in any serious public-private partnership.” The Economic Development Corporation of Kansas City (EDCKC), which also provides a raft of public subsidies, requires no such NDA. As I wrote, I can understand why a developer would want such secrecy, but it is another thing completely to have the public body handing out taxpayer subsidies to be the one demanding discretion.

If you doubt that PortKC maintains a level of secrecy throughout its deals, search online for the terms Project Mica and Project Kestrel.

Collins continues:

PortKC’s process requires more upfront disclosure from developer’s ownership, litigation history, financials, job creation, wage data, and community impact than many.

If this is the justification, it doesn’t appear to be working. It was only three years ago that PortKC failed to discover that a developer to which it was prepared to issue subsidies, Lux Living, had a few Securities and Exchange Commission violations in its past. So much for “more upfront disclosure.”

Separately, in its most recent financial audit, PortKC was faulted for failing to demonstrate that it searched federal databases to determine if any vendors were “suspended and debarred entities” prior to payment. Again, PortKC is not demonstrating that it carefully vets applicants.

Collins continues:

Critics, like this guy [that’s me!], also ignore that PortKC posts its full fee schedule, limits its own ability to rack up costs without approval, and requires developers to follow workforce, equity, and wage policies from day one.

Yes, PortKC posts an impressive fee schedule. I can’t say that it’s complete, but it does make quite a buck from issuing taxpayer subsidies. That’s part of the problem.

Most organizations that grow as quickly as PortKC face similar growing pains, and PortKC has taken action.

Has it, though? The financial audits of 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 all point out that PortKC failed to provide “effective internal control” of finances. One such finding may be the result of growing pains, but four consecutive findings suggest an inability or an unwillingness to right the ship.

Mr. Collins concludes:

The idea that PortKC is “insisting on secrecy” is political spin. This is about protecting sensitive financial negotiations; not hiding public subsidy. If you’re serious about transparency, deal with the facts; not headlines.

Again, it’s very clear from the PortKC application that it insists on secrecy.

I understand that Mr. Collins and others in the “public-private real estate development” industry are either happy with things just as they are or are hesitant to be critical of a scheme from which they stand to gain. But the argument that taxpayers are also benefitted by “protecting sensitive financial negotiations” from taxpayer scrutiny is just silly.

Organizations like PortKC and the groups they fund want public funds dispersed in the dark. If PortKC were serious about serving the public, its leadership would remove its NDA requirement and heed the counsel of its financial auditors. Until then, it should be viewed skeptically.

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Pushing Back Against Policies that Dilute Standards

Currently, Missouri students are categorized into one of four performance levels based on their state standardized test scores. From lowest to highest, these are: below basic, basic, proficient, and advanced.

HB 607 proposes the addition of a fifth performance category, called “grade level,” which would be above basic but below proficient.

• Proficient: Demonstrates mastery over all appropriate grade-level standards
• Grade level: Demonstrates mastery over appropriate grade-level subject matter
• Basic: Demonstrates partial mastery of essential knowledge and skills for the grade level

This definition of “grade-level” implies that it should not be expected for Missouri students to have mastery over all appropriate grade-level standards.

Rather than diluting standards, Missouri should implement policies that make meaningful use of state assessments. One such example is a third-grade retention policy. The transition from third to fourth grade is pivotal—students shift from learning to read to reading to learn. To combat the well-documented fourth-grade reading slump, states such as South Carolina and Mississippi adopted mandatory retention policies paired with targeted phonics-based interventions. The result has been very positive.

Open Enrollment—Better Choice, Better Accountability

Currently, where you can attend school is largely determined by where you live. This prevents many families from changing schools. Establishing a cross-district, universal open enrollment program would allow more families to vote with their feet. Markets excel at revealing best practices, and districts with best practices will likely attract more students and pressure other districts to change.

