#1: It should be difficult to fire teachers, and their pay should primarily depend on how long they have worked.

#2: It should be difficult to fire teachers, but better teachers should get paid more than worse teachers.

#3: Being a teacher should be like any other job, where better teachers get paid more and worse teachers can be easily fired or get paid less.

Sixty percent of participants agreed with position three—teachers should be paid like any other job. This is surprising because of the outcry usually associated with weakening teacher labor protections and awarding teachers merit pay.

However, paying teachers like other professionals is reasonable, and this type of pay structure could be beneficial to students, teachers, and principals alike.

How could Missouri move toward a pay structure that most voters prefer? An initial challenge is measuring teacher quality—if better teachers are to be paid more, we must be able to identify them. There have been plenty of teacher evaluation systems where the evaluations are unhelpful; nearly all teachers are rated as exceeding expectations, and there is not meaningful differentiation. But there are also exceptions. A notable example is right next door in Tennessee: The Tennessee Educator Accelerator Model (TEAM).

TEAM calculates a rating for each teacher on a 1–5 scale based on announced and unannounced in-class observations, academic growth data, and student performance data. A holistic system like TEAM would be a fair way to rate teachers, and principals could use the ratings to inform teacher pay in their schools.

Twelve years ago, a ballot initiative in Missouri on this topic was soundly defeated (the initiative did have other controversial items attached to it). But two years ago, the Missouri Legislature passed Senate Bill 727, which allows for pay differentiation for teachers in hard-to-staff subject areas, like special education or physics, and those teaching in hard-to-staff schools.

This was a big step in the right direction, as noted by the blue ribbon commission assembled to tackle Missouri’s perceived teacher shortage. One member of the commission stated:

The biggest surprise to us businesspeople serving on the Blue Ribbon Commission is the lack of flexibility you all [the board] have for meeting high-need positions, it’s unbelievably inappropriate in today’s highly competitive market.

Paying all teachers the same, regardless of subject or school, was a longstanding policy that Missouri policymakers were right to reconsider and change. We need to continue that momentum and consider merit pay next.

The post We Need to Reconsider How We Pay Teachers appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

We’ve written a lot at the Show-Me Institute lately about A–F letter grades for public schools. The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) will soon begin assigning these grades to all schools and districts under an executive order from Governor Kehoe. Legislation to codify the order may follow, depending on how the 2026 session unfolds.

A central component of these letter grades is student growth. Growth measures how much students learn over the course of a year, based on state assessments. To estimate growth, the state uses a statistical model to generate a “predicted” level of progress for each student. Schools and districts are then evaluated based on how their students perform relative to those predictions. In simple terms, high-growth schools are those where students consistently outperform expectations. You can read more about the Missouri Growth Model here.

I’ve studied academic growth extensively and believe it is the most accurate indicator of school effectiveness we have. No other measure comes close.

New evidence in support of this view comes from a study by researchers at MIT. The study compares test-score growth to a popular alternative for evaluating school quality: schoolwide surveys. The authors assess how well growth-based and survey-based measures predict important student outcomes, including high school graduation, graduating with distinction, and college enrollment and persistence.

The MIT study was conducted in New York City, where the district administers surveys to students, families, teachers, and staff. The surveys are designed to capture school climate across several domains: rigorous instruction, teacher collaboration, supportive environments, and trust. School surveys are intuitively appealing, especially for those who are skeptical of standardized tests. But how do they stack up to growth when it comes to identifying schools that produce strong outcomes for students?

The answer: not very well. The surveys are a little better at predicting high school graduation, but much worse at predicting more meaningful and differentiated outcomes including graduating high school with an advanced diploma, enrolling in college, and persistence in college. The authors conclude: “From the point of view of parents seeking to boost their children’s odds of going to college, test information is most valuable.”

The research evidence on the value of student growth as an indicator of school quality is overwhelming. This is just the newest study to add to the list. School surveys are nice, but when it comes to identifying effective schools, objectively measured growth is far superior.

