This shift will ripple through many of our institutions that depend on population growth. Social Security is an obvious example. But there’s a broader problem: modern institutions are built for expansion, not contraction. Enter our public school system, which is already experiencing declining enrollment. Statewide, enrollment in Missouri public schools is down 4 percent since the pre-recession peak in 2007–08, a trend recent fertility data suggest will only accelerate. On top of this, traditional public schools must contend with the reality that families are increasingly choosing alternative schooling options (e.g., charter schools, private schools, and homeschooling).

Are we prepared to address declining enrollment in Missouri’s traditional public schools? My gut tells me no, and there are some worrisome indicators. For example, many Missouri school districts already have declining enrollment, in some cases stretching back decades. What are we doing about this? At the state level, one thing we aren’t doing is adjusting their funding to reflect fewer students. Missouri’s “hold harmless” provision allows districts with shrinking enrollment to continue receiving funds as if their enrollment hasn’t fallen. In effect, the state is subsidizing higher per-student spending in these districts (this is also happening elsewhere).

This bury-our-heads-in-the-sand approach is manageable for now, but as more districts fall into the declining-enrollment category, it will be harder to keep overfunding them; education is one of many state priorities and our budget must balance.

More broadly, I worry school districts will be slow to close buildings, reduce staff, and otherwise cut costs in response to declining enrollment. These steps are painful and politically difficult, but delaying them only narrows future options. Ideally, districts—guided by the state—would use realistic enrollment projections to plan ahead. With proactive leadership, we could adapt to a new era of declining enrollment while minimizing harm to students. But if district and state leaders wait until acute financial pressure forces their hand, the cuts will likely be deeper and more disruptive.

The post Are Missouri’s Public Schools Ready for Declining Enrollment? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Each state has already promised every student a free public education. This includes every student currently enrolled in private schools or currently homeschooled. If tomorrow those students decide to go to public schools, public schools would be required to accept them and to educate them. This means states and local communities would be required to fund the education of those students. In other words, the state currently has an obligation to provide funding for every single eligible student in the state.

The only way a parent loses access to the funding for education is by expressing choice. We discriminate on the basis of choice. Parents of school children have the opportunity to receive public funding, but only if they sacrifice their ability to choose the school they want their children to attend.

I cannot think of another public entitlement program that removes the benefit when an individual expresses choice. Poor students can use Pell grants at the school of their choice. Veterans can use the G.I. Bill at the school of their choice, public or private. Welfare recipients who receive food subsidies can choose the place where they will use those funds.

Critics of school choice might point to healthcare programs as an example of government funding with limited choice. Some doctors or hospitals do not not accept certain government funding sources, such as Medicare or Medicaid. That is true, but notice the difference. In that case, it is the provider who doesn’t accept the funds—it is not the individual who loses it based on their choice. Many private schools would like to accept funds but are not eligible to. That is a key distinction.

When we tell families they are no longer eligible to receive funding because they choose to send their children to a school that aligns with their values or provides the type of education that they want, then we are discriminating against them based solely on their choice.

This is not a system designed to meet the needs of every child, but a system designed for control. It is a system designed to force people into accepting the education that the government provides.

It would undoubtedly cost a lot of money to provide the public subsidy to those individuals who are presently in private schools. But the only reason it will cost new money is because we have been discriminating against families who use alternatives to public schools for decades. We have denied them access to the public funding that they should receive. It is time to end the discrimination against choice in our public education system. It is time to end the discrimination against parental power and educational opportunity.

The post Public Dollars for Public School Students: Discrimination of Choice appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dedicated funding for specific purposes creates an incentive for inefficient spending. We can think of a multitude of programs and pet projects for which policymakers might want to dedicate funds, but doing so creates restricted pots of funds that often get spent on unneeded items. For example, if funds are dedicated to technology, a school district may continually spend those funds to purchase gadgets and upgraded devices that are not really needed. Similarly, if funds are dedicated to a bullying prevention program schools will have to spend those funds on those programs. For some schools, this could be dollars well spent. In other places, this might mean hiring unneeded staff or purchasing useless curriculum.

The problem with dedicated funding for these kinds of programs is that the needs for all schools are not the same. Earmarking funds for a program will lead to useful programs in some districts and pointless spending in others.

A better policy is to provide a clear, transparent funding system that properly incentivizes school leaders to make wise decisions with their dollars. School leaders need more discretion over their spending, not less. They need the ability to shift more dollars toward curriculum when resources are needed to support instruction, or to spend more on after-school tutoring when remediation is required. Instead of telling districts how they have to spend their money, we could just let bullied students choose a school where they feel safe, like Florida has.

