Susan Pendergrass talks with Matthew Ladner, senior advisor for education policy implementation at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, about a recent Washington Post article blaming Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts for school closures in the Roosevelt Elementary School District. They unpack the real reasons behind declining enrollment, the role of open enrollment and charter schools, and why most Arizona students exercising school choice are still in public schools. The discussion covers how media narratives overlook parent-driven decisions, the political resistance to letting kids leave low-performing districts, and why open enrollment could be a game changer for states like Missouri. Ladner also shares his broader perspective on the post-COVID shift toward educational self-reliance and what it means for the future of public education.

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Susan Pendergrass (00:00)
Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast this morning, Matt Ladner of the Heritage Foundation. You are no stranger to Arizona education or school choice, right? Nor am I. I feel like I could be wrong, but we met at the Goldwater Institute around the year 2002. Does that sound right? It’s been a minute and it was so—

Matthew Ladner (00:03)
That could be, yes, indeed.

Susan Pendergrass (00:28)
It was surprising to me to see in the Washington Post a week or so ago, basically a hit piece on Arizona education. Because oftentimes Arizona’s held up like Florida as one of the states that’s really making strides in both test scores overall, but in particular in Arizona, test scores and growth scores for low-income kids. They’ve really taken bold moves and made an actual difference in outcomes.

And yet we have this piece that says because Arizona is giving parents the option of a scholarship instead of an assigned public school, that is killing this poor Roosevelt Elementary School in Phoenix. I assume you saw the article.

Matthew Ladner (01:08)
I did indeed. Well, so I moved to Arizona in 2003. Of course, I was doing work here before I moved here. So we probably met the year before at the Goldwater Institute.

Susan Pendergrass (01:10)
What’s your take? What’s your hot take?

Matthew Ladner (01:24)
The first I heard of the Roosevelt Elementary School District was in 2005, when someone I worked with had a child who was attending a Roosevelt school and was brutally assaulted. By brutally assaulted, I mean rushed to the emergency room based on what happened to this child.

Susan Pendergrass (01:39)
My gosh.

Matthew Ladner (01:49)
Obviously, the school administration did not react well. In fact, they questioned whether the attack had been provoked—classic blame-the-victim. At that time, I put my coworker in touch with someone who did informally what we would today call navigation—helping people find schools.

Susan Pendergrass (01:59)
Thanks.

Matthew Ladner (02:13)
At that time, it was incredibly difficult to find a school for this woman’s children. The school year had already started. There were charter schools in South Phoenix, where the Roosevelt Elementary School District is located, but they had waitlists. We had scholarship tax credits, but the school year had already started, the money had already been committed, and there were waitlists.

We had open enrollment, but school districts were not interested in taking students from Roosevelt. In fact, I recall my coworker calling about an open enrollment transfer, and when she said her kids attended Roosevelt Elementary, they hung up the phone on her. It was visceral. She was almost as stuck as she would have been in 1993, the year before Arizona started any kind of school choice.

Fast-forward 20 years, no one in Arizona is stuck like that anymore. Every child has access to an ESA program. While only a minority actually use it, it’s available to everyone. That, I believe, motivates these drive-by shooting journalistic exercises, because very powerful vested interests don’t like people having the option of leaving.

If you read the Washington Post article, the unstated hypothesis is that the world would be a better place if people like my former coworker did not have the option of going somewhere else.

Susan Pendergrass (04:04)
That’s exactly right.

They chronicle the closing of an elementary school in that district. People are sad, heartbroken, and anxious. It’s a tragic story. But dwindling enrollment is less due to the ESA program and more due to the fact that in Arizona, you can pick any public school in the state.

In fact, they cite one group of low-income parents of color who started their own micro-school to avoid going to that school. Yet the counterfactual is: “If only they didn’t have the option of leaving, this school would stay open.” As if we should have kept kids trapped in a failing school. Hard to believe that’s the case in 2025.

Matthew Ladner (04:52)
Absolutely.

It’s offensive to argue the world would be better if people didn’t have the option of leaving a situation that wasn’t working for their child. The reality is, the largest form of school choice in Arizona remains district open enrollment.

Back in 2017, a study of Phoenix-area school districts found that the number of open enrollment kids—within and between districts—was about twice the number of charter school students. And Arizona has the nation’s largest charter sector.

Susan Pendergrass (05:42)
About how many kids are in charter schools?

Matthew Ladner (05:44)
Today it’s around 21% of public school enrollment. Back in 2017 it was about 16%.

Open enrollment is the King Kong of school choice. If Arizona has a school choice justice league, Superman is district open enrollment. Then come charter schools, and trailing far behind are private choice programs.

I do understand people don’t like school closures. Even schools that are underperforming and half-empty have emotional attachment. When you move to close them, people say, “My grandfather graduated from that school—how dare you close it!”

Susan Pendergrass (06:33)
No, yes.

Matthew Ladner (06:55)
State data shows Roosevelt has 6,500 kids who live in the district and attend its schools. But 5,700 kids live in Roosevelt and attend a charter. Another 2,700 attend a different district. About 800 use an ESA.

A final report showed only 129 ESA students previously attended a Roosevelt school. If you’re running a 6,500-student district, you don’t close five schools over 129 students. The Post article was misguided and misleading. Roosevelt’s enrollment has been declining since about 2006. There’s also the baby bust since 2007, which Arizona has worse than most states.

Susan Pendergrass (09:11)
Right. And in addition to bad reporting, the article says this ESA program “offers a window into the GOP vision for K–12 education.” In other words, nothing to do with what parents want. It’s supposedly a GOP political strategy to kill public schools.