The post Test-Score Growth Is the Best Metric We Have for Understanding School Performance appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The Missouri House of Representatives recently passed a bill requiring that the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) assign A–F letter grades to schools and districts statewide. The bill now heads to the Senate, which is also considering its own version.

The legislation is meant to build on and improve Governor Kehoe’s executive order from January. Unfortunately, it does not improve on the executive order; in fact, the version that emerged from the House is much worse.

The main problem with the House bill is that it has veered off topic. Governor Kehoe’s short and simple executive order mandates letter grades based on academic performance. This is what we need. The House bill adds language that would create new school climate ratings based on surveys of teachers, parents, and students, which would also go on the report card.

This is problematic for three reasons:

Most importantly, it will distract us from academic outcomes. Academics are where our schools are struggling, and until we focus on them, the situation is not going to improve. This is illustrated most easily with data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, which is widely viewed as providing the most credible test data in the country. Here are charts showing changes over time in Missouri’s national rank on NAEP, in 4th- and 8th-grade reading, since about the turn of the century:

Our 4th-grade reading results are especially bleak—we rank 38th out of the 50 states as of 2024, whereas two decades earlier we ranked in the low twenties. Today, an alarming 42 percent of our 4th graders score Below Basic on NAEP.

Making matters worse, our ranking decline since about 2015 is in the context of generally declining test scores nationwide. Our scores are declining faster than the rest of a declining nation.

Governor Kehoe was correct to focus on academic outcomes, and the focus should stay that way.

Unlike data on academic achievement, which we already collect, survey data for this new school-climate requirement do not exist. It is difficult to develop and implement a high-quality survey with a high response rate. Have our lawmakers considered how we would get these surveys done?

As one of several concrete technical issues, consider the survey response rate. We cannot make parents fill out surveys. So, what if they don’t? What if we end up with schools and districts where fewer than 10 percent of parents fill out a survey (which is very possible)? Are we going to hold a school with a 10-percent parent response rate accountable for negative survey results? If the results look good, are we going to give the school a high rating?

Even if we ignore the first two issues, do we really want to compel DESE to undertake this work? We hear a lot of grumbling around the capitol about how DESE has gotten too big. This is how that happens. Developing and administering surveys to Missouri’s more than 800,000 students and their parents, and 70,000 teachers, across thousands of schools and hundreds of districts would require more administrative expansion. That is far outside the low-cost, straightforward scope of the original report card plan.

Governor Kehoe issued a clear and simple executive order on school and district report cards in January, which properly emphasizes academic performance. The order is fundamentally sound. There’s always room for improvement, but the legislation that came out of the House has moved this effort in the wrong direction. We hope our lawmakers can get it back on track.

The post Legislation on A–F Report Cards for Schools and Districts Has Gone Sideways appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Eric basically said, “Why do it all at once? Why not experiment at one school?” This suggestion may not make sense in a small, rural school district with one elementary school, but it makes perfect sense for a larger school district. Take the Independence School District, for example. The district has over 14,000 students and 20 elementary schools. The district decided to move to a four-day school week.

Think about what district leadership could have done if they had approached this like a researcher.

The Independence School District could have selected two elementary schools to pilot a four-day school week. If it is as appealing as the district says it is, then many teachers and students would likely want to move to that school. The district could have held a lottery to randomly accept teachers and students into the school.

Then we could have had a random assignment evaluation of the school district that moved to the four-day school week. We would have had a group of students in a five-day school and a group in a four-day school and the only difference between the two groups would have been random chance. This is the gold standard of social science research.

I understand the impulse of superintendents and school boards to consider the four-day school week, but they do not have to make the move all or nothing. Pilot it. Evaluate it rigorously. A move this significant deserves that kind of consideration.

The post Considering the Four-Day School Week? Pilot It and Evaluate It appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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.

Okay, I guess you would start by grading on a curve. Then, you would want to make sure that there is a lot of extra credit available. Finally, you would give credit for things like showing up, finishing, and being ready to take another class the next semester.