We can all agree that we want to see less bullying in schools, but we also want to see our tax dollars used wisely and effectively. Carving out dedicated funds for specific purposes is not the way to accomplish those goals.

The post Bullying and Public School Funding appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In this episode, Susan Pendergrass speaks with Jude Schwalbach, a Senior Policy Analyst at the Reason Foundation, about his recent article on the urgent need for school districts to either reduce staffing or consolidate to survive. They discuss the financial pressures facing many districts due to declining enrollment, the tough decisions schools must make to remain viable, the potential benefits of consolidation, the resistance from various stakeholders, innovative solutions to navigate these challenging circumstances, and more.

Listen on Apple Podcasts 

Listen on SoundCloud

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Tough Choices in Education with Jude Schwalbach appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

On May 8, 2024, Show-Me Institute hosted a virtual event where EdChoice’s Marty Lueken and Reason Foundation’s Christian Barnard discussed and demoed their K-12 School Choice Calculator.

The calculator was built to provide legislators, legislative staff, and stakeholders with an easy way to learn about the potential fiscal effects of funding educational opportunities in their state.

You can access the K-12 School Choice Calculator here: https://www.schoolchoicecalculator.com/

The post Watch: K-12 School Choice Calculator Webinar with EdChoice and Reason Foundation appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Recently, the Reason Foundation released a report on K-12 resources and outcomes. Not to minimize the comprehensiveness of this report, but it aligns nicely with what my fingers would describe about public education in Missouri over the last fifteen years. So let’s take a look at data from the U.S. Department of Education and the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) and see where we are.

Public school enrollment in Missouri is down.

Why? Nationally, birth rates have been going down since the Great Recession. In addition, Missouri has done little to make itself attractive to families with school-aged children. In several of our neighboring states families can pick any public or private school for their children. Meanwhile, more than 95% of Missouri families can still only choose between their assigned public school and virtual learning.

The number of teachers is up.

Why? This one is hard to figure out. There is little evidence that reducing classroom size improves achievement, but it continues to be a popular approach for Missouri districts.

Spending on public education is up.

Why? Spending on public education rarely goes down. Much of education spending is driven by the graph above and teacher contracts can be hard to terminate. In fact, due in part to the fact that district budgets are largely fixed, the DESE 2024 budget requests that the state raise the amount appropriated per student because enrollment is down.

Achievement has been declining.

Why? My speculation is that Missouri districts face no competition and are not held accountable. States like Florida with robust choice programs and letter grades for schools and districts have leapfrogged over Missouri in national rankings. Even as test scores decline, nearly every district in the state (514 out of 520) is considered “fully accredited” by DESE and the state Board of Education.

So, to recap—enrollment down, teachers up, spending way up, and achievement slowly tanking. Next year, Missouri will have a new governor and a new commissioner of education. Let’s keep this context in mind as we hold them accountable for changing the outcomes.

The post Missouri Public Education in Four Graphs appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Total expenditures include everything it costs to run a school district, from books and salaries to buildings and debt. It is exactly what it sounds like—total expenditures. Try to find this figure for the state on DESE’s website; I doubt you’ll have much luck.

DESE and the newspaper reporters regularly cite Missouri’s or an individual school district’s current expenditures per pupil. Current expenditures are operating expenses that do not include costs for facilities or debt. DESE readily displays these figures on its website and they are the figures you will see repeated in the media. (While you won’t find the total expenditure per pupil figure on DESE’s website, you can calculate  it yourself using DESE data—for 2022 it was $18,683.)

There are good reasons to report current expenditures. For starters, they tell you how much it costs to run the day-to-day business of educating kids in a school district. Moreover, they are more or less consistent over time. Total expenditures may fluctuate when a school district makes a big debt payment or decides to build a new building. Nevertheless, this does not make the total expenditure figure pointless.

Current and total expenditures are each relevant, but they answer different questions. Think of it like this. Can you tell the difference between these two questions:

-How much are your housing costs?

-How much does it cost to run your house?

The first question asks how much you are paying for your mortgage or rent and all of your utilities and incidental costs. The second drops the cost of the housing payment. If I want to know how efficient your home is, I might ask that second question. If you are on a budget and I’m trying to help you make sound financial decisions, I’m going to ask the first question.

In the public discussion about school spending, we are only told by DESE, public school officials, and the media about operating expenditures. Taxpayers care about this, but they want to know where all their dollars are going.

It is time to drop the Bruno Principle. It is time to tell Missourians exactly how much their school districts spend (in total) per pupil.

In the interest of promoting transparency, the Show-Me Institute has created a useful data tool: moschoolrankings.org. The site allows you to compare school districts academically. You can also toggle to look at school district finances. Here, you can see how each school district spends your taxpayer dollars.