There is some potential to align open enrollment with Missouri’s accreditation process. In December 2024, it was announced that for the 10th year in a row, the state’s accountability system would not be used for district accreditation. Perhaps there is fear of a trigger in the policy that would allow students to transfer out of unaccredited school districts, especially because the unaccredited districts must pay the tuition for the transfers to receiving districts. If universal open enrollment were adopted, lawmakers could revisit the tuition rule for transfer students out of those districts and implement a meaningful accreditation system.

These strategies offer ways to maintain high standards for our schools and children. Better accountability systems in education are the key to learning which strategies are working and which are not. Encouraging transparency and openness will generate more competition and innovation in our schools, and should ultimately strengthen our education system.

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The Missouri Senate debated this week whether we should just throw out the MSIP part. Students would still take the MAP tests, but only to meet federal requirements and get federal dollars. Supporters claim that outcomes will dramatically improve because every teacher, freed from the pressure of MAP scores, will thrive and innovate. Of course, that’s not true across the board. We have quite a few districts that need more oversight, not less.

Rather than take an accountability system with almost no teeth and toss it aside, we should be working on building a better one. It is still true that you can’t fix what you don’t measure. We need test scores to tell us if students can read and do math. We need to know how well schools are serving their students. Publicly funded systems should be held accountable to taxpayers.

We are on version six of MSIP. The state board of education recently determined that the results of MSIP 6 are not reliable enough to use without a rolling three-year average. If it is a broken accountability system—which it seems to be—let’s fix it.

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Markets offer three mechanisms that facilitate school choice. First, they allow for a level of diversity in school offerings that traditional, centrally managed school systems are not able to. Second, they encourage competition between providers, improving the quality of school options for students and families. Third, markets are incredible information gathering institutions, and a more market-driven system can help bring attention to better educational practices and ways to meet family needs that can then be copied by other schools.

When I think about policies that increase the diversity of options, encourage competition, and spur innovation, open enrollment and education savings account (ESA) programs come to mind.

Open enrollment allows students to attend any public school district. In Missouri, a voluntary open enrollment policy has been discussed but never implemented. Open enrollment legislation has passed through the House for four consecutive years but has not had enough momentum to push through the Senate. Open enrollment empowers parents to choose the district and school that best suits their children and strengthens school districts by forcing them to compete for students. Through the addition of open enrollment, competition and increased feedback could spur needed innovation and growth, while at the same time matching families with districts that best suit their needs.

While Senate Bill (SB) 727 expanded Missouri’s ESA program (MOScholars), there are issues with financing. MOScholars is still not publicly funded, as robust ESA programs in other states are. Due to this, many families are left out of the program. A stronger ESA program would give more parents the ability to vote with their feet to support schools with beneficial education practices.

Education cannot be forgotten—our state is experiencing chronic absenteeism and lower academic scores. On the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP), Missouri students have failed to bounce back from the pandemic drop. In English/language arts (ELA), no grade-level cohort has matched or surpassed its pre-pandemic levels. Almost all ELA scores today are actually lower than they were in the first post-COVID year (2020–2021), with 5th graders being the only exception. Sixth graders have fared the worst of all grade levels—in 2018-2019, 46 percent scored proficient or advanced in ELA. In 2021–2022, that number dropped to 43 percent, and by 2023–2024, it sunk to 38 percent.

Hopefully, SB 727 will not be the end of the road for needed change. Markets do matter in education, and school choice policies can greatly benefit our state.

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The playbook highlights how excessive occupational licensing, convoluted permitting processes, and outdated zoning laws create significant hurdles for small business owners. For instance, starting a barbershop often involves not only obtaining city permits but also navigating state-mandated requirements such as barbering school and licensing fees, adding unnecessary time and cost. Punitive late fees, illogical license renewal cycles, and restrictive home-based business rules further complicate the landscape for aspiring entrepreneurs.

One major recommendation is the establishment of one-stop shops for business registration, such as KC BizCare, which can streamline the process by allowing entrepreneurs to complete all necessary steps in one place. This approach reduces confusion and inefficiencies, helping business owners navigate regulatory requirements more easily. Additionally, the playbook suggests cities adopt more flexible licensing terms and graduated fee schedules to lower initial costs for new businesses, particularly those started by lower-income residents.

