Susan Pendergrass speaks with Andy Smarick, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, about Missouri’s education leadership shake-up and what comes next. They discuss how to find the right commissioner of education, why outside reformers tend to succeed where insiders struggle, what the dismantling of the US Department of Education means for state accountability systems, why public complacency about poor academic outcomes persists, and more.

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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00):
Thank you so much, Andy Smarick, for joining once again on the Show-Me Institute Podcast. We love having you on and I appreciate you taking the time. You’re a busy man, so it’s really wonderful to have you back.

Andy Smarick (00:06):
I love being here. It’s a treat. Thank you for having me. I always like talking to you, but also anytime I get to talk about state-level education policy, it’s a treat.

Susan Pendergrass (00:19):
Well, I know that you have experience serving on a couple of state boards, both K-12 and higher ed. Just to bring you up to speed on what’s happening in Missouri: we have a relatively new governor, about a year in, and we had a state board of education where people stayed in expired seats, rubber-stamped decisions, and were very complacent, I feel comfortable saying. Our governor shook up that group and appointed new people who came in and said, what do you mean we don’t have bylaws? It was like, this is bananas. At the same time, the governor issued an executive order requiring letter grades on schools and districts, new school report cards. I don’t know exactly how everything went down, but our Commissioner of Education resigned, our Deputy Commissioner resigned, and our president of the state board of education resigned, all in about one week. So we are now straightening things out and there is a new board president. But this new, relatively new board now has the task of finding a commissioner. The way things have happened in Missouri is we always get a new commissioner from the ranks of the state education agency, maybe from the legislature, always from Missouri. Just a real this-is-how-we’ve-done-it mentality. And we have not been big reformers. No Chiefs for Change in Missouri. Like a lot of states, our reading scores for young kids are tanking, forty percent below basic for third and fourth graders. We have a state accountability system called the Missouri School Improvement Plan in which 516 of our 520 districts are fully accredited and about four are provisionally accredited, none unaccredited. So we have this meaningless accountability system where every district is fully accredited, even St. Louis, which I can’t even go into. So here we are, and I want to know a few things from you. Number one, if you were on the Board of Education in Missouri, how would you go about finding a new commissioner? What would you look for? And then later I want to get into what’s happening at the national level. We are not doing well academically, we have never had a bold reformer in charge, we keep doing the same thing and getting the same result. What would you do if you were in their spot?

Andy Smarick (02:59):
So in education, I’m going to wind up to this answer, so just bear with me for a second. Conservative can mean two different things. One is the traditional conservative view, which is to preserve, to stand athwart big, swift, dramatic, perpetual change. You’re trying to keep things the way they are because there’s a lot of wisdom that has gone into it and people are accustomed to it. In education, there’s also this other right-of-center conservative view, which is we have to be much more open to choice, competition, accountability metrics, and so on. And it seems that Missouri has been one of those very red states that has tended to believe in the first kind of conservatism: protect our traditional school districts, protect the hierarchies we have, protect the tradition of you grow up as a professional, as a teacher, then a superintendent, then maybe go to the state education agency. A lot of people believe that’s the way to do it.

There probably is an ethic among a lot of people to keep it that way. The only way you get out of that is if there’s a recognition among leadership that we can’t continue to preserve the status quo, that we have to change some things. That is a big step for a place that has elevated the idea of preserving for a very long time. If they get to that step, then they have to do the very tough things, which is start to pull out the Jenga pieces of that conservatism. The most important one is having board leadership and having a state superintendent who come from outside the state, and then having a board chair or board president who is not going to just do what the staff of the state education agency says or what the district superintendents say. We saw this work quite well about fifteen or twenty years ago. There was a big movement nationwide in educational reform led at the state level, and a number of states chose out-of-state superintendents and commissioners of education who did a terrific job of shaking things up and advancing a bunch of important proposals. The downside is a lot of them were so brash and so young, and I have to say so cocky, that they made unnecessary waves and kicked a lot of people in the shins in the states where they landed. So my view is a place like Missouri should pick someone from out of state for a state chief, someone with a long track record of success, but someone who isn’t so green as to think he or she knows everything. Someone with enough humility and enough time on task to know what they don’t know, and who can come in and be bold enough to make some changes, but not think that everyone in the state is a dummy who needs to be ignored. That’s how I would think about it. And if you have a board chair and board membership who get all of this, it makes things a whole lot easier. But that might be the hardest part of all. Who is your board president? Who are the board majority going to be? They have to be the ones with the backbone.

Susan Pendergrass (05:57):
Yeah. I feel like we’ve had people come in and say, well, I’m only the commissioner, it’s not my fault that the kids don’t read. And then people say, well, we’re a local control state, so it’s really the local guys’ fault that the kids can’t read. Then the legislators are like, well, who’s supposed to be making sure the kids can read? And technically, kind of they are, but them plus the board, and there’s just fingers pointing every different direction with nobody really taking responsibility. If we had the capacity for hard things, we would not have all of our districts be fully accredited. There’s even pushback on the letter grade idea because folks will say, well, then the teachers in those F schools feel bad and the parents feel bad and the kids who go there feel bad. I’ve seen some states change it to colors or something where nobody feels bad. I’ve also heard folks say it’s racist because a lot of the D and F schools enroll large percentages of students of color. So there are just all of these reasons to resist. It’s going to happen because there’s an executive order, but I feel like we’re going to have a hard time finding somebody who’s willing to do those things.

