Classifying Missouri Public School Spending

The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) classifies spending as:

• Instructional
• Student support
• Non-instructional/student support

Instructional costs include salaries and benefits for teachers, aides, and specialists. It also covers instructional materials (paper, microscopes, software, paint brushes, sports gear, etc.), professional development, and standardized testing materials.

Student support services cover (but are not limited to) salaries and benefits for counselors, psychologists, social workers, nurses, behavioral specialists, and college-preparatory specialists. It also covers costs for mental health services, plus behavior and outreach programs. Administrative, transportation, and food service costs are also classified under this category.

Non-instructional/student support costs in Missouri cover a wide variety of services, such as early childhood instruction, afterschool programs, adult education, and purchases with bonds.

The figures below show how costs have shifted in Missouri over the last decade, as well as changes in staff numbers.

Figure 1: Share of Total Expenditures in Missouri Public Schools by Type, 2013–2023

Figure 2: Number of Missouri Public School Students and Teachers

Figure 3: Total Number of Staff: Student Support Services

Source: Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE)

The 2018–19 school year marked the first large decrease in the share of instructional costs in total expenditures, and it has decreased further since then. If the trend continues, spending on student support services in Missouri may soon surpass instructional spending.

Figure 1 is even more fascinating when considering that the total number of teachers has continued to rise in Missouri, with student enrollment decreasing in the same time period. Even with 26,000 fewer students than in 2012–13, there are around 4,000 more Missouri teachers and 2,000 more student support staff (as of 2022–2023, the most recent data).

The trends emerging from Missouri’s public school spending raise important questions about financial priorities and the need for increased educational transparency. Are funds being used to improve classroom instruction and foster better learning environments? Once DESE releases financial data for the 2023-2024 school year, it will be interesting to see whether this downward trend continues.

The post Missouri is Spending Less on Instruction appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As Harford explains, Sony, Xerox, Kodak, and the British Army couldn’t readily adapt to new ideas because of their organizational structure. Teams of lawyers who were used to negotiating large contracts with banks and government agencies did not translate well into marketing and selling a computer to a single consumer, and a regimented military with centuries of tradition could not readily adapt to the advent of mechanized warfare.

So what does this have to do with in-person learning during the COVID-19 pandemic? The issue is one and the same—traditional school systems are simply not organized in a manner that allows them to adapt to the new challenges presented by this virus.

Think about the two big issues that school leaders must address in light of the coronavirus—social distancing and the mixing of students. For social distancing, students should be able to sit in classrooms with several feet of space between them and their nearest peers. And, to the extent possible, the number of other students that a student encounters each day is supposed to be limited. If a student is in one class with a total of 20 other people, they only have 20 possible chances of exposure to COVID-19. If, however, they switch to a new class every hour, the possible chances of exposure increase exponentially.

The solution to this seems simple enough: reduce class sizes and reduce the number of times students switch classes. As we have seen throughout the country, however, this has been difficult for school districts to accomplish in practice.

The reason schools are not able to meet in person is because they are trying to deliver education in the same way that they have always delivered education. Some states have laws that dictate when the school year must begin and when it must end. In many school districts, contracts spell out when teachers may be asked to begin work, how many classes they may be asked to teach, and a host of other issues that shape a school system’s operational plans.

The current structure, from the school board down to the kindergarten teacher, is designed to deliver an in-person education that packs 20 to 30 students in a single class. Additionally, at least at the middle- and high-school levels, a bell rings every 50 minutes to tell the students to shuffle through the halls to a new classroom filled with different students.

Most school districts have responded to the pandemic in one of three ways: They’ve gone fully virtual, they’ve gone hybrid with half of the students coming to school each day, or they have rolled the dice with students returning to “normal” as much as possible. None of these scenarios fully meets the challenges of social distancing and mixing. Virtual learning gives up on in-person learning altogether. Blended learning only addresses the social distancing by having half as many kids on campus at a time, but typically still has kids mixing in different classes throughout the day. And doing school “as usual” almost ignores the problem altogether; which may be possible (even desirable) in small schools, elementary schools where the effects of COVID have been mild, or in communities where the number of cases is extremely low. Nevertheless, school as usual does not address the issues of distancing or mixing.