That’s damaging because a lot of people don’t read past the headline. In Missouri, we don’t even have open enrollment. Some of our lowest-performing districts demand to be carved out from letting kids leave because they believe they’ll all leave and the district will collapse.

For example, in Ferguson, only 3% of 8th graders are proficient in math. Yet they don’t want kids to leave, even though they’re arguably not even fulfilling the constitutional duty to provide a free and fair public education.

Matthew Ladner (11:02)
Yeah, it’s bad all around. The Fordham Institute’s open enrollment map of Ohio shows every urban district is surrounded by districts that don’t participate. Arizona is the opposite. Almost all districts do open enrollment, including Scottsdale Unified—where about 25% of kids come from outside the district.

They do that because 9,000 kids who live in Scottsdale attend elsewhere. Financial incentives pushed even wealthy districts to open up.

Susan Pendergrass (13:10)
Right.

Matthew Ladner (13:23)
The Post piece framed this as a GOP vision, but really it’s about giving families dignity and autonomy. The underlying hypothesis was that low-income Hispanic and African American parents in Roosevelt are doing something wrong by making the best choices for their kids. That’s offensive, and bad reporting on top of it.

Susan Pendergrass (14:14)
Right. In Missouri, we rank all schools. When we launched that website, protesters said it was racist because many low-performing schools enrolled Black and brown kids. But those kids are already stuck in F schools. Shouldn’t we let them out?

Instead, the approach is: “Let’s not tell them it’s an F school, and if they find out, let’s not let them out.” That’s insulting to parents.

Meanwhile, in St. Louis, schools are losing kids but the district passed a moratorium on new charters because they know a new charter would fill up immediately.

Matthew Ladner (15:42)
Right.

Susan Pendergrass (15:43)
What’s your global view? In Missouri, we’re fighting lawsuits against our scholarship program. Do you see this as a last gasp, or what?

Matthew Ladner (16:03)
Not a last gasp. The struggle will continue past our lifetimes. But we are making progress.

The reason you see lawsuits and agenda-driven journalism is that there was an awakening during COVID. People realized the district system isn’t run for parents—it’s captured by unions and contractors. Schools are not about your kids. They’re about employees and contracts.

Now we’re seeing a self-reliance movement in education—school choice, homeschooling, co-ops. It’s growing. And frankly, Randy Weingarten’s actions during COVID made her the poster child for this failure.

Susan Pendergrass (18:18)
In terms of keeping schools closed and how she reacted?

Matthew Ladner (18:21)
Exactly. If you didn’t realize during COVID that the system wasn’t about you, someone needs to draw you a picture.

Susan Pendergrass (18:33)
The protests with coffins in the street, saying we were sending teachers to their deaths—they overplayed it a bit.

Matthew Ladner (18:37)
Yeah. And now we’re in a different environment. Young parents I talk to say there’s no way they’re sending kids to district schools.

That’s not to say everyone in districts is bad. There are good teachers trapped in a bad system. But the exciting part is teachers leaving to start their own schools. In Florida, there’s nothing stopping them, and it’s beautiful to see.

Susan Pendergrass (19:46)
Yes. In Missouri, we’ve cut off the teacher-as-entrepreneur option. It’s too bad. Every summer, parents reach out to me desperate to transfer kids to other districts, but we have nothing for them—except paying very high tuition.

It reminds me of your coworker stuck in Roosevelt. People say, “Just move.” But not everyone can move, nor should they have to.

Matthew Ladner (20:49)
Right.

Susan Pendergrass (21:09)
When I see a major outlet still saying in 2025 that ESAs are killing public education, when it’s really poor parents finding alternatives, that’s sad.

Matthew Ladner (21:28)
Exactly. It’s not up to me or lawmakers to decide where kids go. Families should decide, and that’s as it should be.

Susan Pendergrass (21:55)
Thank you so much for joining us. We have to keep this in front of people, and I appreciate you coming on.

Matthew Ladner (22:05)
Thank you, Susan.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post What the Media Gets Wrong About School Choice with Matthew Ladner appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Before delving into the growth results, it is important to understand the applicable terminology. There are two different subgroups for comparing math and ELA scores: “all students” and “selected groups.” All students is self-explanatory, but selected groups are comprised of students that have been historically lower performing—low-income students, Black students, Hispanic students, students with disabilities, and English-language learners.

The latest MSIP 6 results display growth statistics for 1,672 different traditional and charter schools, with charters comprising 57 (or 3.4%) of the total. Despite being such a small percentage of the overall sample, charter schools held at least 20 percent of the top ten, twenty-five, and forty spots in each category.

*KIPP Wisdom Academy STL was #1 in ELA Growth for All and Selected Groups

**Four of the top six were charter schools

***The top three, and four of the top five, were charter schools

While charter schools are greatly overrepresented in the top scorers for all students, they are even more so in selected groups. In areas with historically lower-performing students, charter schools have narrowed some of the traditional gaps. Growth may also be a better measure than absolute performance in some of these areas that have struggled historically. It would be unreasonable to expect schools with many underperforming students to compete with high-performing districts overnight. But growth indicates that things are moving in the right direction and that the gap may eventually disappear.

Opponents of charter schools often point to their performance compared to state averages. Since Missouri’s charter schools predominantly serve higher percentages of disadvantaged students living in St. Louis and Kansas City, these comparisons are not very accurate indicators of charter school quality. In certain circumstances, growth can be a better measure. And, as we can see, charter schools seem to be getting something right on growth that traditional public schools can’t yet match. Charter schools have shown they certainly deserve a place (and an expanded one) in Missouri’s education sphere.