Andy Smarick (07:17):
Well, your state, like every other state, has a state constitution that makes the state ultimately responsible for education. Your state, like others, has both tradition and some laws that give a number of powers to local districts. The weird thing, and I’ve seen this in a lot of different states, is the state government ends up in a very weird position. The state can get sued and state leaders can get criticized if kids aren’t learning, because the state actually has constitutional authority to make sure kids are learning. But as a matter of practice, and often of state statutes, a lot of this power is delegated to districts. States then try to recapture some of that power through the accreditation system. It’s the way the state can say, okay, districts, you have the power to do these things, but we’re going to hold you accountable for results and we’re going to accredit you or not. And then it turns out it’s virtually impossible to take away the accreditation of these districts because of legislative pushback, and the state typically doesn’t have the capacity to run a district if it does take away accreditation. It just becomes a complete hot mess. That’s why you need state leadership who has some experience but also some backbone to say, this is how we’re going to thread the needle of state authority, state responsibility, local control, and still making sure that kids learn. This is not easy, other states have gone through it, but it isn’t the kind of thing that someone who has lived in Missouri all their life and grown up professionally there can do easily. It’s going to be hard for that person to get out of that box. Having someone from the outside who can start to do some bold things, including hiring smart, tough lawyers, having board leadership who’s going to stick by it. But I just want to emphasize this point: every state I ever talk to begins by saying, well, you know, we’re a local control state, our districts have all the power. Everybody says that. Go back to your state constitution. The state is the one that’s going to be responsible. And if the state has the backbone, it can do a whole lot. But whether it has the backbone is the operative phrase.

Susan Pendergrass (09:41):
Yeah. So about seven years ago we developed our own school report cards with letter grades, called MOSchoolRankings. I’ll just plug it. It was with GPAs, and this year for the first time I just took the GPAs and converted them to letter grades because folks found GPAs tricky. I put up the methodology. I took all the data from our state education agency, DESE, and just tried to make it a map you can zoom in and out on, easier to navigate. And my thinking is you have to do these things, make sure you say how you do it, and then people can argue with you and debate whether it’s right or wrong or good or bad. And many people have. A lot of people don’t like that the average is a C. I’m open to discussing why the average should be anything other than a C, but you have to at some point just make the move and then be confident enough in what you did that you can defend it and change it if people point out flaws. But this is where I think we struggle at DESE. They struggle to just put that out there because they worry about every negative outcome and consequence. And it’s like, yeah, but at some point to not do it is worse than to do it.

Andy Smarick (11:10):
For sure. And I’ve gotten to the point of realizing that if you have been in a system at different ranks for thirty or thirty-five years, all of your friends, your reputation, your pension, your income, everything about your identity is wrapped up with that system. Expecting these folks to suddenly turn the corner and say, you know, we’ve messed up, tens of thousands of kids are not learning right now today in classrooms, and we have to start holding the adults accountable for that, including teachers and principals and local school board members and local superintendents, and we have to be courageous about it. That’s asking a lot of people who are of, by, and for the system. It can be a whole lot easier if you just get someone from the outside with the courage to do it.

Susan Pendergrass (11:54):
Yeah. So can you think of an example of a state that has done this well?

Andy Smarick (12:02):
Definitely during the late No Child Left Behind era and then the Race to the Top era, a number of states found people from outside. Tennessee was famous for this. Arne Duncan ended up going to a couple of different places, including Rhode Island. New Jersey ended up picking Chris Cerf. There was a movement where probably ten or fifteen states did this quite well. My state, Maryland, brought in the superintendent of Mississippi after Mississippi had had so many gains, so she could carry some of those especially reading reforms to our state. This is not uncommon. Texas did something like this for a while. Louisiana became very famous during the John White era for doing this. But in all of these cases it began often with a governor, and then some members of a state legislature who said, we just can’t keep doing things the way we’ve done in the past. We have to do things differently. Once the governor says something like that, he or she can appoint people to the Board of Education who will do things differently, and the legislature, at least his or her party, will start to fall in line, and the media then starts to understand how serious it is. It is hard to do this without the governor leaning forward and giving the blessing to the bureaucracy to do things differently. So the question for you is, is your governor going to spend any political capital on this and say things are messed up and we have to do things differently?

Susan Pendergrass (13:29):
I don’t know. I hope so. But I haven’t seen evidence of that. I suspect, though I could be wrong, that they’re looking more internally than externally. However, I just want to add one wrinkle to this context that we’ve been thinking a lot about at the Show-Me Institute. If you’re following the US Department of Education, I believe you used to work there. Is that right?

Andy Smarick (13:54):
Yes, back in the day.

Susan Pendergrass (13:55):
Last week they moved the Office of Special Education over to the Department of Health and Human Services. They moved the Office of Civil Rights over to the Department of Justice. The building where the Department of Education used to be is now vacated. All those people are over at an old Department of Energy building. It’s a significantly reduced staff. Without touching the Every Student Succeeds Act, they are effectively dismantling most of the structure over there, at a time when the current president said that sending education back to the states was one of his priorities. I’m particularly concerned that at a time when Missouri has this vacuum, we could be looking at the apron strings being cut, states being told to sink or swim from the federal perspective. You don’t have to maintain the accountability systems. The Secretary is encouraging states to submit requests to waive parts of the law. I don’t really know exactly where it’s headed, but that concerns me. Do you think they’re going to let off the gas on mandated accountability systems in exchange for flexibility?

Andy Smarick (15:15):
Such a good question. To begin with just some editorializing: it is astonishing that Congress has allowed this to happen. In general I’m a big fan of decentralizing education power to the states, but that they’ve been able to administratively dismantle a department without Congress doing anything about it is just shocking to me. Even members of the Republican Party twenty years ago, let alone forty or sixty years ago, who jealously guarded the prerogatives of the legislative branch to create departments and fund departments, would have been appalled at this. There would have been unanimous consent to stop this from happening. So that says a lot that Congress has just sort of excused itself from the discussion. It has been remarkable the extent to which that building where we used to work, and the thousands of people there, is just empty, and they are handing off all the tasks to other places. I don’t know how this is legal, but I guess they’re figuring out a way to do it.