Addressing both the social distancing problem and the mixing problem caused by COVID-19 would require school districts to be nimble and to rethink many of the norms governing how schools operate. Do we have to have two semesters and four quarters, or could we spread the school year over the entire calendar year? Could we use trimesters? Do students have to take seven or eight classes at once, or could they take two or three classes at a time? Do we have to meet all day from 7:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., or could we have two shifts of in-person learning?

If we reconsidered the norms around school and how schools must operate, we would have a much better chance at coming up with solutions that allow us to social distance in classrooms and to keep student mixing to a minimum. But we don’t do these things. We simply say it is all too hard and do virtual learning, we force a blended model on our old structures, or we just put our heads in the sand.

Tim Harford’s cautionary tale helps us to understand why organizations often do not adapt to new ideas and inventions—their organizational structures aren’t designed to do so. It also helps us understand why school districts are struggling to provide robust in-person learning opportunities for students during the pandemic. Our public schools simply aren’t equipped to be nimble, out-of-the-box organizations.

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Missouri’s education spending has continued its upward march. Current spending is up 2.7% from the year before, to $10,589 per student. This is roughly in line with previous year-over-year increases (which were 1.6%, 2.7%, 2.9%, and 1.7%, respectively).

When looking at the total revenue figure, which is a good way of looking at the total amount of money that schools spend (not just on current expenses), Missouri schools received $12,492 per student.

Every time I see spending figures like this, I have to ask myself, where does all of this money go? If you think of a class of 18 students, those children are generating over $190,000 in current revenue alone. How much is the teacher getting? Less than half?

The Kansas City Star’s Editorial Board took to its pages earlier this year to decry low teacher salaries that haven’t even kept pace with inflation. But no where in there did they try to square the circle that spending is actually up! Its just that the new money is not making it to teachers.

Looking at a slightly longer time horizon, Missouri per student spending is up 33% since 1992 while teacher salaries are down 4%. This is largely because both the number of teachers and the number of staff members in Missouri schools have grown substantially faster than the growth in students. While the student population is up 9% over that time period, the number of teachers grew 28% and the number of all other staff grew 24%.

These are policy decisions. We can make different ones.

Our education system has become bloated with bureaucrats, administrators, and non-teaching staff that are sucking up money that could be going to the people who are in the classroom every day doing the hard work of educating children. If you want to be outraged about something, be outraged about that.

Bottom line: we are spending enough money to adequately compensate teachers. We just aren’t spending it on them.

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Sixteen districts responded with contracts showing superintendent salaries ranging from $125,000 to $294,000 per year. We also looked at an evaluation of those same school districts from the Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis (CEPA), which measured the performance of 3rd-grade students in 2009 and then, five years later in 2014, measured the performance of the students in 8th-grade. The object of the CEPA study was to determine if students experienced a full five years of academic growth in five calendar years.

The table below shows superintendent salaries from 2011 to 2014 and student performance growth from 2009 to 2014 for each school district that responded to our sunshine request.

The average academic growth between 3rd grade and 8th grade in these 16 districts is 4.7 years. Only three districts had five or more years of growth over the five-year period studied—Fort Zumwalt, Parkway, and Wentzville.

Because the time covered in the Stanford study (2009–2014) doesn’t align exactly with the superintendent salary information (which only goes back to 2011), we can’t make a perfect comparison of the salaries against performance. But based on the four years for which we have both sets of data, it’s difficult to see a direct connection between the two. Of the three districts with more than five years of growth in the table above, only Parkway paid its superintendent above the average rate from 2011 to 2014.