So, here’s what you might come up with for a grading scale:

• Two tests worth 16 points each, with two ways to earn up to 12 extra credit points on each of them, and one test worth 8 points with up to 6 extra credit points.
• Three homework assignments worth a total of 10 points, but with two ways to earn up to 7.5 points of extra credit.
• Showing up at least 90 percent of the time gets you 10 points, but there’s up to 7.5 points of extra credit if you show up more than you did the last time.
• Finishing gets you up to 30 points – almost as much as the tests! And, there’s up to 24 points of extra credit. Plus – and this is the kicker – you can finish in one semester, or take an extra month, an extra two months, or even finish in two semesters, whichever works out best for you.
• Finally, proving (through a variety of ways) that you’re ready for the next class, is worth 30 points, with up to 22.5 points of extra credit.

Now, to get an A, a student needs to get at least 84 of the “real” 120 points—but since there are 90 extra credit points to work with, a student really just needs 84 points out of a possible 210 to get that A.

Great news! At the end of the semester, you give out 512 A’s (86 A+’s with perfect scores!), 5 B’s, and just one C. That ought to keep the parents happy. As far as they know, everyone learned an A’s worth of material.

This is effectively the grading scale that the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) uses to hold schools and districts accountable. It’s called the APR, and its loaded with opportunities for extra credit. Let’s just look at academic achievement, the area we’d all probably agree is most important. Districts are evaluated out of a possible 40 points, divided among math, reading, and social studies. However, a district can get up to 30 extra points if students show growth or progress in these scores. That means to get a “perfect” score, a district only has to get 57 percent of the possible points available to it. That’s a heck of a curve.

There are four other areas in which schools earn points, and those areas are rife with the same problems.

So what does this mean, practically speaking? Using this scale, Kansas City got 82.9 percent of the 120 points, even though, on average, almost half of their students scored “Below Basic” across grades and subjects. The district clearly topped up its score with various extra credit opportunities. St. Louis Public Schools got 78.5 percent of its points, again with almost half of students scoring Below Basic. In the Ferguson-Florissant school district, just 3 percent of 8th-grade students scored Proficient or above in mathematics, and yet the district received 92.1 percent of its APR points.

Kids are more than the sum of their test scores, and accountability systems should consider more than rates of proficiency. But getting students proficient in grade-level subject matter should count for something. And a system that gives passing grades to 512 out of 518 school districts with academic achievement all over the map is not an accountability system at all. Its’ a way to make everyone feel good.

The post Failure Is Not an Option for Missouri School Districts-but Is That a Good Thing? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

When a school district in Missouri loses accreditation, students are allowed to transfer to a higher-performing school district. In recent years, thousands of students from the Normandy and Riverview Gardens School Districts used this provision in state statute to transfer to some of the highest-performing school districts in the state. But students lost the right to transfer when the state board of education voted to give the school districts provisional accreditation, based in part on improvements in student achievement-test scores. Based on the Education Next study, we have to wonder whether those learning gains were just an illusion caused by the state making the test easier.

It is important to understand this analysis is not comparing the rigor of the learning standards in each state. Standards say what students should learn in each grade. The relevant measure here is what students must score to be considered proficient by the state assessment. While the tests are developed based on the standards, setting the cut-score is a subjective process.  The lower the cut-score, the higher the percentage of students who will score proficient.

In 2009, Missouri had among the most rigorous assessments in the nation. The two images below come from a report from the U.S. Department of Education, “Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto the NAEP Scales.” Look far to the right and you will notice that Missouri led the nation in rigor on the 8^th grade reading assessment and had the third most rigorous state assessment in 8^th grade mathematics.

What followed 2009 was chaos. Missouri adopted the Common Core standards and ditched our rigorous state assessment. The state then went through turmoil as citizens pushed back against the Common Core, the legislature called for new standards to be written, and the state shuffled through four different state assessment systems. In the end, we wound up with an assessment that was easier than the one we had before.