Now, the people who are leading this from inside genuinely believe that education will be better off if Uncle Sam isn’t meddling in it so much. That requires a theory of action, or at least a theory, that the reason why things are bad is that Uncle Sam is causing them to be bad, as though if Uncle Sam backs up there’s going to be a sunnier future ahead. Or it requires believing that it is just morally wrong for Uncle Sam to get involved, and whether states sink or swim after he gets out, that’s up to them. That’s a theory, it’s an ideological approach, and they have the right to pursue it. Donald Trump was elected and he gets to hire who he wants to. But then, to your point, it starts to implicate the Every Student Succeeds Act, which still requires the federal government to do some things related to state accountability systems. And if you believe you have the power administratively to undo a cabinet department, I suspect you probably believe you have the power to ignore some federal accountability provisions and just allow states to do what they want. So we’re going to be left in this position of saying, all right, the federal government is getting out of the business of accountability, therefore the states need to do it well. And then anyone who cares about kids learning will ask, okay, are states going to do this well? And so I turn to you as a state leader. Is Missouri going to

Susan Pendergrass (17:23):
Yeah.

Andy Smarick (17:47):
kick butt and take names?

Susan Pendergrass (17:48):
I’m concerned. I mean, No Child Left Behind was difficult and a lot of people didn’t like it, but test scores went up. Strict accountability, test scores went up. As we backed off, the Race to the Top era with waivers, and then Every Student Succeeds, which allowed more waivers, states were able to lower a lot of bars. Some states raised bars, like you mentioned, Mississippi and Louisiana. Some states are doing a great job, especially with early literacy. Others are not. And so Missouri, I think of it like this: you have a college student and you’re paying all their bills. You’re writing the checks, ordering their textbooks, doing all that work. Then one day you say, you know what, instead of that, I’m going to give you $3,000 a month: you pay your rent, your utilities, get your own books. There are going to be kids who step up and do fine. And there are going to be a lot of kids who take that $3,000 and immediately go to Cancun. We know this. It kind of depends on what you’ve done with the kids so far. And I feel like we have lulled the states into a feeling of compliance. If we just tell you how we spend our Title I dollars, fill out this form, and report that our test scores keep going down, no one cares. There’s no stick. They don’t withhold the money. We just say our test scores this year are lower than last year, and they say, good to know, here’s your

Andy Smarick (19:14):
Yep.

Susan Pendergrass (19:22):
check. So if that’s how you were raising your kids so far, why would you expect them to step up and become suddenly responsible?

Andy Smarick (19:31):
Okay, I have to admit that I have learned a hard lesson in my years doing education policy, which is that I was wrong that the political system of its own volition will always push for big action to make sure schools are great. I believed that if we had accountability systems showing that schools were underperforming, there would be a perpetual energy within the public to say we have to fix this, that it was just a matter of making the knowledge available and then everything else would take care of itself. It turns out it just doesn’t work that way. You need leaders at the top to constantly push and say, we are not doing well enough, we have to do dramatic things to make sure kids are going to be better off. Otherwise, No Child Left Behind is in place for a while and then people get sick of it. Or you have some interesting testing regimes and then there’s pushback to that, or just resistance to Uncle Sam in general. And people like the two of us say, but kids aren’t learning anything anymore. We are seeing a cratering of student learning since the peak of No Child Left Behind’s learning gains. This is horrible. Kids just aren’t learning anymore. The Andy of twenty years ago would have assumed the nation would revolt and say, how dare we do this to our schools and our kids, we have to do something differently. Instead, I don’t want to say it’s crickets, but there has not been a major wave of energy to change things again. The only way to do this is for governors or presidents to say this is not good enough and keep pushing. It is the ultimate dog that didn’t bark. The story is why something isn’t happening. If things are so bad in student learning, why is there not a dramatic energy within the public to do things differently? So maybe I look to you. In Missouri, are people just satisfied? Do they just not want the hassle?

Susan Pendergrass (21:28):
Why do you think? Yeah, they are like, we love our schools. All the time: we love our schools. We love, love, love our rural schools. It’s hard, kids show up with a lot of baggage, it’s just hard. But we love our schools. God forbid we have tiny districts getting below fifty kids. We love it. There isn’t an appetite to say, well, thirty-some percent of our rural high schools don’t offer calculus, and we don’t think we need it. It’s like, well, those kids are going to join a world where a lot of other kids had access to these things. It’s just, I don’t know the word. Complacency for sure. And it gets exhausting to continue to talk about it because it feels like

Andy Smarick (22:20):
Yeah. So this is why it can feel that way. And listen, if I were a state superintendent, based on the things I have learned, I would always begin a big reform movement by saying, first, all of the things you just said, but sincerely, because I believe this. I would say I love our public schools. I know how much they do for kids. I know that we love our teachers. I know that these schools are part of the community. I know that they help shape young people in ways beyond reading and math scores. I know that we love to go to these sports events. I know that we love to go to our fifth-grade graduation. This is an important strand in the fabric of our community. We love these schools, we love our teachers, we need to protect them, and we have to do better. What I found in that previous movement of big, dramatic out-of-state actors who came in and took over is they were awesome at the we-have-to-do-better part and absolutely lousy at the we-love-the-schools-and-teachers part. And that just caused a lot of anger. It was toxic in the long run. It is so important to a state to hear the we-love-our-schools message. That’s why they end up picking leaders, board presidents and superintendents who are of the system, who sincerely love their schools and say that. But they’re bad at the second part: we have to do things differently. The key to leadership right now is finding someone who can say both. We love these schools. We love public education in our communities. But Lord, our kids deserve a whole lot better than this. We have to do some things differently. That’s a rare leader.

Susan Pendergrass (24:00):
Yeah. Well, I think that’s a great place to end, because what else can you say? That’s awesome. That’s what we’re looking at. We’re going to find out soon, and not just Missouri. Many states have the same problems. I would love to have you come back again, Andy. We love having you.

Andy Smarick (24:16):
I love getting emails from you or Zach asking me to come on. I’m happy to give my bad opinions on anything.

Susan Pendergrass (24:23):
No, you have such a good, crystallized view of these things, and your experience on state boards is invaluable. I do appreciate it. Thank you for taking the time. I know you’re busy and hopefully you’ll come back soon.

Andy Smarick (24:40):
Whenever you call. Have a great summer.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post The Case for an Education Outsider in Missouri with Andy Smarick appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Right now, Missouri only classifies a school as unsafe if it has a high rate of violence and a high number of expulsions for three years in a row. Because expulsions almost never happen, the conditions are almost impossible to meet. As a result, no school is ever designated as unsafe, and families aren’t allowed to transfer out.