In fact, evidence of any connection between superintendents and student performance is hard to come by. One Brookings Institute study looked at the effect of superintendent turnover on student performance in North Carolina and Florida schools. It failed to find a significant connection. Nor did the study find a relationship between student performance and superintendent longevity.

Such studies make it appropriate to question why superintendent salaries are so high. There are certainly plenty of reasons why people think they should be high. Superintendents are like the CEOs of the school district. They oversee the management and budget of all the schools in the district. Perhaps most importantly, they hire principals and other administrators in the district, who in turn hire the teachers.

But with little evidence that superintendents are making a significant difference in student performance, it’s reasonable to ask why districts are paying them so much. The people in the school hierarchy who have the most effect on student achievement are teachers—and at an average salary of around $53,000, they earn around one-fourth of what superintendents earn. That’s not even considering the school pension system, which definitely favors the higher paid. All of which takes us back to a question that James Shuls raised in an April blog post: Is this really where we want to spend our money?

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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.

Doctors, lawyers, you name the profession—professionals are paid based on what they do. They are paid in proportion to the demand for their labor, their skill, and their hustle. Not so for teachers. Teachers are paid via a single-salary schedule that doesn’t factor in their quality or effort.

Let me be clear, I’m not saying teachers are not professionals. I’m saying they are not paid like professionals.

Elisa Crouch of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch has been following the ongoing dispute in St. Louis Public Schools regarding teacher pay. For seven years, teachers in St. Louis have been stuck at the same level on their salary schedule and have not received a raise. Recently, the unionized workforce rejected a proposed 3.5% salary increase, calling it a slap in the face.

I’m not sure how this dispute will pan out, but now is the time for school district administrators to consider alternatives to the single-salary schedule.

For starters, they should consider alternatives that allow great teachers to be rewarded. A single-salary schedule is quality blind. Now, I’m not talking about simply tying pay to test scores or some mechanistic rating system, but real management and feedback; pairing data with professional judgement.

They should they take into account not only quality, but also the broader labor market. My 2012 study, “The Salary Straitjacket,” demonstrates how math and science teachers make less than P.E. teachers, despite a shortage of math and science teachers. This isn’t a knock on P.E. teachers, but teachers with Math and Science training who don’t feel adequately compensated are likely to have more lucrative options outside of teaching than P.E. teachers. Districts have to take this into account when determining wages, or there will always be shortages.

One of the downsides to a single-salary schedule is that it dictates wages to the district. The salary schedule doesn’t factor in the financial health of the school district. It mandates that teachers earn X more next year, regardless. A much smarter approach would be for the district to determine how much they have available for salaries and then figure out how they want to distribute that money among teachers. Such an approach would facilitate better management of scarce financial resources.

Teachers certainly deserve to be treated like professionals, which is why administrators should start thinking about wholesale changes to the way they pay teachers. Professionals deserve professional pay. 

The post Attention Teachers: Professionals Do Not Have a Salary Schedule appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The plan is still in its public comment period, so I’d like to offer the questions that I have:

1. Is the district serious about reining in administrative bloat?

The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education publishes administrator/student ratios for every district in the state.  For 2015, Kansas City had significantly more administrators on a per pupil basis than surrounding school districts, and even more than St. Louis. By a lot.

Those extra administrators represent serious money that could be spent in the classrooms that actually educate children.  To its credit, the plan calls for reducing administrative costs by $750,000/year, which is a good start.  But getting down to Liberty or North Kansas City levels of administrators would involve even deeper cuts than that.

2. How much smaller can the district get?

As the Star reports, the district has shrunk to only 14,228 students.  That doesn’t even put it in the top 10 districts in the state by enrollment.   Peak enrollment (in the early 1970s) was almost 73,000.

3. Students are fleeing in droves to attend public charter schools. Are we going to rethink the organization of the district in response?

