When asked why they want school choice, families often cite safety as their number one reason, which makes sense. How is a child supposed to learn if they’re afraid to be at school? Under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), students trapped in persistently dangerous schools are supposed to have a way out. It’s called the Unsafe School Choice Option (USCO). Unfortunately, Missouri has all but ignored this protection—and that needs to change.

ESSA requires every state to identify persistently dangerous schools and offer students the right to transfer to a safer public school. This is not a suggestion; it is federal law. Yet in Missouri, no school has ever been labeled as “persistently dangerous,” and no families have ever been notified of this option. Either Missouri schools are perfectly safe—which is unlikely—or the state’s criteria are so vague and restrictive that no school could ever qualify.

But let’s look at that more closely. Consider Poplar Bluff High School. According to data from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), there were 12 violent incidents at the school in 2022, 19 in 2023, and 10 in 2024. In that same three-year period, there were 266 out-of-school suspensions. A “violent incident” in a Missouri school is one in which “a student uses physical force with the intent to cause serious bodily harm to another person.” It seems hard to believe that a school with these levels of violence would feel safe to students.

And then there’s University City Senior High School. From 2022 to 2024, according to DESE, there were 51 violent incidents and 21 weapons violations at the school. That is a lot of weapons being brought to school, and it certainly doesn’t sound like a safe environment to me. Last year in St. Louis Public Schools, teachers at Vashon High School sent a petition to the district claiming that they were teaching in a dangerous situation. In fact, one teacher had to use pepper spray on a crowd of students to get them under control.

There is no substitute for giving families an immediate exit from a dangerous situation. Additional funding, new programs, or behavior contracts might help improve school safety in the long run—but they do nothing for the student being bullied today, or for the child afraid to walk the halls because of fights, weapons, or harassment. For these families and students facing these problems, the only meaningful solution is the freedom to exercise their current legal right to transfer to a safer school.

In Missouri, for a school to be considered persistently dangerous it must have experienced at least one violent incident or one weapons violation in two out of the past three years. At least 30 schools in the state meet that criterion. However, the school must also have expelled at least five students (ten if the school enrolls more than 250 students) in each of the past three years. No school has met that criterion since the law was enacted. What if the Missouri definition were changed from violence/weapons and expulsions to violence/weapons or expulsions? Thousands of Missouri students could move to a safe learning environment—which should be the minimum standard.

Parents deserve honesty. It’s absurd to suggest that there are no unsafe schools in the state. If a school is unsafe, the state must acknowledge it and provide families with options—not pretend the problem doesn’t exist. If the state refuses to define what “persistently dangerous” means—or sets the bar so high that no school ever qualifies—then the federal requirement becomes meaningless in practice.

It’s time for Missouri to adopt clear, reasonable criteria that reflect real risks to students and activate the USCO in schools that meet those criteria. Every Missouri child deserves to attend a safe school, no matter where they live. Families in struggling districts should not be forced to wait years for conditions to improve—or worse, accept that their child’s school is unsafe with no way out.

The Unsafe School Choice Option was designed to give families an emergency exit from these situations. Missouri leaders must stop ignoring this law and start empowering parents to protect their children.

The post Missouri Families Need the “Unsafe School Choice Option” appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Governor Kehoe has appointed four new members to the Missouri State Board of Education, including two who will, if confirmed, replace the president and vice-president. Given that the current president, Charlie Shields, has held the position for a decade and his term expired five years ago, I would say it’s about time. Hopefully these new members will bring new energy and fortitude as they tackle a challenging to-do list.

First, there is the glaring issue of (a lack of) accountability. Currently, Missouri school districts are held accountable through the Missouri School Improvement Plan (MSIP) 6. According to the standards set by this plan, like those in versions 1 through 5 before it, all but six of Missouri’s 520 school districts receive the state’s seal of approval, also known as full accreditation. It defies logic that a district like St. Louis Public Schools, with its numerous academic and financial problems, could be fully accredited. Part of the reason is that when the board switched from using MSIP 5 to MSIP 6 in 2024, it determined that the MSIP 6 results for a single school year were not reliable enough to justify changing any district’s accreditation status. Rather, the board decided to use a three-year rolling average to make that determination, meaning that accreditation decisions will need to wait until 2027. The new Board needs to recognize this for the nonsense that it is, and it needs to create a meaningful accountability system.

Second, the new Board should get fully behind the governor’s effort to revise the Foundation Formula, which distributes most state education dollars to districts. The existing formula is over 20 years old, and at least one-third of our districts don’t even use it. Instead, those districts are “held harmless” and given the amount they received in 2005, regardless of any changes in enrollment or property values. The board, as stewards of billions of dollars in public funding, should insist on a new formula that is highly targeted to student need, is transparent, and allows funding to follow a student to the school of their choice. Ironically, the same MSIP 6 that can’t be trusted to measure student achievement has been deemed perfectly reliable when the board requests that the legislature raise the formula’s base funding amount per student. Which is it?