Changing one word, from “AND” to “OR,” would finally make the rule work the way federal law intended.

What doesn’t work

Since the law passed, there have been nearly 19,000 violent incidences in Missouri schools and over 4,000 weapons violations. In 2024, more than 12,200 Missouri students attended schools that had at least one violent incident in each of three consecutive years, 2022, 2023, and 2024. Even with these numbers, the state has not identified a single school as unsafe.

Missouri schools expelled zero students in 2024 and only five students in 2023. With so few expulsions, the Unsafe School Choice Option almost never applies, even in schools with serious safety problems.

The simple fix: change one word

In places like Poplar Bluff, University City, and the City of St. Louis, students face serious safety problems each year, yet their families have never been told about their rights.

Missouri should replace the word and with or.
A school should be designated unsafe if it has serious violence, or a high expulsion rate, or weapons violations.

This one change would help families learn when a school is unsafe and allow them to use the transfer option that federal law gives them.

More About the USCO

This one-pager explains how Missouri’s overly narrow definition leaves families without the protections ESSA guarantees and outlines steps policymakers can take to fix it.

The post One Word Could Let Missouri Students Leave Unsafe Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Missouri parents don’t have access to accurate and easy-to-understand information about the quality of their children’s schools.

The Solution

Mandate the creation of transparent online school report cards (with an easy-to-interpret rating system, such as letter grades) that clearly communicate measures of school quality to parents and community members.

Key Facts

• The federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires every state to publish report cards on schools and districts. High-quality school report cards help parents make informed choices and help states prioritize schools for academic improvement interventions.

• The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has no rating system for schools or districts, and the information it shares is not provided in a way that is useful to parents or policymakers.

Parents Are Being Kept in the Dark

When done well, school report cards are a powerful tool for communicating school performance to parents. According to a 2019 Phi Delta Kappa survey, 66% of parents who are aware of school report cards read them, and of those, 82% find them useful.

Federal law requires the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) to produce report cards for every school and district in the state. While DESE has technically met this requirement, the current report cards are not useful. They provide a lot of data, but they do not label the data clearly or give context in which to understand the data.

What Missouri needs are clear, parent-friendly report cards that provide straightforward ratings across key performance indicators. These should include student proficiency and growth in English/language arts and math, with results disaggregated by student subgroup. This is not uncharted territory. Much is known about what makes a school report card useful, relevant, and easy to understand, and many other states already produce high-quality school report cards. Missouri doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel here. We simply need to follow the example set by states that have done this well. It is no coincidence that states with clear and transparent school report cards tend to significantly outperform Missouri on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

In 2021, the Show-Me Institute created its own website, MOSchoolRankings.org, with letter grades for all schools and districts in the state. Ideally, the legislature would require DESE to create something similar.

Policy Recommendation

• Mandate the design and creation of a transparent online school report card system that clearly communicates measures of school quality to parents and community members, including an easy-to-interpret rating system such as letter grades, for every school and district. The report cards should be mobile- and print-friendly.

The post School Report Cards appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post The Unsafe School Choice Option (USCO) appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Dr. Jim Wyckoff, professor at the University of Virginia and director of the Education Policy Ph.D. program, about the long-term decline in student academic achievement. They discuss how national test scores, especially for the lowest-performing students, began falling well before the pandemic, why the usual explanations like COVID or Common Core miss the bigger picture, and what states can do to reverse the trend, and more.

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Timestamps

00:00 Understanding Declining Academic Achievement
02:47 Historical Context of Academic Performance
05:43 The Impact of Policy Changes
08:31 Exploring Causes of Decline
11:14 Success Stories and Lessons Learned
13:51 The Role of State Legislation
16:49 Future Directions and Solutions

Episode Transcript

(Download)

Susan Pendergrass (00:00)
Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast, Professor Wyckoff of the University of Virginia. So you have a recent paper that really caught my eye. I’m puzzling over declining academic achievement in this country. And it’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot. And sort of as a companion issue, I work in Missouri and I’ve been talking for a long time that Missouri enrollment’s been declining and folks are like, well, yeah, the pandemic—the pandemic, kids left public schools, but they’ll probably come back. And I’m like, no, no, we had our largest kindergarten class in 2013. Any data forecaster, demographer would see this coming. This is not a pandemic problem. And I think it exacerbated it, but I think this has happened with basic student test scores in this country, where people are like, well, the pandemic caused it, and we’re gonna come back out of this.
You have a paper that’s out recently on the fact that maybe the pandemic didn’t cause it and it predated it. So I’d love it if you could just tell me a little bit about what you found looking back and why, in my opinion, it’s a bigger problem than many folks are thinking it is.

Jim Wyckoff (01:03)
Sure. So I’ve been following sort of NAEP trends, as a lot of people do, because NAEP is an incredibly reliable source of information about academic achievement at certainly the national and the state levels, and to some extent at certain large districts, the TUDA districts. And so I’ve been noticing this trend for several years now where NAEP scores have been declining—predating the pandemic by a number of years. And these declines have gotten large by almost any metric we might use to measure student achievement.
A lot of people saw the very large declines that occurred during the pandemic. And again, there was lots of discussion in both achievement and political terms about what this meant and how we were going to attribute these losses.
Last fall, I started to get more serious about wanting to understand these trends. Quite honestly, it came from a place of having some ideas, but really wanting to figure it out. The title of the article is “puzzling” because I spent a lot of time trying to better understand these trends—how large are they, when did they begin—and asking questions to help make sense of what’s going on.
One of the more surprising conclusions was that the losses that had been occurring prior to the pandemic were about half as large as the total loss that occurred by 2024. And that surprised me a little.

Susan Pendergrass (02:55)
Yeah, so we were on a bit of an upward trajectory during the era that a lot of people didn’t like, but No Child Left Behind caused a lot of anguish. I remember my oldest was in third grade the first year of No Child Left Behind testing in Virginia—SOLs—and it caused a lot of problems. But it did have results, right? No Child Left Behind, this high-accountability, high-stakes testing that people don’t like, actually improved test scores, right?

