However, there is little evidence that the 4dsw is the answer to financial woes.

A year ago, my colleague James Shuls and I published a systematic literature review of the most rigorous studies that evaluated the effect of the 4dsw on student achievement, district finances, teacher retention and recruitment, and parental satisfaction. We found that the 4dsw has a small, negative effect on student achievement. We also found that a 4dsw may decrease expenditures, but it also decreases revenue. The full paper can be found here.

At first glance, it may not make sense how a district would not see significant cost savings from a 4dsw—but the cost and revenue structure of districts is key.

A large majority of costs are tied up in stable salaries and fixed expenses, which remain largely unchanged regardless of the calendar structure. Therefore, savings that can be realized are related to variable costs, like food service, transportation, and electricity for school buildings.

While districts can reduce costs by scaling back these variable services, many of these services also have associated revenue streams. For example, with a 4dsw, there are fewer lunches served, but at the same time, there are also fewer lunches paid for—either by students or the federal government. The reduction in costs is often mirrored by a comparable reduction in revenue.

As districts evaluate their budgets during this time, they should focus on addressing unnecessary structural costs. A switch to a 4dsw should not be made to save money unless a district has gone through the hard work of documenting that it will actually see significant savings.

The post The Four-Day School Week and Finances appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

There is one key piece of information left out of the report—how much the district actually spends. The report tells residents the district spends $1,718 less per pupil than the state average on operating expenses, but it does not tell us that amount.

While it is understandable for organizations to want to put their best foot forward, this lack of transparency is a real problem. Taxpayers should know how much their schools are spending. Unfortunately, districts and the state make this information hard to find.

That is why the Show-Me Institute created MOSchoolRankings. In addition to having detailed academic data, the site provides detailed financial records for every school district in the state. In 2023, Wentzville spent $15,759 per pupil in total expenditures. That means roughly $390,000 is being spent on a classroom of 25 students. Want to know exactly where those dollars are being spent? The website breaks these expenditures down by program, providing the most granular level of analysis in the state.

The annual reports sent by districts are not meant to be a detailed accounting of performance and spending. They are promotional materials designed to paint the district in a positive light. There is nothing wrong with that—organizations should share their successes. Taxpayers who want more information, however, should have access to it.

The post How Much Does My School District Spend? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Maybe I should have seen this coming, as SLPS was the second-to-last district to have its Annual Secretary of the Board Report available on the Department of Secondary and Elementary Education (DESE) website—and it was months behind schedule.

Transparency is important in public institutions. Parents deserve to know what their money is being spent on in public education. The Show-Me Institute created MOSchoolRankings for this very purpose, providing needed transparency regarding the performance and spending in our public school system. DESE ought to provide this information, but its spending and performance data website is woefully inadequate.

Missouri’s education system has struggled with transparency. In fact, in 2023, the Heritage Foundation ranked Missouri 46th in educational transparency—a very poor ranking, but a slight improvement on Missouri’s 51st rank in 2022.

Increased transparency can come in many forms, one of which is a Missouri Parents’ Bill of Rights. Additionally, the sunshine law needs to be strengthened, as school districts have demanded hundreds of thousands of dollars from Institute researchers to access curricular documents. The sunshine law needs to have “teeth,” perhaps in the form of significant financial consequences for violations. That way, this law will not just be seen as a mere set of recommendations that can be violated without consequences.

SLPS is facing an uphill battle this year. We will see what we can learn from the state audit. In the future, increased transparency may be able to head off some of these problems before they become a crisis.

The post St. Louis Public Schools Exemplifies the Need for Educational Transparency appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

These questions and others are addressed in my latest report, which also presents a program-by-program account of how education dollars are spent in the state. To read the full report, click here.

To supplement the full report, below are six infographics designed to illustrate how billions of dollars flow into public education each year in Missouri, and how they flow out. Where does it come from, and where does it go?