Third, the Board’s job is to hold schools and districts accountable for their performance, not to hide or apologize for failure. Currently, students who have mastered grade-level content and are ready for the next grade are classified as “Proficient.” In other words, they’re where they should be. But a bill currently under consideration in the Missouri Legislature would add a classification called “Grade Level.” If you didn’t know better, you might think that meant something very similar to “proficient,” but it would actually describe students who may be on grade level. What purpose could this new classification have, other than to provide false reassurance to parents whose children are falling behind? The Board should resist any attempts to water down results.

Finally, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) has a website that is notoriously difficult to use. One of DESE’s main jobs is to disseminate information and data on our 2,500 schools and the 850,000 students who attend them. If Missouri were to allow students to choose a public school other than their assigned one, DESE would need a functioning website to track those students. If the Foundation Formula is revised, taxpayers deserve to be able to easily track public funds as they follow students. The Board should prioritize the building of a user-friendly and comprehensive website with easy-to-find, accessible, and transparent data.

Last year, four in ten Missouri 4th-graders tested in English/Language Arts couldn’t read. This fall they will move to middle school, and one can only imagine the difficulty they’ll be having when they can’t read their textbooks. DESE used to publish the percentage of high school graduates who were deemed either college- or career-ready by DESE standards. The percentage for the last year I could find (2017) was 42 percent. My own calculations from last year put the number at around 62 percent. When fewer than half of our young students can read on grade level and only about half of our graduating seniors are prepared for what’s next, we are in an educational crisis.

Being appointed to the State Board of Education is an honor, but it comes with responsibilities. We want board members to know the truth about how Missouri schools and students are faring, and we want them to tell us the truth about it. We want them to have a plan to fix what’s broken. That may include a performance audit of DESE to make sure the agency is functioning at the highest possible level. It may include working to expand rather than restrict parents’ choices for the education of their children. It also should include requesting the appropriate amount of state funds for their budget, rather than reflexively asking for more money each year. Time will tell which direction this new board takes, but one thing is crystal clear: It can’t be business as usual.

The post New State Board of Education Has a Long To-Do List appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This year’s request includes an increase of nearly $350 million for the Foundation Formula, due to an increase in the base amount that the state considers “adequate” to educate a child. This amount had been $6,375 for four years, from FY 2020 through FY 2024. The FY 2025 budget included a request to increase the amount to $7,145, phased in over two years. Why the increase? Well, that’s a bit confusing. Please follow along.

Technically, the amount reflects the current expenditures per student in Missouri’s highest-performing districts, referred to as Performance Districts. The thinking is that what these districts spent should be adequate. But what does it take to be a Performance District?

The way the law has been interpreted is that Performance Districts are those that receive at least 90 percent of possible points on their Annual Performance Report (APR) under Missouri’s accountability system, after removing the outliers at the top and bottom of the list. The accountability system, also known as MSIP 6, gives districts points based on a rubric of items considered important to DESE and the state Board of Education—although some items are only loosely related to performance.

For example, districts can earn up to 52 points for attendance, having 8th graders fill out an Individual Career and Academic Plan, administering a Kindergarten Entry Assessment to incoming kindergartners, submitting their required financial reports on time, conducting a Climate and Culture Survey, and submitting a Continuous Improvement Plan. All 28 of the Performance Districts received 52 out of 52 points in these categories. Eight of the districts had only 114 possible points—so there’s almost half of them.

One of the Performance Districts was Gasconade C-4, a rural K-8 district with just 100 students. Last year, 37 percent of its students performed on grade level in English/language arts (ELA) and 27 percent did so in math—both below statewide averages. Another Performance District, Hudson R-IX, with just 39 students in grades K-8, had only one in four students on grade level in ELA and just three in ten in math. Mind you, this district has fewer than 10 students per grade.

The problem is that weak accountability systems reward weak performance. In the case of Missouri, that consequence bleeds over to funding. More than half of the Performance Districts are very small, with fewer than 300 students in the entire district. Spending tends to be higher in these districts because there are few economies of scale. That higher spending leads to hundreds of more dollars for all 850,000 students in the state and adds up to almost $350 million in state spending.

Are we sure this is the best system we can come up with?

The post What’s So Great about Performance Districts? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Although over 21,000 families signed up, the program had problems from the beginning. First, it took the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) a full year to figure out how to implement the program. How that impacts the federal regulations is unclear, but families had only a short window after that to spend the money. Families had problems finding what they needed and, ultimately, the program was not as impactful as it might have been.

According to the DESE budget requests, in fiscal year (FY) 2024, $25 million was appropriated to the program, but none was spent. In FY 2025, the other $25 million was appropriated, but just $13,875,123 was spent. It’s too late to spend the money, so what happens to the $36,124,877 that went unspent? Technically, it needs to be returned to the federal government.