Jim Wyckoff (03:28)
Yeah, I think there are, as you suggested, large increases in NAEP scores from the early 1990s to around 2009. These increases were large by almost anyone’s standards—over 50 percent of a standard deviation, which translates to nearly two years of learning. So these were consistent, large increases.
Around 2009, the scores leveled off and then began to decline. During that 1990 to 2009 period, a number of policies played a role. NCLB began in 2002 and ran its course until around 2013 before ESSA replaced it in 2015. The best evidence we have suggests that math scores improved as a result of NCLB. Not by as much as the broader achievement gains, but still meaningful increases.

Susan Pendergrass (04:50)
Yeah. And I think it should be pointed out that in the ’90s, governors all met—actually at the University of Virginia—and there was a broader push around academic achievement. For our listeners, Missouri tracks exactly with the national results. We peaked in 2009 and have been steadily declining ever since.
Last year in Missouri and nationally, four out of ten fourth graders were essentially not literate. They didn’t reach the “basic” level in reading. We don’t know where they are between zero and basic, but they didn’t register on the scale—they’re essentially illiterate. And that, to me, is a crisis. I don’t hear it being talked about like a crisis the way it was in the ’90s after a number of major government studies. But that’s where we are. We’re back to square one, essentially—long-term NAEP trends put us back to the 1970s.

Jim Wyckoff (05:51)
Yeah, certainly for the lowest-performing kids, the decline has wiped out gains made since 1990. As you’re suggesting, these results have important implications.
Since NCLB and other developments in the 2000s, I think there’s been less emphasis on academic achievement. Other issues have come forward. People have denigrated test scores to the point where we’ve missed opportunities to understand what’s going on.
And NAEP is a low-stakes, low-accountability test—nothing really rides on it. That’s why we believe it’s a strong signal of what kids are actually learning. And what they’re learning has declined significantly, as you’re pointing out.

Susan Pendergrass (06:52)
Let’s talk about your speculation as to what’s causing this. I’ve heard a lot about smartphones in classrooms, and states are starting to get active on that. You suggest it might be part of the problem. How so?

Jim Wyckoff (07:07)
Yeah, not just me—others have made this connection. Smartphones and social media really took off around 2009. Their use became much more widespread between 2009 and 2020. If you look at the data, smartphone and social media saturation grew rapidly in that period.
There’s evidence suggesting kids have become less engaged in school. That’s led to regulations about phone use in classrooms. But the problem extends beyond school—kids are less engaged with schoolwork outside the classroom too.
It’s hard to definitively link smartphone use to declining achievement, but there’s reason to believe it’s a contributing factor. Still, I don’t think any one issue—phones, NCLB, whatever—can account for the full decline. It’s likely a combination of multiple factors that vary by place and time.
And I think we’re not good at nuance in education. But we need a comprehensive, systematic approach to address this. There’s no single fix.

Susan Pendergrass (09:08)
We have some states—people are calling them “Southern miracles”—like Mississippi and Louisiana, that are doing much better in reading. But it’s not nationwide. We have broad declines, and then these little pockets of success. What does that mean going forward?

Jim Wyckoff (09:27)
I’m not sure we’ll ever come up with a good causal understanding of what caused these declines nationally. But I do think places like Mississippi give us reason for optimism.
In 2013, Mississippi got serious about the science of reading and implemented it rigorously, with supports to help teachers. If you look at their data, they improved reading scores during a period when national scores were declining. In math, they at least held steady.
Now, their scores haven’t continued rising as they did before 2009, but they’ve fared better than most. So while the science of reading isn’t a silver bullet, it’s part of the solution.
States have a real opportunity here. That includes focusing on accountability, proven policies like science of reading, and funding.
Many states cut education funding after the 2008 recession and didn’t return to pre-recession levels, inflation-adjusted, until recently. Teacher salaries fell and in some places still haven’t recovered.
Teacher quality, especially in low-performing schools, matters a lot. And demographics play a role too—we don’t measure poverty depth well, and English language learners are increasing in number.
We need state- and district-level analysis to understand what’s going on and invest in the things that work.

Susan Pendergrass (13:22)
My biggest concern is the fourth-grade scores. These kids are probably in sixth grade now, and one day they’ll go to high school unable to read their textbooks.
We’re creating an underclass that’s not going to catch up. While overall test scores are down, the steepest declines are among the lowest 10 percent of performers. I don’t know how we catch those kids up.
We’re seeing a smaller student population and a higher percentage of students who can’t read or do math. What kind of workforce will we have in ten years?
We’re dabbling in the science of reading, but accountability has dropped. Do you think Common Core contributed to this decline—or at least gave accountability a bad name?

Jim Wyckoff (14:35)
Yeah. Common Core got incredibly politicized—as a sort of top-down mandate—when in fact it came from organizations like the National Governors Association that were pushing for rigorous curriculum.
The underlying concept was good. Many states still use Common Core-style standards, even if they don’t call it that anymore.

Susan Pendergrass (15:05)
Missouri is one.

Jim Wyckoff (15:05)
Exactly. And the evidence linking Common Core to achievement declines is very thin. I don’t think it played a significant role. But like you said, these issues often get politicized and take on a life of their own.

Susan Pendergrass (15:32)
Your paper has great graphs showing projections of where we should be if we stayed on the pre-2009 trajectory. Have you done projections from 2009 forward? Because it doesn’t look good to me.

Jim Wyckoff (15:53)
If we continue the trajectory we’ve been on since 2009—or 2013—about half the decline we saw between 2019 and 2024 could’ve been predicted even without the pandemic.
So the pandemic worsened the problem, but it didn’t cause it. I see no reason to believe the decline would’ve stopped.
Unless we make serious changes, the downward trend is likely to continue. Especially for the lowest-performing group, there’s little evidence of any turnaround.
Among students at the median or higher levels, there is some evidence of recovery in math. But reading remains a problem across the board.