The post Missouri Charter Schools Top the Academic Growth Charts appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Krissia Campos Spivey is a rising national leader in ensuring equality of educational opportunity for Hispanic families. After raising the bar for parent-facing school choice resources in Spanish as a part of National School Choice Week, she’s expanding on that work as director of the newly launched Conoce tus Opciones Escolares (CTOE). In tandem with National School Choice Week, CTOE helps parents explore all of their K-12 education options, in Spanish, year-round.

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Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Empowering Parents of Every Background with Krissia Campos Spivey appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The top line is that test scores are down pretty much across the board. The end-of-course (EOC) assessments in English 1 and Physical Sciences are the only two exceptions. DESE has made it very clear that last year’s scores can’t be compared to any earlier years. We can wait to do that in a couple of years. But there’s plenty of information in just this year’s scores.

Here are my takeaways (bear in mind that about 50,000 students who should have taken the tests did not. We don’t have any information on the type of students who were missing, but one can guess that most high-achieving students showed up):

• Virtual learning was a failure. Eight in ten virtual or distance learning students scored either below Basic or at Basic in math. Those students have either a minimal or a partial understanding of the material. English/Language Arts wasn’t much better. Two thirds of those students scored below grade level.
• We have a math problem. Nearly one third of students tested in math—including students who learned in person and virtually—scored below Basic. That equates to almost 150,000 Missouri students with a minimal understanding of their grade level’s math.
• We have a reading problem on the horizon. One group that I have been very concerned about during the pandemic is early readers. English/Language Arts scores dropped in all the early grades. But what’s really troubling is that out of 60,000 third graders tested, 3 in 10 scored below Basic and another 3 in 10 scored at the Basic level. That’s over 35,000 third graders that will not be able to read a math book or a science book unless we take immediate action.
• Our most disadvantaged students—Black and Hispanic students, students with disabilities, low-income students, and students learning English as a second language—were the hardest hit by the pandemic. Although the scores released by DESE for these groups bundled all three subjects together, the percentages of students who scored at the Basic level or below were dismal. Eighty-five percent of Black students, 87 percent of students with disabilities, and 74 percent of low-income students demonstrated only a minimal or partial understanding of the material.

So now what? The good news is that we have money and lots of it. DESE has received nearly three billion dollars from the federal government in stimulus spending. Although most of the money is directly distributed to districts, several hundred million will be spent at the state level. Parents are worried about their children being behind and they want services now. Students and families should be consulted about their needs and money should be made directly available.

Hopefully, more detailed data will be released soon. We need to understand this as the crisis that it might be.

The post Troubling Test Results for Missouri Students appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

One of the most interesting questions the Census Bureau asked concerns homeschooling. Surveys from EdChoice and others have found huge bumps in the favorability of homeschooling during the pandemic, but have those opinions translated into parents actually taking the leap and homeschooling their children?

According to the Pulse Survey, yes. Yes they have. When asked in late April and early May of 2020, 5.4 percent of American families responded that they were homeschooling their children. By late September and early October, that number had more than doubled to 11.1 percent. And just to be sure, the Census Bureau made clear in its questioning that “homeschooling” meant homeschooling, not simply students working remotely while still enrolled in their traditional school.

The Census Bureau broke down the findings by state, and in Missouri the percentage of families homeschooling nearly doubled, from 5.9 percent in the spring of 2020 to 10.9 percent in the fall. That means that more than 1 in 10 Missouri school children were homeschooled at that time.

The survey also found fascinating trends related to race, with huge increases in homeschooling from Black families (from 3.3 percent in the spring of 2020 to 16.1 percent in the fall), and Hispanic families as well (from 6.2 percent in the spring of 2020 to 12.1 percent in the fall). In fact, expressed as a percentage of all families, homeschooling is now more popular among Black and Hispanic families than among White families, only 9.7 percent of whom were homeschooling in the fall of 2020.

If these trends hold, they represent a sea change in the educational landscape of Missouri and America writ large. We’ll be watching for later iterations of the survey to see if they do.

The post Homeschooling in Missouri Nearly Doubled in 2020 appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The Annual Performance Report (APR) on the DESE website does contain some information. However, as Show-Me Institute writers have pointed out, this report doesn’t show how many students are performing at grade level. It lacks clear labels, leaving the reader confused about what the terms mean. It also doesn’t present the raw data, it only gives results, on an undefined 100–500 color-coded scale, after DESE has gone through the APR calculations. Those calculations are not explained.

Within the APR summary report is the subgroup achievement section. That’s a likely place to look for achievement gaps, but this section isn’t helpful either. It is hard to tell how students in different subgroups are doing because DESE uses a “super subgroup.” The super subgroup is a combination of scores from Black students, Hispanic students, students who quality for free and reduced-price lunch (indicating a low family income), students with disabilities, and English Language Learners. There is no information about performance from each group separately.  

In contrast, resources like the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” show student’s academic achievement and disparities between different groups of students.

Missouri’s NAEP result data can easily be broken out to provide a clear picture of achievement gaps. The starkest gaps are for students with disabilities. Only 6 percent of Missouri’s 8^th grade students with disabilities were proficient in math, and only 8 percent were proficient in reading. That’s 26 and 25 percent lower than the state average, respectively. Other subgroups, including students who qualify for free and reduced price lunch programs and Black and Hispanic students, also have lower rates of proficiency than the state average, as shown in the graph at the top of this post.

The NAEP results provide valuable information for parents about how Missouri students are performing. DESE’s APR Report, with its “super subgroup” that hides more than it reveals, leaves parents in the dark.

Why should Missouri parents have to go searching beyond DESE’s website for information they need? They shouldn’t. DESE should be helping, not hindering parents (and taxpayers) who want to know how their schools are performing.