What a shame. At the same time, the legislature has created another scholarship program, MO Scholars, aimed at low-income students and students with disabilities, but hasn’t appropriated any money to fund it. The MO Scholars program has structure, scholarship-granting organizations, and thousands of scholarship recipients. Thousands more students across the state would probably love to participate in this program if it were funded.

The logic of helping disadvantaged students find their best educational option is there. The structure of the program is there. Why not the funding?

The post The Scholarship That Wasn’t appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

One such item is DESE requesting a much higher than usual increase in the Foundation Formula. The Foundation Formula is the principal vehicle for distributing state general revenue to school districts in a way that (theoretically) reflects student needs and (theoretically) balances resources between poor and wealthy districts. The total Foundation Formula funding has been creeping up from about $3.4 billion a few years ago to $3.8 billion last year. For the next fiscal year, DESE would like to keep the $3.8 billion and add another $500 million, which is three or four times the typical increase.

Why the big increase? Three years ago, DESE asked for an increase in the base amount per student, in part because enrollment was declining. (For reference, the number of students being funded by this “student-based formula” has decreased by over 20,000 students in the last five years). Apparently, having the formula vary with the number of students is only okay if that number is going up. In fact, the increase in the base amount accounts for over $300 million of the request.

Secondly, a bill was passed last year that made several changes to education programs at the state level. The estimated cost of all of those changes was “up to” $228 million in FY 2026. But that includes changes in a laundry list of budget items—not just the Foundation Formula.

Here are what the fiscal effects directly associated with the Foundation Formula were calculated to be for FY 2026 by the Committee on Legislative Research’s Oversight Division. Just over $1.6 million was estimated for changes to how virtual students are counted. A change in how students are counted—from being based entirely on attendance to being based 90 percent on attendance and 10 percent on enrollment—was expected to cost $41 million in FY 2026. A change to how preschool students are counted is expected to cost an additional $61 million in FY 2026. Finally, incentives that increase the Foundation Formula for districts that keep a five-day school week, instead of switching to a four-day school week, are projected to cost $40 million in FY 2026.

So why is the legislature being asked for an additional $500 million? It seems that DESE will not accept districts receiving less money for fewer students.

The post $10 Billion Is a Lot of Money appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

• “Deputy Superintendent”
  • Salary: $230,000
• “Researcher of Best Practices to Advise”
  • Salary: $49,250 for work between November and February
• “Lean Business Management Practices and Flow Analysis”
  • Salary: $49,000
• “Cabinet Team Support”
  • Salary: $49,400
• “Performance Management Oversight”
  • Salary: $69,430

These funds could have been used on a number of (I’d argue) more useful items, such as supplying instructional materials to students or hiring tutors. This raises larger questions: how are Missouri districts spending their money, and where can taxpayers find that out?

My colleagues, James Shuls and Susan Pendergrass, have both lamented the difficulty of using state resources to evaluate districts spending and performance. The weakness of Missouri’s Sunshine Law also allows districts to skirt citizens’ requests for information by charging exorbitant prices.

With this dearth of available information, it is difficult for people to know how money is being spent. To meet this need, the Show-Me Institute annually updates MoSchoolRankings.org, which provides an in-depth look at the educational performance and financials of school districts and charters.

Using MoSchoolRankings

The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) posts each district’s Annual Secretary of the Board Report on its website. These financial reports are compiled and are the source for MoSchoolRankings.

Individuals can either search for districts or find them on an interactive map. The data include, but are not limited to, math proficiency, ACT scores, enrollment, revenues, locale, website, phone number, demographics, average teacher salary, expenditures per student, and a ranking system for all districts.

With multiple years available, individuals can use MoSchoolRankings as a springboard for further research. For example, consider the below table created from data on MoSchoolRankings.

Noticing the large changes in spending in just one year, an individual could highlight these categories and look further into the exact spending (such as receipts for which goods and services were purchased).

The image below displays how the website looks in practice, using the North Kansas City 74 School District as an example.

MoSchoolRankings.org will remain essential for shedding light on our state’s student performance and district finances. However, Missouri still needs to improve the accuracy and accessibility of state reporting in order to allow parents to hold districts accountable. Increased transparency could help ensure that school districts prioritize spending on classroom instruction and student success.

The post SLPS and MoSchoolRankings appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Official numbers from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) have not been yet released for the 2024–2025 school year. However, according to my own compilation, the 4dsw has continued to grow, as now 187 Missouri public school districts operate on a 4dsw schedule, out of 516 total districts.

My colleague James Shuls and I addressed a wide variety of concerns with the growing 4dsw on academic achievement, district finances, teacher retention, parental preferences, demographics, and learning time effects in a recent series of papers. These include a systematic literature review, a survey, and a descriptive analysis.

In brief summary, we found the 4dsw typically lowers academic achievement and instructional time, while also showing mixed and inconclusive effects on district finances and teacher retention. Overall, there is little evidence to suggest switching to a 4dsw has a lot of benefits, so districts should be cautious when considering the switch.