A separate policy report written exclusively for Kansas City, Missouri, included conversations with a number of local entrepreneurs to determine the most significant barriers facing business start-ups. The report made several recommendations—including improving the KC BizCare program—and the IJ Cities Work team pledged to remain involved in Kansas City’s efforts, including collecting feedback on the success of reforms and even drafting ordinances.

The playbook underscores the importance of reducing regulatory barriers to foster a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem. By adopting its recommendations, cities in Missouri and elsewhere can create more dynamic environments for small businesses to flourish, ultimately contributing to stronger local and state economies.

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The state board made the right decision, but not necessarily for the right reasons. Don’t get me wrong— public feedback and buy-in, especially on issues such as this, is critical. But the board made the right decision because DESE did not have statutory authority to push these standards.

Back in September, I noted that the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) was pushing the social–emotional learning standards without statutory authority. At the time, DESE claimed Section 161.1050 of the revised statutes of Missouri provided the authority. In the lead up to this week’s state board meeting, DESE has changed its tune. Instead of citing the statute for the “Trauma-informed schools initiative,” it  cited Section 161.092. This section of the statutes is labeled, “Powers and duties of state board.” Despite the change, DESE still lacks statutory authority to impose the SEL standards.

Section 161.092 essentially tells the state board what it must do. It must “adopt rules governing its own proceedings,” for example. The state board must also “make an annual report.” Nowhere in the section does it mention “standards,” “social–emotional,” or anything vaguely resembling the work that DESE has been pushing.

Once again, I have posted the full statute below for you to examine. It seems DESE is grasping at straws for authority, but coming up empty.

 161.092.  Powers and duties of state board. — The state board of education shall:

(1)  Adopt rules governing its own proceedings and formulate policies for the guidance of the commissioner of education and the department of elementary and secondary education;

(2)  Carry out the educational policies of the state relating to public schools that are provided by law and supervise instruction in the public schools;

(3)  Direct the investment of all moneys received by the state to be applied to the capital of any permanent fund established for the support of public education within the jurisdiction of the department of elementary and secondary education and see that the funds are applied to the branches of educational interest of the state that by grant, gift, devise or law they were originally intended, and if necessary institute suit for and collect the funds and return them to their legitimate channels;

(4)  Cause to be assembled information which will reflect continuously the condition and management of the public schools of the state;

(5)  Require of county clerks or treasurers, boards of education or other school officers, recorders and treasurers of cities, towns and villages, copies of all records required to be made by them and all other information in relation to the funds and condition of schools and the management thereof that is deemed necessary;

(6)  Provide blanks suitable for use by officials in reporting the information required by the board;

(7)  When conditions demand, cause the laws relating to schools to be published in a separate volume, with pertinent notes and comments, for the guidance of those charged with the execution of the laws;

(8)  Grant, without fee except as provided in section 168.021, certificates of qualification and licenses to teach in any of the public schools of the state, establish requirements therefor, formulate regulations governing the issuance thereof, and cause the certificates to be revoked for the reasons and in the manner provided in section 168.071;

(9)  Classify the public schools of the state, subject to limitations provided by law and subdivision (14) of this section, establish requirements for the schools of each class, and formulate rules governing the inspection and accreditation of schools preparatory to classification, with such requirements taking effect not less than two years from the date of adoption of the proposed rule by the state board of education, provided that this condition shall not apply to any requirement for which a time line for adoption is mandated in either federal or state law.  Such rules shall include a process to allow any district that is accredited without provision that does not meet the state board’s promulgated criteria for a classification designation of accredited with distinction to propose alternative criteria to the state board to be classified as accredited with distinction;

(10)  Make an annual report on or before the first Wednesday after the first day of January to the general assembly or, when it is not in session, to the governor for publication and transmission to the general assembly.  The report shall be for the last preceding school year, and shall include:

(a)  A statement of the number of public schools in the state, the number of pupils attending the schools, their sex, and the branches taught;

(b)  A statement of the number of teachers employed, their sex, their professional training, and their average salary;