As I detailed earlier this week, 41 percent of students within the boundaries of the Kansas City School District attend public charter schools, and enrollment is only growing.  There might be a not-too-distant date in the future when the vast majority of students attend public schools in Kansas City that are not operated by the Kansas City Public Schools.  Taxpayers still have an interest in these schools, and our community should play some role in their governance, but what should that role be?  New Orleans offers an interesting possible future for the city.

4. Does this plan come anywhere close to meeting the needs of the district and the children who live in it?

Probably the most striking thing that I took away from reading the report is just how little it actually wants to do.  Moving a couple of attendance boundaries, closing a high school, creating new programs within existing schools . . . these are things districts have to do all the time to adjust to student movement and community change.  Given the exodus of students, the woeful performance of schools, and the hollowing out of the tax base from tax increment financing, how can that possibly be enough?

The post Questions for the Kansas City Public Schools Master Plan appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

There is nothing inherently wrong with having a lot of school districts, provided that you are able to support them all. Researchers such as James Conant have long argued that small school districts are more costly to operate. In addition, small districts often are unable to offer the same quality or diversity of educational opportunity as some larger districts. This is one reason why some are looking to school district consolidation as a possible way to improve outcomes and decrease costs.

One argument often made against district consolidation has to do with geography. Opponents contend that many districts with low enrollments are actually very large geographically, meaning that consolidating them would require students to travel great distances to get to school every day.

There are two easy responses to this objection. First, district consolidation does not necessarily mean consolidating schools themselves. Children’s travel times don’t have to change at all; districts could just consolidate their central offices and eliminate costly and redundant staff and services.

But more importantly, the premise of the argument simply isn’t true; Missouri’s small school districts aren’t nearly as big geographically as you might think.

The table below shows the mean square miles of Missouri school districts of various sizes. These data were obtained from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s website. The average school district in Missouri covers an area of approximately 134.5 square miles. Large school districts (those with more than 1,000 students) cover more area (averaging 142.8 square miles). School districts with fewer than 350 students cover just 100.4 square miles. These districts receive additional funding form the state because of their low enrollment. Smaller still, school districts with fewer than 100 students cover just 63.9 square miles.

For perspective, an 8-mile by 8-mile square would be 64 square miles.

There may be perfectly valid arguments against school consolidation, but for districts with fewer than 100 students, size does not appear to be one of them.

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Closing these underperforming schools may not have been a bad thing, but it certainly put a bad taste in the mouths of those already fearful of the independent nature of charters. For some, Imagine’s failure justifies a long and arduous charter school application process.

While it’s true that some elements of charter school applications may keep out those who have no business educating children, a new study found that other requirements may simply create unnecessary barriers. In “The Paperwork Pile-Up: Measuring the Burden of Charter School Applications,” AEI’s Mike McShane (who will be joining the Show-Me Institute policy team in August), Jenn Hatfield, and Elizabeth English analyzed the sometimes-overwhelming elements of the charter school application process.

After coding requirements in applications from 40 charter authorizers, they found that authorizers could cut down the average application by at least one-third without interfering with their ability to ensure quality.

Charter school authorizers need to refocus their efforts on the regulations that are most likely to ensure quality schooling and do away with extraneous requirements that have piled up over time. Charter school applications can and should be streamlined to help authorizers focus on what they can do well and save applicants hundreds of hours of work.

In Missouri, both school districts and colleges can sponsor charters. Applicants must submit their application materials to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) by Oct. 1 prior to the fall opening of the school year. DESE provides a 40-page model application for sponsors based on statutory references. The application has a minimum of 23 educational, organizational, and business requirements.

“The Paperwork Pile-Up” lists common requirements for charter school applications, dividing them into three categories—green, yellow, and red. Here are a few examples from the DESE model application and statute requirements.

Green: Requirements are both appropriate and manageable.

• Present a compelling 1-2 sentence mission statement that defines the purpose of the school.
• Present proper documentation that the entity proposing to hold the charter is a Missouri nonprofit corporation.