The post The “Bruno Principle” of School Finance—Don’t Talk About Total Expenditures appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Of course, public education has a lot of moving parts and they all cost money. But it’s public money—our money. That’s why the Show-Me Institute decided to build a website that would allow anyone to see how every dollar was spent in 2021 in each of the 551 public school districts and charter school local education agencies in the state. MOSchoolRankings.org, which already has two years of school and district report cards with letter grades, now also shows where every dollar came from and how it was spent. These data were already available on the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) website as Annual Secretary to the Board (ASBR) reports. We simply put them into a single data file and built a portal to make it easy for users to dig into the numbers.

Did we include spending on land, buildings, or other capital? Those are in the ASBR, so, yes. Did we include principal and interest payments on debt? Yes, we did. Did we include district revenue from athletic event admissions and bookstore sales? We did. Did we include revenue that one school district pays to another school district? We did. Did we include revenue that parents pay as tuition to send their children to a school outside their district? We did. Did we include revenue from bond sales that are issued to build things? We did. If the district reported it to the state as a source of revenue or as an expense, we included it.

I believe that the public sector should make it easy for citizens to see how their money is being spent. I don’t believe that the powers that be should tailor spending numbers to include some things and exclude others. So we’re providing everything, and users can decide what they consider to be relevant. Heck, we even made the entire data set of nearly 500 variables for each district available for download. And the DESE accounting manual can be accessed on the site.

Of course, when you look at the numbers for a district, you may have some questions. Those are questions that ought to be answered by superintendents, school boards and DESE.

The post Follow the Money appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Those of a certain age in Kansas City might remember the landmark Missouri v. Jenkins case that wound its way through the courts during the 1980s and 1990s. The decision led to direct oversight of the Kansas City public schools by a federal judge and billions of dollars in spending,  but the key indicators that the case hinged on—student academic performance and racial segregation—barely budged.

I can’t do the whole story justice here, but I can highly recommend University of Colorado professor Joshua Dunn’s outstanding book on the case: Complex Justice: The Case of Missouri v. Jenkins.

Here is a brief excerpt from his conclusion, which might give us pause today as we think about the new spending heading our way:

Many of the problems afflicting urban education can be traced to school districts’ political and institutional arrangements, which give incentives to school boards and superintendents to institute quick reforms that do not challenge established interests. The KCMSD is no exception. In the 1970s and early 1980s, a new superintendent would come in with a “new” plan to rescue the city’s schools. The plan would fail. The school board would fire the superintendent and then commission a study to come up with another plan. That plan would fail as well. Missouri v. Jenkins was the continuation of this failed policy strategy by judicial means. Even with the aggressive oversight of a federal judge, the KCMSD’s problems persisted. A dysfunctional organization given all the money it asks for will likely use that money in a dysfunctional way. Fixing the “root causes” of the problem—poor administration and poor instructions—should be the place to start.

The post Repeating School Spending History appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Let’s take a look at some enrollment data to see if that checks out. The following table contains only those districts that saw a 10 percent or higher enrollment drop between 2019 and 2020, as measured by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE).

As it turns out, quite a few parents chose to leave small rural districts. These districts only enrolled about 5,300 total students in both 2018 and 2019, but now over 600 of them have left. Because districts can base their state funding on enrollment from either this year, last year, or the year before, these students will continue to be funded even though they’ve left the district.

Where have they gone? We know that the homeschooling numbers in Missouri have increased dramatically in the last year and I suspect that explains many of the missing 600. Is it reasonable to suggest that these parents don’t need any financial support? At the state average funding of around $6,500 per student, nearly $4 million in state funding will go to these districts for students who aren’t enrolled. Meanwhile, the parents who have decided that their district couldn’t provide an acceptable education this year are left to figure out how to create one on their own dime.

It’s a convenient story that all rural parents love their local schools and have no need for school choice. It keeps all power in the hands of superintendents, school boards, and local teachers unions. But the facts suggest an inconvenient truth. Will legislators pay attention?

The post An Inconvenient Truth appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post What is an Education Savings Account (ESA)? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

For those who aren’t aware, PPP was created by Congress to give forgivable loans to businesses and nonprofits affected by the coronavirus. As governments across the country shut down schools and businesses, Congress realized that it needed to provide support or businesses would go under, costing millions of jobs and carving deep scars into the American economy.

The first part of the story is important. Government shut these businesses and schools down. PPP was not a “bailout,” rewarding businesses that had acted poorly or were floundering. Businesses and schools had little say in whether or not they would be able to serve customers and did not deserve to be harmed as a result.