The Missouri Legislature took aim at the 4dsw in the recent Senate Bill (SB) 727 (SB 727). This law requires larger districts to acquire parental approval before switching to a 4dsw, and also creates an aid bonus for districts that have 169 days of school or more (which essentially means you must be a 5dsw to receive it). As the below figure shows, the prospect of these measures coming fully into effect in 2026-2027 did not seem to stop 4dsw growth going into the 2024–2025 school year.

In rural Missouri, the 4dsw is nearing the majority, as 47% of rural districts are now using the 4dsw. In 2024-2025, every new district which made the switch to a 4dsw was a rural district. Still no city districts have adopted the measure, and no other suburban district joined the Independence 30 School District in making the switch—although some have discussed it.

It will be interesting to see how the continued growth of the 4dsw affects our state. Is there a proximity effect—do districts near each other feel more pressured to switch? There is a dearth of information on the 4dsw. Shouldn’t Missouri districts proceed with caution when considering a switch?

The post The Four-Day School Week Continues to Grow in Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Missouri Elementary and Secondary Enrollment and Teachers: 2014–15 through 2021–22

Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Common Core of Data, Nonfiscal Survey, multiple years, nces.ed.gov/ccd

Missouri enrollment fell from 920,000 students in 2015 to 910,000 in 2019—before the pandemic. Even with the post-pandemic recovery, enrollment is still down over 30,000 students from six years ago. Interestingly, we now have over 3,000 more teachers to serve the smaller student body.

According to Dr. Marguerite Roza of Georgetown University, there have been three waves contributing to the growing teaching staff. The first was the post-recession hiring back of laid off teachers. Then there were seven boom years of growth in education funding (though not in enrollment). Finally, there has been the enormous influx of pandemic stimulus funds from the federal government.

Stimulus money is drying up, though. So, what happens next? The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) has just submitted a budget request that has a $300 million increase. In a logic-defying move, DESE claims that fewer students means we need a higher dollar amount per student in the foundation formula. Why? Because hiring when enrollment goes down because you’ve got the money doesn’t mean you can simply fire excess teachers when the funds dry up. Public education employment contracts don’t work that way. The system needs total funding to stay the same or increase, regardless of enrollment trends. Here’s hoping the state legislature looks at the math before agreeing to this request for no accountability.

The post Maybe the Adults Need a Math Test appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Why did the Show-Me Institute decide to include/exclude “X” category of revenue or spending?

We didn’t. These numbers all come from a report titled the Annual Secretary to the Board Report (ASBR) that each school district and charter school submits to the state. ASBRs are prepared based on guidelines in the Missouri Financial Accounting Manual. ASBRs account for each dollar that comes into a district and each that is spent. Money comes from many sources, including some that may be surprising, such as bookstore sales, food sales to parents, or tuition from other districts. Some sources, such as revenue received from issuing bonds to build a building, are large, one-time infusions of money. We didn’t distinguish between which sources are “important” or “appropriate” for users to consider. We included all money that flowed into each district from every source.

Similarly, we included every expenditure reported in the ASBR. When the site was first launched, many questioned why we included capital expenses, such as land. Again, we included everything reported and provided sufficient detail for users to disregard what they deem to not be true education expenses. Remember, however, that every dollar spent by a public school district is a dollar that wasn’t spent elsewhere for a different public purpose.

Why are the numbers so high?

When every dollar that is spent by public school districts is totaled up and divided by the number of students, the result is often higher than what the public assumes it will be. Survey after survey finds that the public grossly underestimates public education spending. In addition, public education spending-per-student data frequently excludes certain expenditures. Often what is reported is current expenditures or instruction expenditures. The expenditures per student on MOSchoolRankings.org uses the Annual Secretary to the Board Report (ASBR) Total Expenditures as the numerator and the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE)-reported enrollment for each district as the denominator.

Why don’t the numbers match the expenditures per student on the academic side of the website?

When the Show-Me Institute first launched MOSchoolRankings.org with academic grades for each school and district in the state, we included total expenditures per student for context. These numbers come from a DESE file titled Finance Data and Statistics Summary for All Districts/Charters. We have continued to use this file with each update for consistency. Why those numbers differ from the ASBR totals is not clear.

We hope you find the updated data on the website useful. We are committed to updating the MoSchoolRankings site to give Missourians the best data available on schools in our state.

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What has changed? For the most part, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) data have stayed consistent from year to year. The only difference is in the growth measurement. In the past, DESE changed the growth data to be centered on the number 50, and school (or district) performance was measured as national curve equivalents (NCES) above or below 50, plus an indication as to whether a school’s (or district’s) score was statistically significantly different than the state average of 50. In 2021–22, DESE changed the measurement so that it is centered on 0 and a school’s (or district’s) score is the number of standard deviations above or below 0, plus an indication as to whether the score is statistically significantly different than 0. To the user, however, the most important components are the sign (positive or negative) and the significance indicator (yes or no). These indicate whether the students in a school or district achieved more than average or less than average academic growth in one academic year.