Yellow: Requirements may be appropriate but onerous, or inappropriate but manageable.

• Annual calendar for the first year of operation.
• Include a sample lesson for a single core subject (of your choice), from two different grade levels that illustrate strategies for implementation of the curriculum consistent with the mission and education philosophy.

Red: Requirements are both inappropriate and onerous.

• Present a thorough, realistic, and cost-effective transportation plan; and provide specific evidence of third-party readiness and terms for providing transportation services consistent with the school’s budget assumptions. Third party must collect required information (include in application).
• A description of the charter school’s grievance procedure for parents or guardians. R.S. 160.405.1.(13)

Some burdensome requirements like those listed in the red category come from charter school authorizers, while others are codified into law. Both the Missouri Legislature and individual sponsors should review current requirements, focus on the necessary safeguards of quality, and eliminate regulations that make it impossible for Missouri charters to innovate and experiment.

To read more about cutting the red tape to unburden the charter school application process, click here.

The post What Should a Charter School Application Look Like? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As it stands, the pay schedule for Kansas City teachers starts low and provides only modest increases in the initial years. Largest pay increases come at the end of a career, in a manner to maximize pension value. As my colleague James Shuls has argued in previous posts, this is a disincentive for new and effective teachers to stay on. Dane Stangler and Aaron North of the Kauffman Foundation wrote in a March 2014 op-ed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Because most of the pension value accrues in the final years of an educator’s career, the typical new teacher in Kansas City or St. Louis does not benefit from the current system. Based on our research, we estimate the likelihood that a traditional public school teacher in St. Louis stays in the profession long enough to earn the maximum pension benefit to be about 4 percent. In other words, 96 percent of teachers in St. Louis will leave prior to reaching the full benefit and the percentage is comparable in Kansas City (approximately 3 percent).

As a result, new teachers are less likely to stay on. According to the Show-Me Institute’s Michael Podgursky, “After eight years, roughly 70 percent of teachers remain on the job. The eight-year survival rates in STL and KC are far lower, ranging from 10 percent to 30 percent.”

Podgursky’s paper urges more transparency and,

Given the relatively small share of new teachers in Kansas City or Saint Louis who can expect to complete an entire career in either district, as a strategic recruiting tool it makes more sense to raise front-end salaries, 

rather than “generous end-of-career retirement benefits.”

Certainly, there are many reasons why teachers in Kansas City and Saint Louis are much more likely to leave, and creating a more fair pension system will not solve all of them. But one thing we can do in Kansas City is to let new teachers know they are valued early on in their careers and that we want them to stay on.

The post Ideas for Kansas City Schools: Pay Teachers More Sooner appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

First, it is noteworthy that the stated purpose of the advisory committee is seemingly small ball. Their email soliciting participation asks only,

What’s it going to take for Kansas City Public Schools (KCPS) to regain full accreditation? What’s it going to take for your school to regain/sustain full accreditation? How can we retain and attract students?

In other words, “What do we have to do to provide the minimal state-required level of service?” We’re also suspect that they are looking toward parents and the community for ideas when there is an entire industry of specialists who have researched, written, and talked about what to do to improve schools. We at the Show-Me Institute have our own suggestions, and they aim at rebuilding world-class education in Kansas City. All our ideas have a common theme: Move power away from centralized school districts and toward students and parents.

For his 2003 book Making Schools Work, UCLA Professor and Author William G. Ouchi studied more than 200 schools in six cities and found that a school’s educational success may be most directly affected by how it is managed. The way to increase successful management, he argues, is to give schools more control over their own budget.

While schools may boast large budgets, Ouchi’s research uncovered that very little of it is controlled by the principal or the school itself. In one anecdote, he relates that a Los Angeles principal said her school had a budget of $21 million but added, “It doesn’t really matter because I only control $32,000.” Ouchi’s further research indicated that in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago the local schools only controlled 6.1 percent, 6.7 percent, and 19.1 percent of the budget, respectively.