Forget for a moment the overall message that lowering standards sends and the potential it has to impact all students. In the cases of Normandy and Riverview Gardens, lowering standards may have had a direct and detrimental impact on students. The year Normandy lost its accreditation, just 22 percent of the district’s students scored proficient or advanced in communication arts and 23 percent did so in math, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In 2017, the district regained provisional accreditation even though the performance of students in the district was not substantially better. That year, 34 percent of students scored proficient or advanced in communication arts and only 19 percent did so in math. Keep in mind these scores were with the easier tests.

Missouri’s state board of education voted to give provisional accreditation to the Riverview Gardens School District in 2016 and the Normandy Schools Collaborative in 2017. It seems those decisions may have been based on the faulty assumption that the student achievement in the districts was improving, when it seems the state was just giving easier tests. At the very least, we owe it to the students of these districts to investigate this further.

The post Like a Sore Thumb: Missouri’s Testing Standards Buck National Trend appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“The benefits read like a laundry list of personal responsibility: more employment success, higher earnings, better health, greater education attainment, lower chances of incarceration, reduced likelihood of dropping out of high school, fewer teen pregnancies, and on and on.

Early education is good for business as well. Pre-K graduates show up on time, ready for work and with a temperament essential for work place success. They also possess confidence, curiosity and a greater sense of purpose, all of which will help the private sector’s bottom line…”

In short, next time I’m running late, I’ll just tell my boss, “Sorry, I didn’t go to preschool.” That ought to get me off the hook.

Preschool supporters like Schoemehl have good intentions, but often make the mistake of talking about preschool as if it’s some kind of cure-all. That just isn’t the case. While it’s true that preschool can offer some benefits for low-income students, creating a quality program is difficult. When preschool programs are constructed, they usually import some of the worst problems of our public K-12 system.

In a recent study, Vanderbilt University’s Peabody Research Institute performed an independent evaluation of the state’s Voluntary Prekindergarten program (TN-VPK). TN-VPK offers a full-day prekindergarten option for four-year-olds. The program focuses on the neediest children in the state.

Despite previous findings that showed that the Tennessee prekindergarten program was successful in producing improvements in academic skills by kindergarten, Vanderbilt found that there were no statistically significant differences between TN-VPK participants and nonparticipants by the end of first grade. Brookings Institution senior fellow Russ Whitehurst called the results “devastating for advocates of the expansion of state pre-K programs.”

In his letter, Schoemehl wasn’t necessarily advocating for a state-based program, “If we want our children to grow into responsible adults, then our kids need better options and those options need to start at birth,” he said. Schoemehl is right about one thing—options are key.

A targeted, market-driven program could deliver at least some of the results Schoemehl discussed, though no preschool model is a silver bullet. Missouri already has a large private preschool market. A voucher program that allows parents to choose the option that makes sense for their work schedules and children’s needs is a far better method of expanding access to early childhood education than simply adding a grade to an already struggling public K-12 system.

The post Preschool: Silver Bullet? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Mathematica, a leading education research firm, recently released an impressive evaluation of KIPP middle schools (the Missouri schools were not included in this study). Using a rigorous gold-standard research design, the researchers explored the impact of KIPP schools on student achievement.

What they found was not surprising to me: “KIPP middle schools have positive and statistically significant impacts on student achievement across all four academic subjects examined . . .”

I have written fairly extensively about KIPP schools on the Show-Me Daily blog, in Phi Delta Kappan, and in two pieces that are forthcoming in peer-reviewed journals (Social Science Quarterly and The Rural Educator).

KIPP’s success is often chalked up to hard work. While that is certainly a large part of it, I believe there is a bit more that we can learn from KIPP schools. In the Phi Delta Kappan piece, which I penned with Bob Maranto, we wrote:

What distinguishes KIPP is not just hard work, but thoughtful work linking the daily processes of schooling to the goals of schooling, in this case, success in college. Day-to-day tactics reflect broader themes: having a clear mission and hiring staff who support the mission, building student culture to sup­port the mission, ensuring consistency, building rela­tionships, empowering principals to lead, and using frequent measurement of success to motivate teach­ers and students.

Not all schools will share the same mission as KIPP or be just like KIPP, nor should they; but every school leader can learn from KIPP and apply these lessons to their schools.

The post Lessons From KIPP Charter Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.