Lots of schools took PPP loans. This shouldn’t surprise us. As Dean Johnson, leader of the Crossroad Academies charter schools in Kansas City told The Kansas City Star, “I understand the economic realities, but one way or another we need to be able to meet our expenses, and if we’re trying to provide a more complex learning model what we certainly can’t be doing is laying off staff.”

But here is where the Star’s PPP story went off the rails. Rather than examining the effects of the coronavirus on local schools and their budgets, the author decided to pit charter and private schools against the Kansas City Public Schools (KCPS), making the case that it was unfair that charter and private schools could get PPP support while KCPS couldn’t. The article PPP-shamed them. It includes the predictable jabs at Rockhurst High School’s tuition ($15,000 for the upcoming year), and a quote from the local teachers union leader taking a dig at Betsy DeVos.

Like great Kansas City jazz, it’s the notes that it didn’t play that are the most revealing.

First, it left out the fact that KCPS receives more public funding than local charter schools, and even more per pupil than most private schools. According to the state of Missouri, KCPS spent $15,137 per student in 2019. Seems like an important detail to put in the story. KCPS is hardly in penury. It is certainly not “underfunded.”

Second, as Mayor Quinton Lucas pointed out on Twitter, in Clay County, federal CARES Act dollars were allocated to support the North Kansas City and Liberty public school districts. Jackson county could do the same for KCPS but hasn’t. Maybe someone should ask them why not.

Third, the article fails to mention that if private and charter schools were to close due to the economic effects of the coronavirus (as more than 100 private schools already have), it would be terrible for KCPS. State and local governments are already reeling from decreased tax revenue due to depressed economic activity; flooding schools with hundreds or thousands of new students would put tremendous strain on KCPS or any other public school district. If public school advocates could see beyond their immediate, narrow interests they would understand that charter schools and private schools are doing them a favor.

The disappointing thing about the Star’s article is that if it were not framed as adversarial, but as a system of schools wrestling with a shared problem, we might be better able to find solutions. Judging from the social media reaction, most readers walked away from the story angry at private and charter schools, not interested in how to help all children in Kansas City get a good education in the time of the coronavirus. That’s a shame.

The post The Star PPP-Shames Kansas City Private and Charter Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course, there’s no reason to wait for the final minute to report. Nineteen other states, including Illinois, have already released school-level spending ahead of the deadline. But Illinois takes it a step further and breaks out that spending by subcategory, including spending for instructional purposes, teacher salary and benefits, and classroom supplies. The state also has a high quality, organized school report card website that allows people to easily compare schools. Parents and school leaders can compare schools’ spending and academic performance at the same time.

The screenshot below shows a few randomly selected schools in Illinois and their spending comparisons, and also shows how much of school funding comes from different sources (local, state, federal or evidence-based funding). Further comparisons might reveal districts where one school spends more money per student and does poorly in academics, while another school that receives less money but does very well in academics.

Information about school-level funding will provide more detail and context for how schools are performing. Parents in Illinois and other states that have already published this information can use it to form a more complete picture of school performance. Why does it seem like DESE always waits until the last possible minute to comply?

The post Why Can’t Missouri Be Like . . . Illinois? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The study found no statistically significant correlation between the financial status of school districts and their charter enrollment. Charter school critics note that when a student transfers from a traditional public school to a charter school, their previous school no longer receives funding associated with that student (which makes perfect sense, since the school is no longer responsible for the student). But the data in the study gives no indication this process is causing financial problems for districts. When CRPE looked at long-term trends regarding charter enrollment and the number of districts in financial distress, it found that while charter enrollment has steadily increased, the number of districts in financial distress has not increased every year.

Many factors contribute to financial struggles in school districts. Costs of pensions, benefits and grossly overestimating enrollment can cause a district to be short on money. These are the real causes of financial troubles in school districts, not the convenient bogeyman of charter schools. While the study looked at California schools, there’s no real reason to think the results would be different in Missouri. Charter schools shouldn’t be limited in Missouri out of misplaced worry that they will financially harm school districts; they should instead be expanded for the opportunities they provide students.

The post Charter Schools Don’t Cause Financial Distress appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Here are some of the highlights:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new essay by Gail Heyne Hafer and Rik Hafer explores questions like these by examining data across Missouri counties to track not only economic outcomes but also social behavior in order to see whether different levels of education produce different outcomes at the county level and to inform debate about how educational funding should be allocated across the state.

Click on the link below to read the entire essay.

The post Education, Income, and Social Behavior Across Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A new essay by Gail Heyne Hafer and Rik Hafer explores questions like these by examining data across Missouri counties to track not only economic outcomes but also social behavior in order to see whether different levels of education produce different outcomes at the county level and to inform debate about how educational funding should be allocated across the state.

Click on the link below to read the entire essay.

The post Essay: Education, Income, and Social Behavior Across Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.