The post DESE’s APR Summary Reports Hide Achievement Gaps appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A new study from the Fordham Institute found that a higher percentage of charter school enrollment (referred to as “charter market share”) among black and Hispanic students in large urban areas is associated with higher English language arts and math achievement. A similar result was found for Hispanic students in suburban and rural districts, and black students in rural districts. And these results are measuring overall achievement in an area—not just the students attending charter schools.

The study used data from the Stanford Education Data Archive containing student performance on NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam. The data contained scores from both charter and traditional public schools. Further analysis of the individual geographic areas in the study could help determine if the effect of competition from charters on traditional public schools varies across regions. But the study does contradict the argument that charter schools only have higher achievement because the best students transfer to charter schools. If that were the case, then overall achievement would not rise.

Charter schools in Missouri wouldn’t be a threat to traditional public schools. They could provide educational opportunity for many students who do enroll in a charter school and also boost overall achievement. Missouri shouldn’t be afraid to offer students who happen to live outside of Kansas City and St. Louis opportunities like charter schools.

The post Student Achievement Rises with More Charter Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The study examined student’s academic growth on the state assessment in math and English for the 2014–15, 2015–16 and 2016–17 school years. CREDO compared traditional public school students in Kansas City to Kansas City charter school students, and then compared both of those groups to the state average.

In order to compare student growth, CREDO uses a “virtual twin” method, taking into account seven student characteristics such as previous academic achievement and income level. CREDO matches each charter student with several traditional public school students who are similar on the seven characteristics and averages the test scores of these students to create each charter student’s virtual twin. The traditional public school virtual twin for each charter school student differ in only one way— what type of school they attend.

Using this model, Credo found that Kansas City charter school students had more academic growth in both math and English than their traditional public school student twins in every year studied. And by the 2016–17 school year, charter school students had more growth than the state average in both subjects.

Although the results of the research are measured in standard deviations, the researchers converted these to days of learning. A typical school year has about 180 days. CREDO found that during the 2016–17 school year, Kansas City charter students received nearly 60 additional days of learning in math than Kansas City traditional public school students and about 30 more days than the state average. Charter school students also showed more growth in English, receiving about 90 extra days of learning compared to the traditional public school students and more than 30 extra days compared to the state average.

When CREDO researchers analyzed student subgroups, they found that Black, Hispanic, English language learner students, special education students and students in poverty all had more days of learning in charter schools than traditional public schools in both math and English. Notably, special education students in charter schools had more than 120 extra days of learning in English and over 90 extra days in math in one school year than special education students in traditional public schools.

While the evidence that charter schools are capable of producing great academic results continues to mount, Missouri remains steadfast in refusing to expand educational opportunity for students. Why doesn’t Missouri want to give kids all across the state the option to attend these high-performing schools?

The post Charter Schools Are Working in Kansas City appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Busing may have been the only option for blending the two separate school systems in the South in the latter half of the last century. But today, it remains wildly unpopular with parents. White, middle-class children are the key to the policy and yet, when busing goes into effect, they tend to flee the school. Many urban districts don’t have enough white children to create any sort of balance. And suburban districts are often not interested in participating.

The research on the academic impact of such programs is labeled “variable” at best by its most ardent supporters. In fact, there is stronger evidence that having a teacher of the same race as the student improves academic outcomes. In other words, the race of the person at the front of the room can make a difference in a way that the race of the other students doesn’t.

You know what is popular with parents, and especially with low-income parents of color? Getting to choose where their children attend school rather than having them be assigned or bussed to one. And in many cases, parents would prefer to be able to choose a school where the staff looks like their child, rather than a school where the other students don’t. Researchers at Stanford have determined that low-income black and Hispanic students who attended charter schools of their choice made significant academic gains when compared to their matched peers who attended traditional public schools in the same district. This is a policy that works.

Before there were options like charter schools, the only way to get children from distressed neighborhoods out of their troubled schools was to pick them up every day and take them somewhere else. We now know that giving every parent options for where to send their children to school negates the need for districts to shuffle kids around. It’s time to stop arguing about who’s for or against a failed policy from 50 years ago and give disadvantaged parents the educational options they want and need.

The post Don’t Be Nostalgic for A Failed Policy appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University released a recent study on Indianapolis charter school performance. The study tracked academic growth from the 2013-14 to the 2016-17 school years, comparing the average growth in reading and math in Indianapolis charter school students to traditional public school students.

In order to compare school performance between charter schools and traditional public schools, CREDO creates a “virtual twin” for each charter student that is a combination of similar public school students. This method considers seven characteristics (including ethnicity and income status) of a charter school student, and finds students from traditional public schools who share the same characteristics. The test scores of all the similar traditional public school students are averaged to create a growth score for the virtual twin, which is then compared to the charter student.

The CREDO study found that charter school students in Indianapolis experienced significantly more academic growth in both reading and math than traditional public school students. In the 2016-17 school year, Indianapolis charter school students gained 29 extra days of reading and 4 extra days of math compared to the state average (180 days of learning a school year). Traditional public schools were behind the state average in both subjects; 48 days behind in reading and 96 days behind in math. The difference between Indianapolis charter school students and traditional public school students is striking. Charter school students learned 100 more days of math and 77 more days of reading than the traditional public school students. That’s 20 extra weeks of math and over 15 weeks in reading for charter school students.

Charter schools also produced better results than the city’s traditional public schools for specific student groups. This held true for all the student groups the study measured: Black and Hispanic students, low-income students, English language learners and special education students.