In school districts that have seen tremendous improvements in their urban school performances, such as Seattle, Houston, and Edmonton, Canada, the percentage of the budget controlled by the local schools was 91.7, 79.3, and 58.6, respectively. This should be no surprise. Administrators, teachers, and parents at the school are best able to identify and address the specific needs of their students.

Here in Kansas City, better school management means moving the power of the purse away from the top-down centralized control at 12th and McGee streets and out to the principals at Paseo, Lincoln Prep, and elsewhere. Ouchi offers this warning to parents:

Control goes with the money. If your superintendent smiles, invites your group into his office, and tells you that he agrees with you and that he’s going to roll out a new school-based decision-making program that includes parent involvement—smile sweetly and ask him who will control the school’s budget. Don’t let him off the hook. Don’t let him think that you can be so easily fooled.

Remember, the author was chief of staff to Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan. He has academic credentials, but he has weathered political fights as well. And the Kansas City district appears to be doing exactly what he describes: They smile, invite people to discuss the district, but surrender none of the control that is necessary for success.

The post An Idea for Kansas City Schools: Give Principals Power appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Sparkly, purple, and lined with a shiny metal band, my retainer was wrapped in a napkin while I ate my school lunch throughout elementary school. “Don’t you lose that retainer,” I can still hear my mother saying. Inevitably, I lost it at lunch, and I knew there was only one place it could be.

Inside the trash can, remnants of sloppy joes and sour milk splattered the edges of the bag. A cafeteria worker, realizing what had happened, pulled the trash out and began to dig. “Here you go,” he said and returned the retainer to me.

I recalled the cafeteria worker who helped me find my retainer after I read Fordham Institute Research Analyst Matt Richmond’s report, The Hidden Half: School Employees Who Don’t Teach.

The report’s findings are startling. Over the past 60 years, schools have increased non-teaching personnel positions by 702 percent. It also found the U.S. spends more than double what Korea, Mexico, Finland, Portugal, Ireland, Luxembourg, Austria, and Spain spend on non-teaching staff salaries and benefits.

As the study’s title, and my own personal vignette, suggests, these workers are both seemingly underappreciated and overlooked. We know little about the non-teaching part of the education industry, except that it has grown at a much faster rate than students. One study showed that if non-teaching personnel grew at the same rate as the student population, American public schools would have an additional $24.3 billion annually.

This is not to say that schools would be better off with less non-teaching personnel, but if Missouri schools want to get serious about spending efficiently, then collecting specific data on non-teaching staff is a good place to start.

The post New Study Looks at Growth of Non-Teaching Personnel appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Carroll’s term would have ended April 2014. According to Missouri statute (RSMo 162.492.7), “Vacancies which occur on the school board… shall be filled by special election if such vacancy happens more than six months prior to the time of holding an election…” Carroll’s resignation was accepted on Sept. 25 with more than six months remaining. (In fact, it was tendered much earlier and appeared online Sept. 7.) It took an additional two weeks for Board Chairman Airick West to notify state authorities per state law, finally doing so on Oct. 11. On Oct. 22, the Missouri State Board of Education approved a special election to fill the vacancy.

In a Nov. 1 letter to the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), KCMSD attorney Ray Sousley attempted to explain the confusion:

The last day for a candidate to be qualified to be on the November, 2013 ballot was August 27, 2013, and the ballot had to be certified on August 29, 2013. Because those dates had been missed when the verbal resignation was given, I think there was a misconception by the Board that we would not need to hold an election…

He continues by saying the district wants to avoid a costly election. But DESE doesn’t buy any of it. On Nov. 18, DESE certified the election in accordance with state law — a special election is to be held.

