Using school-level data from the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP), we evaluated four different types of schools in the City of St. Louis: charters that were open in 2012 and are still open today, charters that have closed any time between 2012 and 2024, magnet schools (which filter enrollment), and traditional public schools. We looked at the total number of students who scored proficient or advanced in each category (charter, magnet, etc.,) and divided it by the total to calculate the percentages. In these totals, grades 3–8 are all aggregated together, and Algebra I and English II students are also included.

Since the MAP has changed in the time period we are assessing, it is difficult to measure performance within schools—but it is possible to measure performance between different types of schools.

In all three subjects (math, ELA, and science), charter schools that have been open since 2012 (SO Charters) surpassed magnet schools by 2023. In ELA, SO Charters had 7 percent fewer students who were proficient or advanced than magnets, but were 3 percent higher than traditional public schools in 2012. Fast forward to 2023, and SO Charters have 4 percent more students proficient or advanced than magnets and were 13 percent higher than traditional schools. The trend also translates to mathematics. All schools have remained relatively similar in science.

The orange line represents the group of charters that have closed down. Most recently, Hawthorne Leadership School and La Salle Charter had to shutter their doors due to low performance. The design of a charter school allows for schools with less successful models to be phased out. As the figures above display, successful models have benefitted students in the City of St. Louis.

The simple ability to close serves as a mechanism for accountability and competition. New models have been tested—some have succeeded, some have failed—but the ones that have succeeded have exceeded the performance of traditional public schools and magnets. This should be taken into consideration when weighing charter school expansion.

The post Comparing the Performance of Public Schools in the City of St. Louis appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The argument is that private school choice programs are inequitable because they do not open options equally for all students. In other words, private schools can deny admission to some applicants.

Take for example the admissions criteria I found online for one school. Students applying to the school must score in the top 30% on standardized tests, have excellent attendance (90%), have good grades, and submit letters of recommendation from teachers, counselors, or other administrators. In addition, the student and his or her guardian may have to pass an interview with the school and write an entrance essay.

Oh wait. Those aren’t the rules for a private school, but for a public school—Metro Academic and Classical School. Metro is a magnet school in the Saint Louis Public School District. Magnet schools are public schools that are allowed to have admissions standards. As St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Blythe Bernhard has reported, Metro is “thriving” and is the “highest-performing high school in the state.”

Many private schools have admissions standards, but most pale in comparison to Metro.

Opponents of private school choice use a lot of arguments to make their case but they fail to consistently apply those arguments to public schools. They say they oppose school choice because some dollars may go to rich families in private schools, but do not oppose publicly funding rich students in rich public schools. And they complain public schools will lose money if a student leaves for a private school but you’ll hear nary a word when a school loses money because a student moves to another public school.

The underlying element in all these school choice criticisms is a philosophy of control. As long as public funding goes to rich kids in public schools, or dollars flow from one public school to another, or admissions criteria are used in a public school system, the critics remain silent.

What then is the real opposition to school choice policies? It seems fair to wonder if what school choice critics fear most is losing control.

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This occurs largely because California and Texas require school districts to purchase textbooks that have been approved by the state board of education. The Education Commission of the States reports that 20 states have similar policies.

What Goldstein’s article makes clear is that values are transmitted via the texts we assign children to read. In California, the texts are more open to portraying individuals with various sexual orientations. In Texas, they discuss legal and illegal immigration. Far from being value-neutral, the text schools assign children and the lessons teachers teach can be laden with values.

In this case, we can see the values when we compare one state to another. Missouri, however, does not have a state textbook adoption process. As such, schools can choose the books they think best align with state standards. Many are ditching textbooks altogether in favor of teacher curated reading materials and online resources. My 8^th– and 9^th-grader, for example, do not bring any textbooks home. Everything is online.

In this system, how can parents figure out what values are embedded in the curriculum that is being taught to their children? We can’t.

This is why we need school choice. With a robust system of school choice, which includes traditional public schools, magnet schools, public charter schools, and private schools, we can stop the charade. We can stop pretending that there is such a thing as the value-neutral school. We can be more upfront about what we want for our children and what our school community believes.

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Magnet schools are public schools that have a specialized focus, like STEM or the arts. They will often have admission and retention requirements, such as a minimum test score or GPA for students. Charter schools are another form of public school choice; they are granted autonomy and accept all students who apply. If a magnet school can get millions of dollars and support in Springfield, why does Missouri stifle the growth of charter schools, which could serve students outside of Kansas City and St. Louis?

I bet there have been many other ideas from would-be school leaders across the state on how to create new opportunities for students with an innovative school, but Missouri has been hostile to expanding school choice. Students in Springfield are fortunate enough to soon have access to another option. Unfortunately, many other Missouri students don’t have the chance to pick an education that’s right for them.