Charter schools are helping Indianapolis students access a quality education. Why wouldn’t Missouri want the same?

The post Charter Schools Outperform in Indianapolis appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The WDAF story goes on to point out:

The city has “banned the box” since 2013 and said it’s been a big success. Employers can still do background checks, which could prevent someone from getting hired. But getting rid of the check box can help eliminate the stigma [that would] prevent qualified candidates from getting hired just because of their criminal history.

That is certainly a noble goal. But research from respected universities and public policy organizations casts doubt on the effort’s effectiveness. According to The Atlantic magazine,

. . . banning the box may actually be hurting some of the exact groups of people it was designed to help, according to a few new studies. In a recent paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, Jennifer L. Doleac of the University of Virginia’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and Benjamin Hansen of the University of Oregon looked at how the implementation of ban-the-box policies affected the probability of employment for young, low-skilled, black and Hispanic men. They found that ban-the-box policies decreased the probability of being employed by 5.1 percent for young, low-skilled black men, and 2.9 percent for young, low-skilled Hispanic men.

The left-leaning Brookings Institution found the same, detailing what happens when the felony conviction disclosure is removed:

Employers are forced to use other information that is even less perfect to guess who has a criminal record. The likelihood of having a criminal record varies substantially with demographic characteristics like race and gender. Specifically, black and Hispanic men are more likely than others to have been convicted of a crime: the most recent data suggest that a black man born in 2001 has a 32% chance of serving time in prison at some point during his lifetime, compared with 17% for Hispanic men and just 6% for white men. Employers will guess that black and Hispanic men are more likely to have been in prison, and therefore less likely to be job-ready.

In short, ban-the-box policies are likely hurting minorities.  Hiring discrimination is a thorny problem, but not all such problems have easy or obvious solutions. If your proposed solution is hurting the people it is intended to help, it’s probably time to think about a new approach.

The post Does Banning the Box Work? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

There are some great NFL press conference moments. Jim Mora’s incredulous “Playoffs? Playoffs? I hope we can just win a game.” Herman Edwards’ punctuated “You play. To win. The game.” Mike Ditka’s forlorn “If I was fired, I’d quit right now.”

But perhaps the most emotional press conference moment came from Arizona Cardinal’s coach Dennis Green, who, after losing a game to the Chicago Bears, angrily pounded the press conference podium and shouted “They are who we thought they were, and we let them off the hook!”

I was reminded of this exhortation last week when NCES released the results of the 2015–16 Private School Universe Survey, an exhaustive analysis of the landscape of private schooling across America. I spend a lot of time in Missouri and across the country talking about private school choice programs, and hearing people’s opinions about private schools and their potential as options for children. Based on people’s perceptions, I’d like to invert Dennis Green’s shouts and say that private schools aren’t what you think they are.

When they hear the words “private schools,” many people think about toney suburban campuses speckled with lacrosse fields and tennis courts. Others think about single-sex Catholic schools run by the Christian Brothers or Sisters of St. Joseph.

Neither of these images is fully representative of the diverse set of private schools in our nation today. So what do we know about private schooling in America today?

The 34,576 private elementary and secondary schools are, on average, quite small. The average enrollment was only 142 students across all schools, 100 students in elementary schools and 263 students in high school. Forty-six percent of private schools enrolled fewer than 50 students.

Single-sex schools are extremely rare. Only 4 percent of private schools in America were single-sex, evenly split between 2 percent all girls and 2 percent all boys.

Catholic schools only make up 20.3 percent of all private schools, though it should be noted that they enroll 38.8 percent of all students. A full 32.7 percent of private schools are nonreligious.

Perhaps surprisingly (though not as surprising if you read this great Brookings Institution paper on the geography of school options across the country), 30.2 percent of private schools were located in rural areas or in small towns.

As to racial demographics, private schools do differ from traditional public schools in meaningful ways. While public schools are roughly 50% white, 16% Black, 25% Hispanic, and 9% all other races, private schools are 69% white, 9% Black, 10% Hispanic, and 12% all other races.

One last data point worth mentioning; private school enrollment is on a serious decline. In just 15 years, it has dropped from 6.3 million children (in 2001–12) to just 4.9 million (in 2015–16).

I’d offer three short reflections.

1.It’s time we update our understanding of what private schools looks like. There is an incredible amount of variation within private schools. On average, they are small, more likely to be religious, and are probably located within a city or suburb. But that’s about all we can say. If you have a mental picture of what a private school looks like and assume they all look like that, you’re probably guessing wrong.

2.School choice risks being too little, too late. As I have argued for years, private schools, and particularly the urban Catholic schools that have a proud tradition of serving low-income and minority students, are closing by the hundreds. School choice is a way to stanch the bleeding—but without a greater sense of urgency, there will be no schools left for children to choose. We cannot be surprised to see private schools serving fewer and fewer minority children when all of the schools that have served them in the past are closing.

3.Private schools should do a better job of reaching out to minority communities. If private schools want to grow, reaching out to growing populations is the way to make it happen. I’m heartened by efforts like Notre Dame’s Task Force on the Participation of Latino Children and Families in Catholic Schools, but we need many more organizations working to connect minority children to educational opportunities in private schools. School choice is also an indispensable part of this effort, as it is perhaps the only tool that can help bridge the gap between what people can afford and where they can go to school.

Private schools are not a monolith. They are a part of the diverse landscape of education in America, and their decline should trouble all of us.

The post Private Schools Aren’t What You Think They Are appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

P.S. 199 is a National Blue Ribbon Award-winner with high state test scores, strong parent involvement, a high percentage of white students, and a low percentage of students qualifying as poor. P.S. 191 is made up of mostly poor, Hispanic, and black students from the public housing unit across the street. Because of overcrowding issues, P.S. 191, which sits within nine blocks of P.S. 199, may enroll wealthier students if the districts are rezoned.