The measures of expected rates in proficiency in English/language arts (ELA) and math are adjusted each year. This is done by taking rates of proficiency in all schools (or districts) for that subject and the percentage of low-income students in each school or district and calculating the relationship between the two using simple linear regression. The resulting intercept (where the resulting line crosses 0) is the rate of proficiency expected in a school with 0% low-income enrollment. The slope of the line indicates how much that expected rate of proficiency declines with each one percent increase in low-income enrollment. These two numbers (the intercept and the slope) were then used to predict rates of proficiency for each school (or district) based on its percentage of low-income students. The expected score is compared to the actual score to see if a school (or district) did better than expected or worse than expected. The slope and intercept are recalculated each year based on that year’s scores.

What hasn’t changed? When this project was launched, using 2018–19 data, we calculated grade intervals for 10 indicators and committed to using the same grade intervals every year. This would allow us to see if schools (or districts) are getting progressively better over time. So, for example, for a school to get an “A” in ELA proficiency, it had to have between 72 percent and 90 percent of its students score proficient or higher. To get an “F,” it had to have 0–18 percent proficient or higher. Even though there has been a global pandemic in the meantime, we have stuck with this commitment. And now we can see how the distribution of grades has changed over time.

Looking at the rates of proficiency for ELA at the school level (Figure 1), we can see that in 2018–19 grades were distributed in a fairly normal way, with slightly more D’s than B’s. In 2021–22, the number of B’s and C’s declined, while the number of D’s and F’s increased. Unfortunately, that trend continued in 2021–22, with the plurality of schools receiving D’s.

Figure 1

The same is not true for math, however (Figure 2). It appears that schools have recovered somewhat since the pandemic and the grade distribution looks more like it did three years ago.

Figure 2

There is much that can still be learned from the wealth of data that now exists on MOSchoolRankings. org. We welcome any user feedback or questions.

The post An Update on MOSchoolRankings appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Think of it this way. When someone enters the teaching field after graduating from college, they are called “teacher.” Over the next 30 years, they can get a master’s degree, a specialist degree, or even a doctoral degree. They may attend numerous professional development sessions every year. When they retire, they may still be called “teacher.”

There are no ranks. There are no promotions. There are no steps to career advancement. The only pay raises they will receive will be based on getting additional degrees and each year of experience.

Compare this to higher education. At the higher education level, you may enter as a teaching or research professor not on a tenure track or on a tenure track. Typically, a new professor is called an “assistant” professor. After a few years, the professor can be promoted to “associate” professor and eventually to “full” professor. There are also prized “endowed professor” positions. In short, there are tiers to the profession.

This is not to say higher education is the pinnacle of excellence that should be modeled in every circumstance. Rather, this simply demonstrates the key differences between K-12 teaching and most other fields. In most public school districts, there is no room for advancement within the teaching profession. The only way to advance is to leave the classroom by becoming a principal, superintendent, or something else.

We can imagine a system where teachers are recognized for their performance in the classroom and rewarded in title and in compensation. Teachers need a system that recognizes and rewards excellence—call it merit pay, if you will. They need the opportunity to grow, to excel, and to be rewarded. That is the type of advancement opportunity teachers need. With that said, we should be wary of attempts to create a centralized advancement system from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) or the legislature. The state should empower local communities and local school leaders to develop routes for advancement for their teachers. Centrally imposed systems often become bureaucratic hoops to jump through. Local school leaders may be more motivated to create meaningful advancement opportunities. But this sort of reform surrounding advancement is what we should be focusing on—not red herrings about professional development.

The post Teachers Need Advancement Opportunities, Not Just Professional Development appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This waiver is being requested in partnership with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) in order to conduct a formal study (called the Demonstration Project) to determine if a new testing system should replace the existing MAP. If the exemption is granted, these districts would use their own test but would not administer the MAP. If the waiver is denied, these twenty districts would use their own test and also administer the MAP.

The MAP test is traditionally given to 3rd through 8th-grade students in Missouri at the end of the school year to evaluate their understanding in mathematics, English/language arts, and science. MAP testing also includes End of Course (EOC) tests for high school students who have completed four chosen subjects—Algebra I (or II if you took Algebra I in middle school), Government, Biology, and English II.

The Demonstration Project will use an adaptive testing system, which will test students and provide timely results three times per year. An adaptive test essentially learns who a test-taker is. As students miss questions, the prompts become easier, and vice versa. Through this process, a computer algorithm can learn a student’s skill set, provide a detailed report to the teacher, remember it, and use that student’s proficiency as a baseline for the next standardized test. In practice, a student will sit down at a computer for 90 minutes to take one 45-minute adaptive test on ELA and one 45-minute adaptive test on mathematics three times per year. Since this system is online and designed for quick feedback, a detailed breakdown of how each student performed will be provided to teachers and parents in order to help students improve throughout the year. The new state assessment will shift from a “lagging” indicator to a “leading indicator.” This system will require 280 less minutes of testing time and will cost $21.60 more per student annually.