Susan Pendergrass (17:17)
So what should we do? I work at the state level a lot—what should state legislatures or education agencies do?

Jim Wyckoff (17:35)
This is a real opportunity for state leaders—governors and legislatures—to act.
We’re on the cusp of seeing real consequences in the workforce and higher ed outcomes. Governors could champion this issue. Academic achievement isn’t the only thing we care about in schools, but it’s a top priority.
We need to move past the cultural wars of the last decade. Most parents still care deeply about academic outcomes.
For kids from low-income families, education is their path to a better life—and we’re not serving them well right now.
This should be a bipartisan issue. Conservatives and progressives should be able to rally around this.
I know there are institutional barriers and some bureaucracies may not want the changes required, but I hope we see leadership from some states. And when we see success, others can follow.

Susan Pendergrass (19:52)
Yeah, and I really appreciate your scholarly approach to something I’ve been speculating about. This goes way back before the pandemic.
If we blame it on COVID, we’ll keep talking about “pandemic learning loss” when the issue runs much deeper.
We need to acknowledge the path we’ve been on and chart a better course. Where can people find your article or get in touch with you?

Jim Wyckoff (20:23)
The article is forthcoming in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. My email is mikeoff@virginia.edu.
I appreciate your interest in this topic and would love to see more people dig into it. What I’ve done is just the beginning.

Susan Pendergrass (20:48)
I couldn’t agree more. We’ve got to keep puzzling through these issues. Jim, thank you so much. Take care.

Jim Wyckoff (20:57)
Okay, thank you, Susan.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Understanding the Decline in Student Test Scores with Jim Wyckoff appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This reminder came because most states are effectively ignoring the requirement. In 2024 only 25 schools nationwide were identified as persistently dangerous—15 of them in Arkansas alone. Missouri, despite ranking 50th in a recent analysis of School Safety, has never identified a single such school.

Missouri does have a definition on the books. Part of the definition is that a school must have an “act of school violence,” “violent behavior,” or a gun-free-schools violation in three consecutive years.  Unfortunately, there is plenty of violence and violent behavior in Missouri schools. For instance, there were 128 weapons violations and 335 violent incidents reported in Missouri schools just last year. A school safety hotline reported that they received nearly 1,600 tips of safety threats, including physical assault, threats to kill, guns, and drugs.

Yet there’s a catch. For a school to be labeled persistently dangerous in Missouri, it must also have more than five expulsions in two of three consecutive years (or more than 10 if the school enrolls over 250 students). However, schools can control expulsions and DESE data indicate that there were no expulsions of any student in the entire state in 2021, 2023, and 2024. Just 10 occurred in 2022. Meanwhile, nearly 13,500 students received out-of-school suspensions lasting 10 or more days last year.

Does it seem reasonable that no student in the entire state was expelled last year?

It is a policy failure that no schools in Missouri are classified as persistently dangerous, despite clear indications to the contrary. By allowing schools to manipulate their data—and in particular, to avoid expulsions at all costs—we are allowing them to circumvent the law. And the law exists for a good reason: to give students trapped in unsafe environments a real chance at success.

Parents have the right to expect their children will come home safely from school each day.  For children assigned to local schools that are persistently dangerous, ESSA is supposed to provide the opportunity to change schools. Missouri’s failure to take the law seriously has permitted persistently dangerous schools to operate without taking on the formal designation, and is a disservice to the children and families who are trapped in these schools.

The post Children Have a Right to a Safe Place to Learn appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As part of the Every Student Succeeds Act, passed by Congress in 2015, districts are now required to report spending at the school level. Unfortunately, those data can be hard to find, and aren’t available in an easy-to-access, user-friendly way. That is, until now.

Project Nickel has created a searchable database of school-level spending. You simply type the name of your local public school into the search bar, and you can find out how much it spends.

What you find might surprise you. Border Star Elementary, a beloved Kansas City public school, spends $21,982 per student per year. Sumner High in St. Louis spends $17,580. I could go on, but I recommend checking it out yourself.

To answer the question that will inevitably arise: The primary reason that different schools, even within the same district, spend different amounts of money is teachers. More senior teachers make more money than more junior teachers, so schools with higher concentrations of veteran teachers will spend more per student, on average. It is worth thinking about why some schools seem to collect large numbers of veteran teachers while others do not, but perhaps that is a topic for another day.

The post How Much Does Your Local Public School Spend? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In the coming weeks, Susan Pendergrass and others at the Show-Me Institute will dive deeper into the numbers. For now, I want to take a quick look at the data to show the schools in the St. Louis area (St. Louis City, St. Louis County, and St. Charles County) with the highest and lowest spending. I display the top and bottom ten high schools and elementary schools.

For a similar report on Columbia, Missouri, schools, check out the Columbia Missourian.

The post Highest and Lowest Spending Schools in the St. Louis Area appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The DQC publication is a resource for parents, explaining why growth data is important for understanding student progress and how it can provide insight into their child’s school. It even explains different types of growth measurements in non-academic terms and could help parents work through jargon that may be on a school report card.

Unfortunately, the Missouri school report cards produced by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) don’t clearly explain growth data like the DQC does. In fact, the report cards don’t effectively inform parents about student growth at all, let alone explain what growth means.

To be sure, Missouri school report cards currently have a “growth” column in a section labeled “Federal (ESSA) Data”. The screenshots below are from three different district report cards. The growth numbers are all indecipherable.

The explanation on the report card doesn’t help much either. The report card states that numbers above 50% represent positive growth. ‘S’ and ‘N’ indicate whether the data was statistically significant or not. However, DESE doesn’t indicate how much growth the 50 percent benchmark represents, or even what defines growth. This “information” is not useful for parents who want to gauge how their child’s school is performing.

DQC’s approach actually informs parents. To explain how growth is calculated, DQC asks, “Did teachers help students in this school do better than we expected them to perform, even if they didn’t get to a grade-level target?” Framed in this way, there is context to the meaning of growth data and what it tells us about a school. DESE and the DQC are both talking about growth, but the different ways they present and communicate the information can make a major difference.