Parental response has been mixed. Some want to erase the boundaries between the two schools altogether, allowing for a greater mix of students at each. Others say they’ll move to another school district or send their kids to private school if their children are sent to P.S. 199.

The story of P.S. 199 and 191 may sound familiar to residents of Saint Louis County and City. Here students may live within walking distance of one school but attend another, because of where boundaries are drawn.

For years, numerous groups have advocated for a unified district in the Saint Louis area, but as SMI’s James Shuls has pointed out, this solution is too pie-in-the-sky to make a difference for students who need better education options today. As an alternative, the St. Louis Post Dispatch Editorial Board proposed an open enrollment policy last November. “Districts would agree to a set tuition amount that would follow any student who wanted to cross boundaries. Transportation would be provided for those below poverty level,” they wrote.

Open enrollment policies have become more common over the past several decades. In 1988, Minnesota passed the first mandatory open enrollment law. By 2013, 21 states had allowed students to transfer from their home district to another school district. Some of these states, like Missouri, only allow students to transfer if their current district is failing.

But there are many reasons why a student would want to transfer to another school district aside from poor student achievement. A student might just live closer to a school within another district (this example also applies to students who live in rural parts of Missouri).

Another way to create more options for students would be to allow charter schools to operate anywhere in the region, and allow students to transfer across district lines to attend them. For example, if a charter school opened in the Bayless school district in Saint Louis County, students in the Affton, Hancock, and Lindbergh districts could apply to attend.

In the upcoming legislative session, I hope lawmakers consider the alternative to unifying school districts—expanding the state’s open enrollment policy to include not just students in failing schools, but all students in the Saint Louis area and across the state. 

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Perfection!

The report shows that 31 Missouri students scored a perfect 36 on the entire test. Within individual tests, 197 students scored perfect on the English section, 108 scored perfect in math, 368 scored perfect in reading, and 289 scored perfect in science.

College Readiness

ACT sets a “college readiness” benchmark on its exams that (they claim) correlates to a 50 percent chance of a B or higher or a 75 percent chance of a C or higher in the first-year college course in that subject. For English, it’s an 18 (out of 36), for math and reading it’s a 22, and for science it’s a 23.

Across the class of 2015, 71 percent of Missouri students scored college-ready in English, 44 percent scored college-ready in math, 51 did so in reading, and 42 percent cleared the bar in science.

Unfortunately, those groups weren’t always overlapping, because in total, only 30 percent of the class of 2015 scored college-ready in all four tested subjects.

If that wasn’t bad enough, breaking down the scores by racial groups shows even worse performance. While 34 percent of white students and 43 percent of Asian American students scored college-ready in all four subjects, only 20 percent of Hispanic students and 6 percent of African American students did.

Everywhere in Missouri, we have room to grow.

Course Access

The ACT also collects information from test takers on the courses that they have taken.

Probably the most eye-catching figure to me was the finding that 6 percent of the students who took the ACT in the class of 2015 took fewer than 3 years of math in high school. Not surprisingly, only 9 percent of those students were ready for college math. (For those students who took 3 or more years of math, 54 percent were college-ready.) The report also shows that 17 percent of the class of 2015 took fewer than 3 years of natural science courses. Preparing students for the 21st Century means preparation in math and science, and in too many places the courses simply aren’t there.

The findings from this report are a challenge to Missouri to step up its game. We won’t be an engine of economic growth, a vibrant cultural center, or a flourishing democracy if so few of our students are prepared for higher-level schooling. We have to do better.

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Now, this might strike you as odd when you hear over and over that charter schools are destroying public education.  Kansas City and St. Louis each have more than one-third of their students enrolled in charter schools, and yet, the traditional public school districts seem to be getting better.  How can this be?

It’s possible that either by stirring competition, more efficiently sorting students into options that serve them, or relieving pressure from school districts, charter schools are helping once struggling districts turn a corner.  Whatever the reason, it is hard to look at these numbers and see charter schools harming either district.

I should also point out that both districts started in very bad places.  In 2011, Kansas City had a graduation rate of 50 percent and St. Louis was at 54 percent.  Even with their gains, the Kansas City School District sits at only 67 percent and St. Louis at 68 percent. This puts them on par with cities like Newark, New Jersey (68 percent) and Compton, California (65 percent). They perform worse in absolute terms than neighboring cities like Little Rock (75 percent) and even Chicago (70 percent).  Inauspicious company. Clearly, there is still a long, long way to go.

Around the rest of the state, there was both good news and bad news.

The overall graduation rate in Missouri is up, from 81% in 2011 to 85.7% in 2013. That gain represents the 6^th best growth rate in the country over that time period. At the same time, though, Hispanic students in the class of 2013 graduated at a rate of 81 percent, low-income students graduated at a rate of 78 percent, and African-American students graduated at a rate of only 72 percent.

The report also broke out the performance of districts with at least 15,000 students:

• Around Kansas City, North Kansas City saw a graduation rate of 91 percent and Lee’s Summit clocked in at 94 percent.
• In greater St. Louis, Hazelwood saw an 86 percent graduation rate, Ft. Zumwalt 89 percent, Francis Howell 92 percent, Parkway 93 percent, and Rockwood 94 percent.
• Columbia had a graduation rate of 86 percent and Springfield had one of 87 percent.

All in all, a very interesting report that should inform conversations about education around the state.