Below are the 20 districts that are seeking exemption from the MAP:

• Affton, Branson, Center, Confluence Academies, Fayette, Lebanon, Lee’s Summit, Lewis County, Liberty, Lindbergh, Lonedell, Mehlville, Neosho, Ozark, Parkway, Pattonville, Raymore-Peculiar, Ritenour, Ste. Genevieve, and Shell Knob

These 20 districts roughly represent the demographics of Missouri, with huge districts, rural districts, and a charter school (although low-income students are underrepresented).

The study was created because of doubts about the effectiveness of the MAP; as the Demonstration Project proposal states, “The MAP was never intended as a progress monitoring tool at the student level.” Since the MAP is administered at the end of the year, districts do not receive test results until fall of the following year. Districts claim that makes it very difficult to make adjustments and corrections within the school year if a student is struggling in a certain subject. They also claim that adaptive standardized testing throughout the year would allow teachers and administrators to make adjustments to help students before the next school year. (There are reasons to take these complaints from districts with a grain of salt, which I will get into in my next blog post.)

It will be interesting to see if this trial is successful. The desire to try something different than MAP (which traces its origins back to 1993) raises plenty of questions in itself, and I will discuss those issues also in my next post.

The post 20 Missouri Districts Seek Exemption from the Missouri Assessment Program appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Under MSIP 5, the average district received 96 percent of total possible MSIP points. MSIP 6, to be fair, has a more reasonable distribution. About one fifth of districts did not get the necessary 70 percent of their possible points, making them technically eligible for non-accreditation. Not to worry though – these scores won’t be used to actually rate districts for another year.

Another good aspect of MSIP 6 is that student academic growth actually counts. Under prior MSIPs, it only served as extra credit. Tracking academic growth is critical for students who come to school far behind their peers. It measures if and how quickly they are catching up to grade level. So, while we only have growth scores for students in grades 3–8 and the reporting is a little difficult to understand, at least it counts.

Now for the bad. Academic measures—both for percentages of students scoring on grade level in reading, math, science, and social studies and for student academic growth in reading and math—still only count for less than half of the points. Districts (unfortunately) still have a variety of ways to achieve the maximum points possible, with the highest score being 180. Academic testing is worth a maximum of 48 points for getting students to grade level and 36 points for growth. But having a school improvement plan is worth 30 points and giving a school culture and climate survey is worth 4. How many districts got all 34 of those points? All of them. Graduation rates—which can be gamed—are worth 20 points. How many districts got all 20 points? The answer is 422 out 553.

And, finally, the ugly. The ugly is the MSIP 6 APR report. The APR report assigns districts a number that represents the percentage of possible points earned. The total possible points varies from 152 to 180. How does this help sort out what a district is getting right or wrong? Why does the title have two acronyms? Why can’t districts simply be given letter grades, which all of us understand? Why don’t we have ratings for schools, as well as districts? While we’re trying to figure out what the scores mean, why don’t we ask our leaders for something we can all understand?

The post The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The foundation formula—which is used to equalize public education dollars between property-rich and property-poor school districts—is based on the highest student attendance number in any of the last four years. It has always been the case that Missouri districts can pick the highest of any of the last three years to use as their average daily attendance (ADA), but the law was adjusted during COVID to allow districts to use any of the last four.

Here’s what puzzles me—this is still happening. According to instructions from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), in FY 2022 student attendance was “broadly impacted” by the Delta and Omicron variants and therefore, for FY 2024, districts can still use the highest attendance of the four previous years. Isn’t it time to stop leaning on COVID?

But here’s what this means in reality. Let’s take the district Fort Zumwalt district as an example. In 2021, it received an average of about $3,000 in foundation formula money per student. Even though its ADA in 2022 was 15,971, Fort Zumwalt gets to use its 2019 ADA of 16,856 for four years, giving it almost 900 ghost students to use in the formula. Moreover, its ADA has steadily declined from over 17,200 students in 2015 to just under 16,000 in 2022—this decline started before the pandemic. Statewide, using the maximum ADA for the past four years for all school districts results in a total of 65,500 ghost kids. Using the foundation formula’s per-student State Adequacy Target amount (the minimum amount the state says each student should receive in state funding) of $6,375 results in over $415 million in funding for students who used to be in attendance.

We know that kids have been on the move since the pandemic. Homeschool numbers have skyrocketed. Private schools have enrolled public school switchers. Some students may have decided that virtual schooling worked well for them, and some parents have gotten together to start their own schools. Public funding for education can easily keep up. We should be funding students where they are, not where they used to be.