Parents should be able to easily find how much a school teaches students each year. But as long as student growth information is hidden behind statistical jargon and vague definitions, parents may never know how much students are learning at their child’s school.

The post Making Growth Understandable 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.

In this report, we compare the report cards issued by Missouri’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) to the specific requirements listed in the ESSA to see if the state is meeting its obligations. Unfortunately, we find that not all of the required information is included in the report cards, and some of the data that can be found is couched in jargon and confusing language, making the report cards far less useful than they could be to parents.

Click on the link below to read the complete report.

Check out a recent episode of The Show-Me Institute Podcast on this subject featuring Dr. Susan Pendergrass and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Aisha Sultan.

Listen on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/show-me-institute/smi-podcast-what-do-you-know-about-your-school

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/smi-podcast-it-shouldnt-be-this-hard-aisha-sultan/id1141088545?i=1000449285680

The post Report: Missouri’s Report Card and ESSA Requirements appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Missouri has spent more than $6 billion in 2019 on public education.

Do we know what we are getting for our money? How well are our schools performing? Which schools are performing better than others?

Dr. Susan Pendergrass and Abigail Burrola have created a report card that evaluates and grades how well Missouri provides school performance information based on federal requirements in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).

Join us at this St. Louis Policy Breakfast where they will present their findings.

RSVP here.

Featured Speakers:

Susan Pendergrass, Director of Research and Education Policy

Before joining the Show-Me Institute, Susan Pendergrass was Vice President of Research and Evaluation for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, where she oversaw data collection and analysis and carried out a rigorous research program. Prior to coming to the National Alliance, she was a senior policy advisor at the U.S. Department of Education during the Bush administration and a senior research scientist at the National Center for Education Statistics during the Obama administration. Susan holds a doctorate in public policy from George Mason University with a concentration in social policy.

Abigail Burrola, Analyst

Abigail Burrola graduated from Azusa Pacific University with a bachelor’s degree in political science in 2018. She is originally from the Minneapolis area, and her policy interests include special education practices and rural school choice.

The post Missouri’s Report Card and ESSA Requirements appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

And guess who also eschews letter grades for schools? Missouri. The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) recently released the list of Targeted Schools (pretty bad) and Comprehensive Schools (the worst of the worst). Seemingly, this is to be compliant with the federal law to release the list of the lowest five percent of schools in the state in terms of performance, although neither list quite matched that mandate in numbers.

As I converted the PDF lists of Targeted and Comprehensive Schools to an Excel file that I could use (meaning merged with performance and demographic data), I kept having to remind myself which list had 64 schools and which had 323. Targeted and Comprehensive don’t carry much meaning to me. At least these 387 schools got some sort of label. The other 2,200 or so purposefully aren’t “labeled.” Rather, they get a score between 0 and 100 that reflects the number of possible points that a school received (with tons of extra credit points available) divided by their possible points. Parents in the state have been trained to look for the number 70, because that’s the threshold for accreditation.

So, which Missouri schools are doing well and which are doing poorly? Maybe ask your neighbor or the parents on the sideline at this weekend’s soccer game. They probably have some sense of what “most” people think are the “good” schools and which ones to avoid. They may be right, they may be wrong. I don’t recommend turning to DESE to figure it out.   

The post Welcome to the Club, New Mexico! appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

There are four primary areas that DESE needs to address.

1. Implementing the Missouri Course Access Program (MOCAP)  Last year the Missouri legislature passed, and the Governor signed, a state law granting all Missouri students access to classes in the MOCAP online program. MOCAP is a step toward providing students with expanded opportunities. Through MOCAP, students can take courses online that their own schools may not offer, such as advanced placement or foreign language classes. The law also allows a student to choose to take their full course load through MOCAP. DESE is responsible for implementing MOCAP. This entails (1) making sure that districts notify parents that they can access the program; (2) ensuring that each district has a link to the program on the home page of its website; and (3) maintaining a fully functional MOCAP website a complete approved course catalog and registration information.
2. Providing accurate, timely and user-friendly information on school performance  Under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), DESE is required to prepare and widely disseminate an annual report card for each school. The law requires that the report cards be developed with parent input and be easily accessible and understandable by parents. DESE continues to use the Annual Performance Report (APR) to determine accreditation status, but the APR is difficult to interpret and is a poor gauge of student learning. Under the APR system, nearly 99 percent of Missouri school districts were fully accredited by DESE in 2017, making it impossible to determine which schools are doing well and which are doing poorly. Individual school reports are available on DESE’s website, but they are difficult to locate and they don’t contain the full suite of information required. I hope that by December 31 DESE posts accurate, user-friendly report cards that include school-level performance data for 2017–18—as required by law—and I’m curious to find out how they will put these in the hands of every parent.
3. Making school finance data transparent and accessible  House Bill 1606, passed and signed last year, requires Missouri school districts to post their financial data online in a searchable format. Additionally, federal legislation requires DESE to submit school-level finance data to the U.S. Department of Education. DESE needs to make sure that these obligations are met in good faith and to the full extent of the law. Taxpayers should be able to easily determine how schools spend their money.
4. Adopting a high-quality accountability system that can be used for a longer time period  DESE should adopt a high-quality tool for assessing student progress, use it consistently, and return results in a timely manner. It has been difficult to see how schools are performing over time because DESE has changed the standardized tests every few years, making it nearly impossible to see whether schools are improving or regressing. Missouri’s most recently adopted accountability plan, submitted to the U.S. Department of Education under ESSA, was given low to mediocre marks by an independent review panel. DESE has an opportunity to get this right.

I have recently expressed my concerns over the State Board’s decision to rehire the former commissioner of education rather than embark on a national search for one who could launch us in a new direction.  Under the commissioner’s prior tenure, DESE was hardly an innovator for real reform. That could certainly change, and I hope it does.

This list is not an ambitious one. One of DESE’s most basic jobs is to generate, collect, and provide data to parents, students, teachers, administrators, policymakers and taxpayers. I simply expect DESE to do that job well.