The post Six Ways to Better Understand the DESE Budget appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

1. What’s out: Annual Performance Report (APR) scores
   What’s in: APR colored bar graphs with words
   It used to be that each school and district received a number between 0 and 100 that indicated what percentage of their possible APR points they received.  Now the APR reports have a couple dozen colored bar graphs with words like “Floor” and “On Track.”  “Floor” means below average and “On Track” means average. Why not just use the words that make sense? Supposedly, the change was intended to make things easier to understand. I beg to differ.
2. What’s out: Top Ten by 2020
   What’s in: Bottom half by 2020
   Once upon a time (2009), the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) set a goal for themselves. By 2020 Missouri would be a top ten state on the Nation’s Report Card, a test given by the U.S. Department of Education to students in all states every two years. While the goal was certainly admirable, the execution got tripped up somewhere along the way. The 2019 scores were released in October and Missouri 4th-graders were 34th in both reading and math. Our 8th-graders fared somewhat better—23rd in reading and 26th in math—but nowhere near the top ten.
3. What’s out: Kansas City charter school students receiving state funding based on the legislatively approved formula
   What’s in: Kansas City charter school students, no matter how many there are, sharing a finite and too-small pot of money
   Although the state has a formula that determines how much money each charter school student should receive (spoiler alert – it’s less than traditional public school students), the money is deducted from the public school district’s state funding. Unfortunately, the Kansas City Public School district doesn’t receive enough state funding to cover the amount calculated for the charter school students. So going forward, as the charter school population grows, the amount for each student will get smaller.
4. What’s out: Only knowing how much each school district is spending
   What’s in: Also knowing how they distribute those funds to their schools
   For the first time (and for the first time that it was legally required) DESE released school-level spending data. This means that we can now compare, for example, elementary schools in the same district in terms of both spending and performance. We can also compare how much is spent on the central office in each district.  These data are new, but analysts and policy wonks are already digging in, and I expect to see some interesting findings.
5. What‘s out: Students forced to go only to the school assigned to them based on their address
   What’s in: Giving every parent, regardless of background, a variety of high-quality options for each of their children.
   Ha, ha, ha – just kidding. The Show Me state remains firmly planted in the Twentieth Century on this one.  Some states, like Florida, are embracing multiple forms of school choice for families. They acknowledge the desire that every parent has to find a good fit for each child. And while Florida didn’t set a “top ten by 2020” goal, they got there anyway. Their 4th-graders have gone from the bottom 10 to 6th in reading and 4th in math. The one choice that public school districts must, by law, now offer parents—for their student to take courses online at no cost to them – is being strongly resisted by the powers that be. We’re digging in our heels on a status quo that we know isn’t working.

So, here we are, just like so many other Decembers, saying “maybe things will get better next year.” I hope so. Happy Holidays!

The post It’s Listicle Time! appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

DESE released tables for each district that show, on the left side, the spending per student in each school building and, on the right side, the district-wide spending per student on the district’s central office. Both sides should raise a number of questions.

For an example on the left (school-building) side, consider Columbia. Two schools—Midway Heights Elementary and John Ridgeway Elementary—look very similar:

• Midway Heights has 212 students (84 percent White, 24 percent qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch) and John Ridgeway has 234 students (74 percent White, 13 percent qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch).
•  Each spent about $2 million in 2018–19 at the building level (before central office costs)
• But at Midway Heights, 72 percent of the students scored at grade level in English/Language Arts (ELA) in 2018-19, compared to 57 percent at John Ridgeway. In math, the numbers were 82 percent for Midway Heights and 59 percent at John Ridgeway.

So what’s going on? I don’t know, but we now have the data to ask the question. One school seems to be getting a higher return on investment, and it’s worthwhile to figure out why.

Now let’s look at the right (district-office) side for two school districts of similar size—Brentwood (755 students) and Marionville R-IX (757 students).

• Marionville has four schools and Brentwood has three.
• Brentwood spends $5,100 per student—nearly 30 percent of their total expenditures—for their central office. Marionville, on the other hand, spent just $1,900 per student (about 20 percent of their total) on their central office. For the record, Marionville has more than twice the number of low-income students than Brentwood.
• Yet, just like their size and unlike their spending, their test results are fairly similar. At both middle schools, 58 percent of students scored on grade level in ELA in 2018-19. Brentwood High School did better than Marionville’s, but Marionville still scored well above the state average.