The post If charter schools are ruining education in Missouri, more please! appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Why? Because governments are terrible at figuring out how development dollars should be allocated — to entertainment? to bars? to factories? to homes? — and simply do not have the knowledge that is embedded in the marketplace to make many developments successful. The decisions of individuals, maximizing their own well-being, are why most cities came to be. They are why good cities became great, and great cities became world-class. It is why cities that have fallen on hard times can be great again, if the government will stop meddling.

On a personal note, I was raised in the Northeast area of Kansas City, which for the last 100 or so years has been a heavily immigrant community. It is not necessarily “hip,” but it is real. Inexpensive housing plus ready employment made it an ideal place for a newcomer to the States to, sometimes literally, set up shop and grow a family. It is why my mother’s Italian family came there, why Jewish families came before them, and why Hispanic and Vietnamese families came after them.

“Old Northeast,” as it is often called, has a meaningful and enduring story, I think, because its history emerged naturally. Its story is a story of people, not of government or government-sponsored “big ideas.” It is a story about authenticity, not artificiality — about the uniqueness of the Kansas City experience. One chapter closes, another opens, and the story continues, but it is a story built by people, not by development experts that the city or state enlist to “revive” an area’s fortunes. Part of the problem that Missouri and her cities have is that instead of harnessing the potential of all their citizens and diversifying their growth opportunities, they are too often just tinkering with one government-subsidized development after another.

Check back later this week for Part Three. Rest assured, we will be adding meat to these broad philosophical bones.

The post Part Two: The Smallness Of The Potentially ‘Hip’ Core appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

These schools are not perfect — far from it, in some cases — but, for most of these students and parents, the system works relatively well. There is a well-known correlation between academic achievement and socioeconomic status, and students from higher-income families outperform lower-income students on practically every measure. This disparity is also reflected in the achievement gap between white and minority students. Tino Sanandaji, a Ph.D. student in public policy at the University of Chicago, recently compared the scores of non-Hispanic white American students with those of non-immigrant Europeans on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, and found that the American students performed admirably. White Americans scored seventh out of 28 countries, beating students from Denmark, Sweden, and France, as well as an average of 15 European Union countries.

On the other hand, our educational system routinely fails poor and minority students — those least able to choose a different school by moving to another district. Although the racial achievement gap has narrowed somewhat in recent years, at age 17, black and Hispanic students still score about 10 percent worse on average than white students on the reading portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). There a number of proven ways we can expand choice and improve academic achievement for those students.

Missouri has already experienced some success with charter schools. According to a 2009 study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, students attending charter schools in Missouri show more improvement in both mathematics and reading than similar students in traditional public schools, and this remains true when looking only at black and Hispanic students. Unfortunately, state statute limits the existence of charter schools to the cities of Saint Louis and Kansas City. If that restriction were removed, the gains of charter schools could be expanded to students in other struggling districts.

Furthermore, we could provide parents and students with more options in existing public school districts simply by restructuring how the schools are funded. Under a weighted-student-formula program (also known as “backpack funding”), students can attend any school within the district, and the schools are funded based upon the number of students they attract — with more dollars devoted to students who typically require more resources to educate (e.g., those with disabilities). Schools are then allowed more autonomy to experiment and compete for students — and for the money attached to them. In California, the cities of San Francisco and Oakland both implemented backpack funding and saw large gains in student achievement across ethnic and socioeconomic lines. San Francisco is now the top performing large urban school district in California. There is no reason, outside of political intransigence, that the Saint Louis and Kansas City school districts could not enact the same reforms.

It would be difficult to design an educational system worse for the disadvantaged than one that assigns students to schools based on the housing that their parents can afford. Although our best schools, public and private, are the product of parental choice, poor and minority students are frequently stuck in monopolistic urban school districts. School choice is not a panacea for this problem, but giving parents the power to choose is a necessary step toward ensuring a quality education for all of Missouri’s students.

John Payne is a research assistant for the Show-Me Institute, an independent think tank promoting free-market solutions for Missouri public policy.

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– A reduced scope for Latino history and culture. A proposal to expand such material in recognition of Texas’ rapidly growing Hispanic population was defeated in last week’s meetings—provoking one board member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out in protest. “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist,” she said of her conservative colleagues on the board. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”

– Changes in specific terminology. Terms that the board’s conservative majority felt were ideologically loaded are being retired. Hence, “imperialism” as a characterization of America’s modern rise to world power is giving way to “expansionism,” and “capitalism” is being dropped in economic material, in favor of the more positive expression “free market.” (The new recommendations stress the need for favorable depictions of America’s economic superiority across the board.)

– A more positive portrayal of Cold War anticommunism. Disgraced anticommunist crusader Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator censured by the Senate for his aggressive targeting of individual citizens and their civil liberties on the basis of their purported ties to the Communist Party, comes in for partial rehabilitation. The board recommends that textbooks refer to documents published since McCarthy’s death and the fall of the Soviet bloc that appear to show expansive Soviet designs to undermine the U.S. government. […]

– Thomas Jefferson no longer included among writers influencing the nation’s intellectual origins. Jefferson, a deist who helped pioneer the legal theory of the separation of church and state, is not a model founder in the board’s judgment. Among the intellectual forerunners to be highlighted in Jefferson’s place: medieval Catholic philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, Puritan theologian John Calvin and conservative British law scholar William Blackstone. Heavy emphasis is also to be placed on the founding fathers having been guided by strict Christian beliefs.