The post New Year’s Resolutions for DESE appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As I noted in an earlier post, our scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), considered to be the Nation’s Report Card, have been basically flat for over a decade. For all the changes made to standards and all the accountability efforts, including multiple iterations of MSIP, we’ve made little if any progress. The national scores don’t look much better. In 12 years, American 8th-grade students gained just 5 points in reading and 3 points in math, despite huge bets on No Child Left Behind and the Every Student Succeeds Act.

But what about charter schools? This year, the Missouri House Committee on Elementary and Secondary Education went so far as to suggest that we need a two-year task force to study these new, exotic schools to see if they’re working. No need. In 2005 there were fewer than 4,000 public charter schools serving about one million students. Now there are over 7,000 schools serving over 3 million students. And while traditional public schools in Missouri and across the U.S. were making no progress on the NAEP, the nation’s charter schools were making double-digit gains. This even though nearly one in three charter school students attends a school that has 75 percent or more low-income students, compared to less than one-quarter of students in traditional public schools. At this rate, charter schools will soon surpass the nation’s traditional public schools.

Unfortunately, we can’t see NAEP results for Missouri charter schools because here charters are used as punishment and are relegated to just two cities. What this means is that, unlike in most states, it’s not possible to create a sample of charter school students in Missouri that can be compared to a representative group of students across the state.

The charter model gives participating schools the autonomy to innovate but demands that those schools either produce results or close down. Accordingly, we should expect to see continuous improvement, as low-performing charter schools are closed and what has been learned is used to open newer ones that are stronger. And it seems to be working—at least where it’s allowed to.

The post Charter Schools: The Education Opportunity Hidden in Plain Sight appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I guess it’s good news that Missouri’s graduation rate in 2017 was nearly 90 percent—higher than the national average. But have we really put those students on the “path to achieve their goals in life”? Or has a high school diploma become little more than a participation trophy?

Consider that in 2017, the percentages of Missouri 11th-graders who scored Proficient or above on the state assessments were 35 percent in English/language arts, 15 percent in math, and 20 percent in science. And, according to the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), just 42.5 percent of 2017 graduates were “College or Career Ready”—meaning that they met or exceeded the state standards for the ACT, SAT, COMPASS, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) or they received and industry recognized credential (IRC).

This is backed up by a 2011 study commissioned by the Missouri Department of Higher Education, which found that 64 percent of Missouri students who were first-time undergraduates at public two-year institutions took at least one remedial course, including 56 percent who needed remedial math. At public four-year institutions the numbers were better, but still one in five students took at least one remedial course. Taking remedial courses is expensive and discouraging.

Recently, stories of “graduation rate malfeasance” have surfaced in nearly 10 states. Nationally, graduation rates are at an all-time high even as rates of proficiency have stagnated or declined. What good is it to increase graduation rates if academic performance and college readiness aren’t improving?

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), passed in 2015, moves much of the responsibility for school accountability back to states. ESSA required states to submit accountability plans that include graduation rates as a measure of school quality. Most states are now implementing their approved plans and, sure enough, graduation rates are taking off. Does that mean we’re holding schools more accountable? Probably not.

As was pointed out in a recent essay by the Show-Me Institute, accountability plans—even the most complicated ones – can be toothless, gamed, and even ignored. Missouri has an opportunity to design and implement an accountability plan that gives parents meaningful information about how their child’s school is performing. They can also give parents options when their child’s school doesn’t measure up or isn’t a good fit.

A high school diploma should be more than a piece of paper. Missouri’s education system is responsible for doing more than just issuing diplomas – they should be making sure that there is something behind the diplomas they issue.

The post What’s Going On with High School Graduation Rates in Missouri? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

But as usual, a closer look calls such clear distinctions into question. In her EducationNext article on accreditation and its possible role under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Jennifer Oldham contacted the Show-Me Institute’s Emily Stahly for a better understanding of what the reinstatement of accredited status means for Saint Louis. Unfortunately, as Emily wrote back in January, in this case the news is hardly cause for celebration. The district was accredited even though most students scored below the “proficient” level in both math and English on standardized tests, because “higher scores in the attendance and graduation-rate categories made up for poor results in academic achievement.”

Oldham’s article examines accreditation from several angles, including the effect that loss of accreditation can have on districts and communities and also the incentives that accrediting agencies face. The entire article is worth reading, and offers some ideas to consider as Missouri adapts to the ESSA standards for accountability.

The post A Closer Look at Accreditation appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I haven’t had a chance to fully dig into the document, but at the 30,000-foot level it seems reasonable to me. The state doesn’t appear to be doing anything overly ambitious (it is only slated to intervene in the law’s minimum 5 percent of lowest-performing schools, it doesn’t appear to be using any new or fancy non–test score indicators to try to hold schools accountable) which ultimately might be the most prudent path forward. It looks like the state is going to take a hard look at the lowest-performing schools and try and leave the rest alone. Seems wise.

One area where there is an opportunity, and where I wish the plan was a bit more direct, is under Title IV. Eagle-eyed readers of this blog would remember that I wrote about flexibility that the state has under this provision in the law to provide some innovative direct services to underserved students.

On page 50 of the plan (emphasis mine):

“To overcome the lack of course availability, MO-DESE intends to improve access to advanced coursework for all students, but particularly for minorities and economically disadvantaged students and for those whose rural or small school settings reduce their access. MO-DESE may also subsidize fees for AP and IB courses. Furthermore, where advanced coursework, including advanced mathematics and science are locally unavailable, MO-DESE will subsidize course fees for the Missouri Virtual Instruction Program.”

DESE’s plan is laudable, and we’re singing from the same hymnbook when it comes to recognizing that far too many students in the state lack access to higher-level coursework, but I’d like to see more than one sentence in a 94-page document laying out how to solve the problem.  What students would be eligible? Would this be a formal “course access” program or just paying for courses ad hoc if and when funds are available? The state can spend up to 3%; will they spend that whole amount? Some fraction?

This document appears to be a step in the right direction. With some clarification, the state can take a bold step to fix the persistent problem of course availability in underserved areas.

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