Why do some schools have much higher test scores for the same investment and similar students? Why do some districts have nearly triple the central office costs of others of similar size? There are so many questions raised by these data. I look forward to digging in more, and I hope that local stakeholders across the state will do so as well.

The post The data are here! The data are here! appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Here are some of the highlights:

The audit noted that the School Board and superintendent spent more than $387,000 in the past two school years on membership fees, travel, gifts, airfare and meeting expenses. The district spends tens of thousands of dollars on items such as sympathy flowers, sympathy cards, “excessive tipping,” bellhops, valet parking, extra airline fees, gifts, T-shirts and board meals.

That’s enough money to give every teacher in the district about a $300 raise. That may not seem like much, but things like this add up. Here is another example from the Post-Dispatch’s report:

The district pays a $600 monthly car allowance to the associate superintendent in addition to mileage reimbursement, even though the associate superintendent only drove $250 worth of mileage for the entire last school year.

According to data from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), the average administrator in Hazelwood earned $107,526 in 2017. This includes principals and assistant principals, so the salary paid to an associate superintendent is undoubtedly higher than this. I leave it to you to decide whether a $600 monthly car allowance for an associate superintendent is a prudent investment for the district to make.

The audit also found that the school district improperly over-counted student attendance—leading to the district receiving $95,000 that it wasn’t supposed to receive—and failed to report a principal who allegedly stole thousands of dollars from the district. While those two examples are evidence of wrongdoing, what about the spending practices described above? They don’t violate any rules, but they explain a lot about where all that additional education funding is going. In a time of increased focus on teacher pay, it seems incredible that we can say to school administrators, “That’s what you spent your money on?”

[As part of the Show-Me Institute’s Checkbook Project, you can see a full breakdown of the Hazelwood School District’s spending.] 

The post So That’s What You Spent Your Money On appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As we watch teacher strikes throughout the country, that’s the same question we should be asking public school administrators.

For decades, our nation has seen substantial increases in education funding. In Missouri, per-student spending in inflation-adjusted dollars increased 33 percent from 1992 to 2014. Yet during that time, average teacher salaries decreased by 4 percent. How is that possible?

What did you spend your money on?

When we look at the numbers, the answer is obvious—people and pensions.

As economist Benjamin Scafidi has shown, the growth in the number of teachers and staff has far surpassed the growth in students. From 1992 to 2015, Missouri saw a 9% increase in students. Meanwhile, schools bulked up by increasing the teaching workforce by 28% and all other staff, including school principals and central office workers, by 24%. When given the money, schools chose to spend it on decreasing the pupil teacher ratio from 16.0 to 13.6. They chose to spend it on aides, principals, secretaries, you name it. They chose not to spend it on pay raises.

But that’s not the only thing keeping teacher salaries down. School administrators also chose (or were forced to choose) to shift compensation into retirement and benefits. This was a shift of about 6 percent of current operating expenditures that went from salary to benefits (see the figure below for a breakdown of Missouri expenditure numbers from 1998 to 2014). Make no mistake: This wasn’t done in order to make teacher benefits better. It was done to help pay for the promises they’d already made.

We all want great teachers, and many of us believe we should increase teacher pay. In fact, 61percent of respondents in the 2017 Education Next poll said we should increase or greatly increase teacher pay. Yet when we increase funding for public schools, the money just doesn’t make it into teachers’ paychecks. Something has to give.

Given the budgetary pressures faced in most states, marching to the statehouse is not an effective strategy. Even if they succeed in getting more funding for public education, there is a good chance that it will not result in substantial pay raises for teachers. At least that’s what history has shown us.

Instead, teachers should be marching to their central office; because to get higher teacher salaries, the system has to change. Schools need staffing policies that provide teachers with raises. And pensions must be reformed so teachers can have more pay today, not in 30 years when they retire. In other words, teachers need to start asking the question: “What did you spend our money on?”