(c)  A statement of the receipts and disbursements of public school funds of every description, their sources, and the purposes for which they were disbursed;

(d)  Suggestions for the improvement of public schools; and

(e)  Any other information relative to the educational interests of the state that the law requires or the board deems important;

(11)  Make an annual report to the general assembly and the governor concerning coordination with other agencies and departments of government that support family literacy programs and other services which influence educational attainment of children of all ages;

(12)  Require from the chief officer of each division of the department of elementary and secondary education, on or before the thirty-first day of August of each year, reports containing information the board deems important and desires for publication;

(13)  Cause fifty copies of its annual report to be reserved for the use of each division of the state department of elementary and secondary education, and ten copies for preservation in the state library;

(14)  Promulgate rules under which the board shall classify the public schools of the state; provided that the appropriate scoring guides, instruments, and procedures used in determining the accreditation status of a district shall be subject to a public meeting upon notice in a newspaper of general circulation in each of the three most populous cities in the state and also a newspaper that is a certified minority business enterprise or woman-owned business enterprise in each of the two most populous cities in the state, and notice to each district board of education, each superintendent of a school district, and to the speaker of the house of representatives, the president pro tem of the senate, and the members of the joint committee on education, at least fourteen days in advance of the meeting, which shall be conducted by the department of elementary and secondary education not less than ninety days prior to their application in accreditation, with all comments received to be reported to the state board of education;

(15)  Have other powers and duties prescribed by law.

The post In Search of Statutory Authority for Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) Standards appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Trust is foundational to any healthy school learning community. This is because schooling is an inherently personal affair. It is the shaping of minds, the forming of character, and a form of job preparation. And at its heart, it is relational. This is why the results of the recent public comment session for Missouri’s proposed social-emotional learning (SEL) standards are so troubling. They make it clear that many Missourians have lost trust in the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE).

The proposed SEL standards, which are divided into “Me,” “We,” and “Others” categories, attempt to get to the heart of student character and conduct. They include things like setting and achieving attainable goals, effective teamwork, and empathy for others. Generally, these are values that almost every parent wants for their children. Yet when DESE polled Missourians about the standards, the responses were deeply troubling.

When looking at the responses from parents and community members, little more than half (50.4%) were supportive of the “Me” standards. The other two standards areas failed to receive support from even half of those responding. In the “Others” category, which included “respect, kindness, and civility while treating others with dignity and respect,” just 46.2% of parents and community members expressed support for the standards.

Why would roughly half of Missourians not support standards that attempt to promote positive character traits? The only plausible answer is that many parents and community members simply don’t trust DESE.

Some may point to sensational social media posts or outlandish rhetoric as the culprit for the lack of trust. While it is true that issues may get blown out of proportion on these platforms, DESE and the State Board of Education bear much of the blame in this case. For too long, they have operated without any meaningful accountability. They have made promises and failed to deliver, have pushed policy proposals without the support of the people, and they have acted, at times, without statutory authority. Three examples, including the proposed SEL standards, make this clear.

Do you remember the “Top 10 by 2020” initiative? No? Well, that’s because DESE memory-holed that initiative. It was a lofty goal to move Missouri to the top of the national rankings. It was a colossal failure. Not only did we not move to the top, we moved down in most rankings. As we did, DESE acted as if the initiative had never existed.

Consider also the state’s adoption of Common Core State Standards. Without public support, DESE and the State Board jettisoned our standards and with them the state’s standardized exams. That shift launched Missouri schools into a tumultuous decade that has seen bitter fights over state academic standards and continuous changes to state testing regimes. In 2011, Missouri’s proficiency standards were rated the eighth most rigorous in the country by Education Next. By 2017, the same publication rated Missouri 48th in the country. In one of the few areas in which we actually were in the top 10, the rigor of our academic standards, DESE and the State Board of Education led us to the bottom of the barrel.