What about Sousley’s statement that the school board didn’t understand a special election was necessary? It is empirically untrue. The podcast of the Sept. 25 meeting includes the following discussion about Carroll’s resignation and replacement:

Board Member Marisol Montero: “So after–if it gets accepted, which I’m sure it will, the letter goes to the school board of education and then from there are we having a special election to replace the term that Ms. Carroll has left, six months?”
Board Chairman Airick West: “That is up to the determination of the state board as to the statute. We’ll accept this and send them a letter. If they determine that is within the parameters of state statute… they will make the determination.”

The Board knew exactly what was required, but they dragged their feet to avoid following state law. Now they think they can just re-vote and avoid a special election altogether. But not everyone will go along. Montero voted ‘no’ on Dec. 18 to this proposed do-over, expressing concern about the possibility of violating state law.

The KCMSD is one of the wealthiest in Missouri. It is ambitious, wanting to expand into pre-kindergarten care. But it also is failing to improve meaningful academic standards for accreditation and, apparently, struggling with managing the day-to-day legal requirements of the board.

The post Kansas City School Board Member Resigns … Twice? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

According to the Post-Dispatch, not only does the charter school company appear to have rushed to open a school without providing textbooks and other school supplies, and with some classes held in hallways, but the school hired a developer who pled guilty to fraud earlier this year (in an unrelated matter). That developer also received historic tax credits for redeveloping an Imagine Schools property, and charged the charter school company $150,000 for the service of acquiring nearly $480,000 in tax credit money from the state.

In her letter to the sponsor of the Imagine charter schools, Nicastro minced no words:

We do not view it as the intent of the Missouri General Assembly that the department engage in intrusive regulatory oversight of charter schools, or to perform the administrative responsibilities of the sponsor. However, it appears from your public statement that [you desire] our recommendations in this matter. Let me be specific:

1) Announce immediately that the Imagine charter schools will close at the end of the current school year.

Some may rush to use Imagine schools’ negligence as evidence that many, if not all, charter schools are inferior, and that the expansion of charter schools in Missouri is bad public policy. On the contrary, it is necessary that bad schools close in order to enable good schools to thrive. In any endeavor, whether it is business, art, or even education, there will always be some successes and some failures. It is important to encourage success and limit failure.

The esablishment of charter schools, which are outside the traditional school district framework, is one way to do this. The theory behind charter schools is that the good ones will thrive on their own merits, and the charter schools that do a poor job of educating students will lose students and funding.

Based on the Post-Dispatch coverage, along with the mayor’s and the education commissioner’s statements, the Imagine schools in Saint Louis City certainly appear to be failing. As such, students and funding should be shifted to schools that do a better job of educating students. If the sponsor of the schools has been negligent in monitoring whether they have been successful (an intricacy created by our convoluted education law), then calls from the  mayor and education commissioner to close schools are certainly warranted.

However, I think that this controversy can also be a learning experience. Yes, Imagine schools appear to be failing. But failing is not unique to charter schools. There are certainly many public schools that are failing their students — be it in providing safety, an adequate mathematics education, or curtailing dropout rates.

For example, Yeatman-Liddle Middle School in Saint Louis City has had increasingly fewer students score proficient or better on the state mathematics test. During the 2007 school year, 35.5 percent of students at the school scored “below basic” on the eighth-grade state math test. In 2010, 64.9 percent of students scored below basic, a proportion almost twice as high as the students scoring below basic just a few years ago. A much more thorough review would have to be conducted, but it appears Yeatman may be doing a poor job of teaching math to its students.

Letting a failing school continue does not help current students. During the past Missouri legislative session, I testified before the House Education Committee to discuss a proposal that would enable parents of students at a failing school to trigger reform, a proposal that I think might help address the problem of failing schools.

Rather than treating Imagine as an isolated incident, let’s recognize that schools can fail — regardless of structure — and consider ways to allow that failure while encouraging successful schools to grow.