The post School Administrators, What Did You Spend Your Money On? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Teachers are paid on what is known as a salary schedule, which maps out exactly how much a teacher will make for their entire career based on how many years of experience they have, with additional adjustments made for teachers with advanced degrees. When finances are tight, however, district officials will often do one of two things: sometimes they decline to adjust the schedule for inflation, and in leaner years they may “freeze” teachers at their current salaries. According to the Springfield News-Leader, salaries for Marshfield teachers were frozen for four years, and teachers received just a one percent raise in two other years.

Some teachers feel a sense of entitlement regarding pay raises. As a former public school teacher, I know this from experience. You would feel entitled to a raise too if your employer presented you with a predetermined salary structure. You consider yourself bound by the salary schedule, but you consider the district bound by it as well. What good is an agreement that only one side must abide by?

Over the years, I have analyzed hundreds of salary schedules. While conducting my research, I found one school district that did not have a salary schedule. When I spoke with an administrator there, I asked him why not. He said the schedule was like a promise to teachers. They expected to receive those raises. When they did not, they felt that something had been taken away from them. It felt like a slap in the face.

When workers in any field believe they are not valued, morale drops, productivity may decrease, and employees might look for jobs elsewhere. We certainly don’t want low morale among our teachers.

In Marshfield, with the foundation formula fully funded for the first time since its inception, the district will largely make up the “missed” pay increases. This will help ameliorate any negative sentiments from the years when their salaries were frozen. It will, however, do little to change expectations among teachers.

Currently, salary schedules dominate school district budgets. They tell the financial office how much money is available to hire new teachers or to purchase new resources. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that approximately 80 percent of a district’s operating expenses go toward salaries and benefits. With salary schedules, school boards and administrators cannot control these expenses without “taking away” raises from teachers. That is a problem.

The school district without a salary schedule has a different model, one in line with sound financial management. It gives raises based on how much money is left in the budget, which helps school officials effectively manage their budget.

The post Want to Value Teachers? Eliminate Salary Schedules appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

According to data from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), the Saint Louis Public School District spent $14,779 per pupil in 2015 in operating expenses and $18,476 per pupil when you include the cost of debt and capital projects. The table below (which uses DESE numbers) gathers the spending figures for all of the districts in the region. It shows that in real dollars the gap between the highest and lowest spending districts in the Saint Louis area was less than $9,000.

So how did Saint Louis Public Radio get such different numbers? It’s difficult to say. They state that their

analysis uses a cost of living index to calculate to calculate a national per student spending of almost $12,000 in 2013. The analysis applies that same formula to measure what individual districts are spending in relative dollars.

While adjustments like these could be helpful, especially if they have to account for differences in cost of living, it is important to realize just that—these figures are adjusted.

Unfortunately, this isn’t clear to the average reader. For example, St. Louis Public Radio states:

There are some obvious high points, the Clayton School District is [sic] spent $19,681 per student, according the analysis. That’s compared to Clayton’s neighbor, St. Louis Public Schools, which spent $9,826 per student.

The publication could have easily tacked on, “in cost-adjusted dollars” to the end of the last sentence. More importantly, they also could have explained how they adjusted the spending numbers, figures that vary so wildly from those reported by DESE deserves some serious scrutiny. As it is, readers and listeners have no way of evaluating for themselves the methods that were used to adjust the spending numbers.

We can and should have productive dialogue about school spending and inequities in education. But we can’t have fruitful conversations without a mutual understanding of the statistics that are being used.

The post How Much Do Saint Louis Area Schools Really Spend? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The two least favorite, though, are ubiquitous: “professional development.”

A new study out by TNTP confirms what teachers will tell you: on balance, professional development (PD) does not help teachers improve their practice.

The researchers surveyed over 10,000 teachers, 500 school leaders, and 100 staff members and then compared a variety of PD experiences with several different measures of teacher performance.  The conclusion:

“No type, amount or combination of development activities appears more likely than any other to help teachers improve substantially, including the “job-embedded,” “differentiated” variety that we and many others believed to be the most promising.”

Not good.

But the real-eyebrow raiser is not just the ineffectiveness, but the cost.  TNTP found that on average the districts they studied spend $18,000 per teacher per year on PD. Yes, you read that right: per teacher, per year. In one of the districts they found that PD was a bigger budget line item than transportation, food, and security combined. Combined!