Recently DESE promoted social-emotional learning standards. As if their track record wasn’t bad enough, they did so without proper authority. When DESE began this process, they listed Section 161.1050 of the revised statutes of Missouri as justification for implementing the SEL standards. Then, after I noted this statute had nothing to do with SEL standards, DESE began listing new statutory authority on documents, specifically Section 161.092. This statute is about the “power and duties of the state board.” Once again, the statute has nothing to do with standards or social-emotional learning. In other words, they were grasping at straws to justify a proposal that they have no statutory authority to make or implement.

If many Missourians do not trust DESE to teach their children about good character or social-emotional learning, maybe it’s because DESE has failed to lead responsibly for far too long.

The State Board of Education rejected the SEL standards at their last board meeting, citing the negative feedback. This was the right move, and it could be seen as a first step toward regaining the trust of Missouri parents and community members. At that same board meeting, Commissioner of Education Margie Van Deven stated that she will be stepping down at the end of the school year. This provides the State Board with a terrific opportunity to take the next step: finding a commissioner of education who is able to restore the public’s confidence in the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

The post It Is Time to Restore Trust in Missouri’s Public Education System appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

You can take a look at DESE’s proposed standards yourself. For the most part, they seem to be fairly straightforward standards that many could get behind. For example, the standards say students should learn “Processing and managing one’s own thoughts and behaviors to regulate emotions in a healthy manner.” Here’s another: students are to show “Respect, kindness, and civility while treating others with dignity.”

DESE breaks the standards into three categories: “Me,” “We,” and “Others.” “Me” is about developing a healthy sense of self. “We” is about building healthy relationships. “Others” is about treating others well. If you click on the link to provide feedback, you will be asked, “What comments do you have on the ‘Me’ section of the proposed standards?” You’ll have the same opportunity to reply on the “We” and “Others” standards.

DESE is asking for reactions and suggestions to its proposed standards. But this is not the question it should be asking.

The key question anyone should ask is this: What gives DESE the authority to set SEL standards?

The May 2023 Missouri State Board of Education Agenda lists Section 161.1050 of the revised statutes of Missouri as justification for implementing SEL standards. Curiously, I cannot find a single thing in this section that would even remotely give this authority to DESE. You can read the statutes for yourself. I’ve copied them below.

The statute DESE claims gives it authority pertains to the “Trauma-informed schools initiative.” Nowhere in the statute does it say anything about SEL, nor does it mention the adoption of standards of any kind.

The statute says DESE should “provide information regarding the trauma-informed approach to all schools.” It is a big leap from providing information about trauma-informed education to setting SEL standards.

Without the proper statutory authority, it doesn’t really matter what comments anyone has on the “Me,” “We,” and “Others” standards. It does not matter because based on the authority cited DESE should not be writing the standards in the first place.

Missouri Revised Statutes

 161.1050.  Initiative established, department duties — definitions. — 1.  There is hereby established within the department of elementary and secondary education the “Trauma-Informed Schools Initiative”.

2.  The department of elementary and secondary education shall consult the department of mental health and the department of social services for assistance in fulfilling the requirements of this section.

3.  The department of elementary and secondary education shall:

(1)  Provide information regarding the trauma-informed approach to all school districts;

(2)  Offer training on the trauma-informed approach to all school districts, which shall include information on how schools can become trauma-informed schools; and

(3)  Develop a website about the trauma-informed schools initiative that includes information for schools and parents regarding the trauma-informed approach and a guide for schools on how to become trauma-informed schools.

4.  Each school district shall provide the address of the website described under subdivision (3) of subsection 3 of this section to all parents of the students in its district before October first of each school year.

5.  For purposes of this section, the following terms mean:

(1)  “Trauma-informed approach”, an approach that involves understanding and responding to the symptoms of chronic interpersonal trauma and traumatic stress across the lifespan;

(2)  “Trauma-informed school”, a school that:

(a)  Realizes the widespread impact of trauma and understands potential paths for recovery;

(b)  Recognizes the signs and symptoms of trauma in students, teachers, and staff;

(c)  Responds by fully integrating knowledge about trauma into its policies, procedures, and practices; and

(d)  Seeks to actively resist retraumatization.

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