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Stories about the teacher shortage conjure images of overwhelmed teachers across Missouri struggling to manage overflowing classrooms and a growing student population. If you never looked at the statewide numbers and only at media headlines, you might think the sky was falling. A few examples: “The Profession that Prepares People for all Other Professions is Diminishing (in Missouri),” “Teachers in Missouri are Not Returning to the Classroom,” and “A Look at the Local Impact of the Teacher Shortage Crisis (in Missouri).”

While the statewide trends are relatively minor, they still directly contradict the idea that teachers across the state are in short supply. The figures below depict statewide trends.

Student enrollment numbers have bounced back a bit from the COVID-19 dip and currently sit at 863,000. Nevertheless, prior to the pandemic, enrollment had been falling every year since 2013, and the 2022 number is still not close to the 2020 enrollment figure of 879,000. Conversely, teacher FTE (full-time equivalent) rose during the pandemic, and actually increased by a greater percentage (0.78%) than enrollment (0.41%) in 2022.

Even with the first positive enrollment growth since 2013, the student enrolled to teacher ratio still decreased from 12.29 to 12.26. The national student enrolled to teacher ratio has been decreasing for a long time, from 27 in 1951, to 20 in 1976, and to 16 in 2000. In 2020, the national ratio was 15.2, almost 3 whole students higher than Missouri’s total.

If the student-to-teacher ratio is so low, why are schools feeling the heat? The answer: there is a shortage of teachers to fill specific positions, not a shortage of teachers in general.

Five districts account for 50 percent of teacher vacancies in Missouri, and many of these vacancies are in a few subject areas—including special education, English-language learning (ELL), and mathematics. Allowing school districts to pay teachers more to fill these high-need vacancies—pay differentiation—is something I have discussed before, and could help solve this problem. Luckily, House Bill (HB) 190 is currently progressing through the Missouri Legislature, and it would allow for pay differentiation in our state.

There are districts in Missouri with needs for specific teachers. But that does not mean the whole state has a teacher crisis, and the data make it clear that Missouri is not facing any systemic teacher crisis. It is unfortunate that some Missourians may be getting the wrong impression from some inaccurate headlines, and one would hope that going forward we can have a debate that takes the actual facts into consideration.

The post Statewide Trends and the “Teacher Shortage” appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The kinds of education transparency that the legislature will grapple with are likely threefold.

• Transparency in spending: Previous Show-Me Checkbook projects have mainly looked at how local governments spend money, but districts and schools also should be transparent and accountable for how they spend taxpayer money. Especially in an environment where teacher pay is a hot topic, seeing exactly where tax money is going today will be illuminating about where tax money should be going tomorrow. My colleague, our director of education Susan Pendergrass, will have much more on this soon.
• Transparency in curriculum: It is no secret that we sent thousands of Sunshine Law requests to schools and districts around the state over the last couple years asking what they’re teaching kids and telling teachers about a host of hot-button education topics, the responses to which (when there have been responses) have been mostly incomplete. At this point, I believe the state needs to mandate transparency of these institutions. Taxpayers can debate whether it’s appropriate to teach critical race theory in the classroom or to instruct teachers that Christians oppress all other religions, but that debate can only happen if taxpayers are aware of the content.
• Transparency in performance: When true school choice is widely available in the state, parents will have some decisions to make about where to send their kids. How good each educational option is will play a major role in those decisions. Unfortunately, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) has done an abysmal job ensuring parents have tools to easily distinguish between failing and succeeding schools and districts. The law must change to make that information more widely available and to ensure failure is administratively corrected, not administratively protected. Susan’s MoSchoolRankings.org is a valuable bridge of information as we wait for the state to take action.

These reform ideas are showing up individually in a lot of pieces of education legislation, but the legislation they’re most often appearing in are “parents’ bill of rights” proposals. We’ve talked about those kinds of laws in the past, and whether legislators pass all these reforms at once with a parents’ bill of rights or separately, these reforms would be a significant advance in parent-empowering policy. Parents need school choice, and better still, they need informed school choice.

The post A Reminder: Missouri Still Needs Transparency in Education appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

For decades, the state and the federal government have poured billions into the system to try to balance the disconnect between students living in wealthy neighborhoods and students living in poor neighborhoods. The wealth gap between neighborhoods was referred to as the “big white elephant” by the board member who provided the first quote. As it turns out, monopolistic bureaucracies are reliably terrible at solving this problem. Complicated funding formulas try to take into account how much residents of local districts could contribute to public education based on the value of all property in the district in an attempt to redistribute funds from wealthy districts to poor districts. The result is that some districts, such as Brentwood and Ladue, receive about $600 per student from the state, and others—mostly small rural districts—receive as much as $16,000 per student. The federal formula to redistribute resources to low-income districts, also known as Title I, is ridiculously Byzantine and political.

Here’s the problem with “resource deployment.” It hasn’t worked. The achievement gaps between low-income and non-low-income students in Missouri have only gotten wider. In 2019, 45 percent of non-low-income 8th graders scored Proficient or higher in reading on the Nation’s Report Card, compared to just 21 percent of low-income 8th graders. The gap in math was even larger–27 percentage points. In 2003, the gap in reading was 19 percentage points and the gap in math was 22.