There is so much to unpack here that I could never do it all justice in a blog post, but here are a few brief criticisms from this former high school social studies teacher:

• While I’m certainly not one to push for highlighting the roles of minorities simply because they are minorities, Latinos have done a great deal to shape the history and culture of Texas. It is arguably the confluence between the Mexican and U.S. cultures that so defines the American West and Southwest, and makes Texas so unique, but apparently the Texas State Board of Education would rather not discuss half of that equation.
• The changes in terminology are deliberately meant to whitewash American history. As much as the conservative board members may not like it (or don’t even want to admit it), Americans and the American government have engaged in plenty of bad behavior over the years, and to act like none of that happened is no different in principle than a German nationalist denying the Holocaust in order to avoid dragging his country’s name through the mud. Furthermore, speaking as a strong advocate of free markets, I would prefer that they not use that term for the corporatist shenanigans executed throughout this country’s history; I have reservations about using the term “capitalism” for them as well, but that term has more traditionally implied some kind of government favoritism than “free market” has, so I still prefer the old standard to the change.
• There is certainly nothing wrong with pointing out that there were a number of active Communists within the government and other high echelons of American society during the Cold War. However, that does not make Joe McCarthy’s wilder claims any more accurate, or the Hollywood witch hunts of the House Un-American Activities Committee any more justifiable.
• Removing Jefferson from the account of this country’s historical origins is absolutely unforgivable. I can only think of two other founders whose intellectual influence is as profound as Jefferson’s — Hamilton and Madison — and Madison arguably changed his own position between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian thought over the course of his life. What’s worse is that the board has replaced one of our country’s intellectual giants with a grab bag of European historical figures. Blackstone is appropriate enough, but what in God’s name is Saint Thomas Aquinas — a medieval Catholic philosopher — doing on a set of standards about the Enlightenment intellectual origins of an almost entirely Protestant country? (I realize Thomas contributed mightily to the natural law tradition, which gives rise to philosophies of natural rights, but that should be studied as part of a section on the Middle Ages, not the Enlightenment.) Like Syme in 1984, the Texas State Board of Education has made Thomas Jefferson an unperson, disappeared down the memory hole.

The problem here is not so much the specific politics of the Texas State Board of Education, although I do find those objectionable. We have seen this same phenomenon from the other side, with demands for more politically correct textbooks in California. The root problem is that any one institution has this much power over education. In more market-driven school systems, standards would be set not from bureaucrats on high but through the interplay of scholarship and consumer demand. Certainly, some parents would still demand slanted views of history, but at least they would not be the only views available. If we want the study of history at the elementary and secondary levels to be something more than a political football, we must recognize that government monopolies, by nature, tend to strangle dissenting views.

Yahoo link via Hit and Run.

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In other findings about Missouri, the report found that:

• In general, new charter school students experience an initial drop in both reading and math compared to their counterparts in traditional public schools, but they experience no significant drop in reading and math in later years in charter schools.
• In general, blacks and Hispanics in charter schools achieve significantly more in reading and math compared to their counterparts in public schools.
• Poor students in charter schools perform significantly worse in both reading and math than their counterparts in traditional public schools.
• Both special education students and English language learners receive no significant advantages from attending charter schools compared to their counterparts in traditional public schools.

So, according to this report, children in Missouri who attend charter schools experience an initial drop in reading and math, but later, reports the Star, “a Missouri student attending a charter school could expect to learn ‘significantly more in reading and math than they would if they went to a traditional public school in the same community.'”

This study is another data point to add to the case for charters. Nationwide, however, the study found that many individual charter students fared worse than comparable students in traditional schools.

The beauty of charter schools is that they are not all one beast. They offer a variety of options for different types of students, and students with different needs. Let’s relish the bad results as a learning opportunity for other charters, now and in the future, and relish the good results here in Missouri as a sign that charter schools offer a viable alternative to troubled traditional public schools.

I leave you with a statement from The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, quoted in another article about the CREDO study:

“The CREDO report confirms what several other studies previously indicated: in states and communities where there are high standards for school quality and authorizers are performing their duties well, students in public charter schools are making solid academic progress. Where large numbers of schools have been created without a rigorous application process and adequate authorizer oversight, the results are unsatisfactory,” said Nelson Smith, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

“We are encouraged by the ground-breaking results being achieved by many public charter schools across the country,” said Smith. “However, if high-quality performance is to become the norm for public charter schools, we need to ramp up our efforts to replicate what’s working as well as enhance our work to ‘remove the barriers to exit’ and make it easier to close chronically low-performing charters.”

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The best possible education for students should take precedence over attendance boundaries.

It would be great if Missouri were to follow suit, create districts of choice, and allow families to choose public schools without regard to street addresses.

St. Louis has the Voluntary Inter-District Transfer Program, but it doesn’t go far enough. For one thing, the eligibility requirements restrict choice to certain groups. Why shouldn’t a white, Asian, or Hispanic city student have the same choice as an African-American student to attend a suburban school? The situation is reversed in magnet school admissions, in which African-Americans are reduced to the lowest priority level. These admissions distinctions reflect someone’s idea of the “right” racial mix for certain schools — an idea that I find very distasteful, to say the least. Restricting educational options by racial group is even more repugnant than limitations based on address. It also makes no sense in a diverse city that’s home to many multi-racial families.

In addition to the race issue, the Transfer Program is inadequate because it doesn’t present parents with enough choices. Parents can choose to participate, but once they do they have little say in which suburban school their children will attend.

It would be difficult to institute a broad public school choice program in Missouri, because districts are wary and parents are used to the way things are. One small step would be to streamline the magnet school admissions process, doing away with tiers and racial preferences. Allow any child from the city or county, regardless of race, to enter the magnet school lottery on an equal footing with other students — or to enter a lottery for other SLPS schools. SLPS could then have the distinction of being Missouri’s first true district of choice.

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