The post We Need to Shut Down Failing Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In this interesting paper, Show-Me Institute researcher Audrey Spalding analyzes a topic that has received little systematic study: the compensation of school superintendents. School superintendents are the CEOs of our public school districts. Missouri school districts spend roughly $ 9,500 per student in current

operating expenses. This rises to nearly $ 13,000 per student when capital expenditures are included. Superintendents, with the approval of their boards, make important decisions about how these resources are allocated.

They make staffing decisions, including hiring and firing teachers and principals. They set pay and benefits for these staff. They invest in technology and curricula. They open and close schools. In many of our counties, the public school system is the largest employer by far. This makes the school superintendent and the jobs and resources he controls a very important person.

So, how are these education decision-makers compensated? Which superintendent and district factors explain differences in superintendent pay? In this study, Spalding attempts to answer these questions by drawing on two new sources of data. The first are salary data reported to the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE). These data are routinely reported to DESE by districts, but they are not reported by DESE to the general public. Spalding filed a sunshine request to obtain several years of these reported salary data. However, there is more to executive compensation than just salaries. To get a fuller picture of compensation, Spalding made sunshine requests to all Missouri school districts for superintendent contracts. These contracts provide important data about other benefits that superintendents receive, including the use of cars, additional annuities, vacation time, bonus pay, etc. She coded much of these contract data and worked them into her analysis.

After publication of this report, interested readers will be able to access the underlying data including all of the superintendent contracts, on the Show-Me Institute's website. This project thus advances the institute's mission to provide solid economic analysis of public policy, and also to increase government transparency.

Michael Podgursky
Professor of Economics
University of Missouri Columbia
Board Member, Show-Me Institute

Collected Superintendent Contracts

The post Actual Pay: A Survey of Missouri Public School Superintendent Salary and Benefit Packages appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Once they are a single department, the management styles of the old departments will influence each other. No doubt the influence will flow in both directions, but ultimately either higher education will end up looking more like elementary and secondary education, even if only on the margin, or vice versa. I hope it will be the latter, because higher education gives far more autonomy to individual schools, instructors, and ultimately students, which I believe is one of the reasons that — for all its problems — the American higher education system remains highly touted.

That said, I fear DESE’s influence will win out. It is the far larger department, with a 2010 appropriation of more than $5.4 billion compared to Higher Education’s $1.3 billion. This will probably mean far more micromanagement of college curricula and a greater emphasis on pedagogy compared to content. That’s simply how DESE officials think; they create a statewide standard to make classes nice and formulaic. If this plan is implemented, I fully expect that within a decade there will be state-mandated standards for common courses (e.g., western civilization, macroeconomics, chemistry, etc.) similar to the Class Level Expectations (CLEs) in high school classes. Missouri will have a “seamless” education system, as one legislator describes it, but at the expense of the independence of our public universities.

The post On Education Consolidation appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Superintendent John Covington has a new vision for the Kansas City School District, and it involves halving the number of schools in the district from 61 to 31 or 30. Initially, the “rightsizing” plan sounds drastic, but Covington is adamant. The school district, which had 75,000 students 20 years ago, now has only has 17,500 students and 50-percent occupancy.

The plan (from what has thus far been released) may bring a much-needed change. By consolidating facilities, the school district can better allocate funds tied up in buildings and redundant administrative costs. The district has faced low test scores and budget deficits, and officials hope that this radical change will improve both. As for the cost:

As it stands, the District receives about $12.8 million net monthly less than what that it needs to sustain operations. Fortunately, the District currently has about $91.2 million in its operating fund to coverage the shortage. The Right Sizing plan will drastically reduce costs and wipe away the $12 million deficit. As with your personal budget, the District’s goal moving forward is to not spend more than the revenue it receives.

Given the reduction in student population, rightsizing looks like it could be a step in the right direction, but a full analysis will have to wait until more details are released.

The post “Rightsizing” Kansas City School District Potentially the Right Move appeared first on Show-Me Institute.