We cannot equalize opportunity using a top-down approach. Resources should be deployed to families to spend at the school of their choice. I continue to assert that if low-income families were given the responsibility for choosing which schools received their children’s public education funding, four out of five families would not accept below grade level results.

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The Missouri Legislature is currently debating several bills that are each known as a “Parents’ Bill of Rights.” They’re not all exactly the same, but, for the most part, they reiterate that parents have a right to know what their children are being taught—and not by digging through notes or textbooks. Parents should have easy access to what each teacher plans on teaching.

In addition, parents (and taxpayers) should know how much is being spent and what the money is being spent on for public education. Surveys consistently find that parents and taxpayers underestimate how much is spent per student in our public schools. Consider that in the last school year (2020–21), the average spending per student in Missouri was about $16,800. Where is that money going? Parents have a right to know.

One of the most fundamental rights of parents is the right to know whether their children’s school is doing a good job or poor job at educating students. This should be very simple—no jargon, no words like “provisionally accredited,” and no protecting the egos of the adults in the building. Parents understand the difference between an “A” and an “F” on their children’s report cards, and they should be given the same opportunity on a report card for their children’s school and district.

One version of a Parents’ Bill of Rights (HJR 110), sponsored by Representative Christofanelli, requires the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) to report on a list of indicators for each school and district and to score them with a letter grade of A through F. Unfortunately, the bill gives DESE too much wiggle room in how to assign points that determine the calculation of grades. It also includes some non-academic measurements, such as attendance, and some gameable measurements, such as graduation rates.

To be useful, school report cards should be based on objective learning outcome measures of both performance and progress. They should be timely and use clear and transparent descriptions of what’s an A and what’s an F. They should be as rigorous as possible and have automatic increases in rigor (e.g., the bar for what constitutes an A keeps going up over time) to encourage continuous improvement.

It’s great that legislators are ready to stand up for parents, but we need to make sure that they get this legislation right.

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At the state level, eight governors have issued executive orders, proclamations or initiated coronavirus task forces. At least seven state education departments have offered statewide guidance, with California’s being an excellent example. Missouri’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) has a webpage with information related to COVID-19. DESE has also issued administrative guidance to all superintendents regarding school funding, attendance waivers, and the cancelation of Missouri Assessment Program (MAP) testing. Links to information on virtual instruction are provided, but it is left up to districts and schools to determine whether they will use them. Two of the statewide virtual learning programs, Launch and the Missouri Virtual Academy, currently only say that short term-enrollment is “possibly available.”

The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) at the University of Washington has been painstakingly building a database of district COVID-19 responses. The plans range from detailed and specific like Miami’s “comprehensive district learning plan that includes online learning curricula and teacher support, technology device and WiFi access provision, and supplemental resources for special populations” to simple and broad, like districts in Pennsylvania that have essentially cancelled school for the rest of the school year. St. Louis Public Schools doesn’t appear to have much of a plan right now. It is “considering” sending homework assignments to students through the mail, the approach that Kansas City Public Schools is also adopting.

So, what does all of this mean? We’re in uncharted territory and everyone is creating their own map. Districts and states that were prepared will have a much easier time providing their students an actual education. Florida, for example, already requires every high school student to take at least one of their courses online and is currently providing $200 stipends to the first 10,000 teachers who pass their virtual education training program. Those that have not embraced virtual education, like Missouri, are either going to have to figure it out very quickly or punt until the end of the school year.

The Show-Me Institute will be monitoring it all very closely and looking for best practices and lessons learned for when we eventually emerge from this crisis.

The post What the Heck Is Happening Out There? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A bill currently circulating in the Missouri Legislature seeks to remedy this. The bill would require districts and charter schools that have three percent or more of their students identified as gifted to establish a state-approved gifted program. Currently, creating a gifted program is entirely voluntary, and there is vague language about a “sufficient number” of gifted students as the threshold for establishing a gifted program. But shouldn’t all gifted students receive an education that challenges them?

Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) are another tool that could help gifted students, particularly low-income students. ESAs could provide these students with options they previously couldn’t afford. An ESA is a flexible account with funds that families can use to purchase books, tutoring, online services or other academic programming for their students. With an ESA, students don’t have to rely on their district to meet the three percent threshold outlined in the legislation before they can get support.

In 2019, there were a total of 37,474 gifted students in the state. Of them, just under 1,000 students qualified for the Free and Reduced-Price Lunch (FRPL) program, used as a proxy for low-income status. Using an ESA program to award $1,000 to each low-income gifted student would cost around $1 million, a small portion of the $6.2 billion DESE budget in 2019. 

Kids learn at different paces. Shouldn’t our education system reflect that? Isn’t it time for Missouri to provide all gifted students with access to supplemental material so they can receive an education that matches their ability?   

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