But it’s not just money, it’s also time. According to Kansas City’s teacher contract, teachers are required to attend 3 days of PD before school starts and one day during the year, and then 75 minutes of every Wednesday are earmarked for PD.  That adds up to around 10 days of their 185-day contract. This means that over five percent of teachers’ salaries (and who knows how much of their energy and good will) is dedicated to time that yields little return on investment.

Teachers want to develop professionally.  They want to get better at their jobs.  But we have done a terrible job in helping them do so.

(One brief addendum. Don’t forget this in the coming months when you are bombarded with rhetoric telling you that Missouri schools are “underfunded.”  I’m perfectly willing to admit that dollars are not going to the areas where they can be best used, but I’m not convinced that new, additional dollars will make that any better.)

The post Professional Development: Neither Professional nor Development. Discuss! appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Obviously, there are two ways to control Baumol’s disease. One is to slow the rate at which spending increases and the other is to increase output.

We are in a time of declining state budgets and Missouri already spends approximately 34 percent of general revenue on K-12 education. This may force us to curb or slow education spending, but the public has shown little interest in holding education spending constant or even decreasing spending.

The other option, increasing output, is easier to say than to actually do. And, as we have noted on Show-Me Daily, Missouri has seen very little in terms of gains in academic achievement.

Students and taxpayers cannot support this type of system indefinitely, but fixing Baumol’s disease is not as simple as saying “we will do better.”

If we want to cure this disease, by increasing achievement and putting education on firmer financial footing, we need to rethink schooling.

Harness the power of technology

We at the Show-Me Institute have written at length about the potential benefits of using technology more effectively.

Rethink how we staff and operate schools

The traditional education system is designed to treat teachers like widgets, because teachers are paid in lock-step fashion, they are almost entirely evaluated with high marks, and we retain low-performing teachers just as readily as high-performing ones.

Missouri schools need to do a better job of identifying and rewarding good teachers and removing the worst. Furthermore, educators must figure out how to expand the reach of great teachers so they can have an impact on more students, not just the 25 students in their class.

The post Curing Baumol’s Disease In Public Education appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The people who have researched the idea said it wouldn’t bring in a ton of money, but many districts are in a position where every little bit helps.

Parents and school officials in the Lee’s Summit School District met and discussed the idea Thursday evening.

Parent Keith Asel said it could make about $500,000 for Lee’s Summit schools.

“With all the budget cuts we’ve had, if we can just incrementally move the needle through things like school bus advertising, we can get to a number that really makes a difference,” he said. “We’ve got to think outside the box. The traditional means, I mean, we’ve already put such a burden on taxpayers.”

As it turns out, 17 states already allow districts to implement such an advertising program. Parents at the meeting reportedly did not have a problem with the idea, either, so long as the advertisements are age-appropriate. Supporters said ads for “alcohol, tobacco and even sugary foods” would be “restricted,” which I assume means effectively or explicitly “banned.”

My take? It is a great idea. Until I saw this story I had not realized that such a bill was floating around the Capitol, but apparently the bill has support from both sides of the aisle. Like the parent in the report says, we have to “think outside the box” if we want to improve education and reduce tax burdens. This, to me, is a great proposal that seems like it would promote both objectives.

The post Lee’s Summit Debates Selling Advertisements On School Buses appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

That’s a small sum compared to the $1.25 million the Jennings School District spent on hand-held computers for students. Most of those computers ended up in storage. Jennings is now selling some of the devices for a fraction of what it paid, and it plans to distribute others to graduating students over the course of a few years.

It would be wiser for Jennings to emulate the Florida district and give away whatever computers it can’t sell, as soon as possible. If the district gives them all out at once, recipients may be able to find some use for them. If it waits to hand them out to graduates in a couple of years, they’ll be completely obsolete. By then, graduates won’t want to do anything with the computers — except maybe to display them with their caps and gowns as mementos.

There’s no need to attach a survey; just get rid of the devices. But if Jennings does give them to survey participants, I can imagine what a common response will be: “Stop wasting money on gadgets that students don’t use!”

The post One Way to Get Rid of the Jennings School District’s Handheld Computers appeared first on Show-Me Institute.