The post Why Does Missouri Make it So Difficult? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

When it became clear that the governor was attempting to remove Vandeven, public educators rallied to her cause. Some defended Vandeven as a competent and well-regarded public servant. Others, however, sought to attack charter schools. They presumed that the whole ordeal wasn’t about Vandeven, but about putting someone in place who would work to expand school choice in Missouri. Several public school administrators tweeted the below graphic. One wrote, “More tax dollars could soon be siphoned to these ineffective schools if @GovGreitensMO gets his way.”

The claim that this chart shows anything meaningful about charter school effectiveness would be amusing if it wasn’t being vigorously advanced by numerous individuals who should know better. Take a look to see what I mean. The table shows a comparison of public school districts performance on the Annual Performance Review with individual charter schools. There are two huge problems with this. First, we are comparing whole school districts with individual schools. Second, it compares districts with schools that serve entirely different types of students. Charter schools in Missouri are only in Saint Louis and Kansas City. It is hardly fair to compare their performance to the Rockwood or Nixa School Districts that serve much more affluent students. 

A better comparison would be to compare charter school performance to the performance of individual schools in Saint Louis and Kansas City. I’ve done that below. As expected, the comparison is much more favorable for charter schools. In total, 58% of Missouri charter schools scored above 70% on the APR. Meanwhile, just 45% of public schools in Saint Louis and Kansas City scored in that range. Interestingly, 13 of the 16 traditional public schools in the top category were magnet schools, as were 6 of the 11 in the next category. These are hardly traditional schools. Neither traditional schools nor charter schools are allowed to have admissions requirements, but magnets can. Some magnet schools require students to take admissions tests and score at a certain level before they can be admitted. 

Given this more accurate context, charter schools appear to be outperforming their traditional public school counterparts. Yet, even this comparison tells us little about the effectiveness of the schools themselves. For that, we’d need a more sophisticated analysis. Fortunately for us, the Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University conducted such a comparison. Using a matching design, in which they compare charter students to similar students in district schools, they found Missouri’s charter schools outperformed the district schools in reading and math.

It is understandable for public school officials to defend Margie Vandeven or even for them to oppose charter schools. However, it is not acceptable for them to build their case on misleading data. Let’s have a productive dialogue about public education and school choice in Missouri, and let’s have that conversation by looking at what the evidence actually says. 

The post I Don’t Think the Data Say What You Think They Say appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

 In a recently published paper in the Journal of School Choice: International Research and Reform, “School Choice: The Personal and the Political,” I explore the question of whether parents who support school choice for their children would be willing to support programs that extend the same opportunities to other families. To find out, I convened five focus groups with parents in Kansas City and Saint Louis. A total of 35 parents of school-aged children attended these discussions. My findings were interesting, but not that surprising.

 The parents I spoke with strongly supported choice for their own children. In fact, most of their children attended schools of choice. More than 75 percent of the parents in the study either homeschooled or sent their kids to a school outside their traditional public school district. Of the remaining quarter, several sent their children to magnet schools within the traditional school district.

 Would they be willing to extend options to other children by supporting a private school choice program? As I write in the paper, “the responses were decidedly mixed.” Many parents who themselves expressed choice—including some who even sent their children to private schools—were not thrilled at the prospect of the government providing financial support for other children to attend those same schools.

 The parents in my focus groups expressed four main concerns when it came to private school choice programs. Over the next few days, I’ll take a look at each of these reservations and offer suggestions as to how school choice supporters might bridge the gap with parents like these.

 You can find the journal article here (paywall) or an earlier working version here. 

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Recently, the Center for Public Education, an arm of the National School Boards Association, released a report on the merits of school choice. The paper claims to summarize “what the research says.” Interestingly, the report fails to include almost every analysis that has found benefits to private school choice programs.

When Anna Egalite, an assistant professor of educational leadership, policy, and human development at North Carolina State University, conducted a systematic review of the competitive effects of private school choice programs, she found 21 studies. She concluded that the results “unanimously find positive impacts on student achievement. Such overwhelming evidence supports the development of market-based schooling policies as a means to increase student achievement in traditional public schools.” Interestingly, the Center for Public Education did not cite any of these studies.

Similarly, there have been 12 random-assignment studies of voucher programs. These are considered the “gold-standard” in social science research because they are the best at determining causality. Eleven of the 12 studies have found positive effects from voucher programs. The Center for Public Education review only cites one of these studies.

The report cites plenty of useful statistics from the National Center for Education Statistics and other sources, but does not even attempt to cite the plethora of useful research on school choice programs.

Nevertheless, the report does get at least one thing right—private school choice tends to boost graduation rates.  This was highlighted in the evaluation of the Washington D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program, which showed a 21 percentage point increase in the graduation rate for voucher users.

Not surprisingly, given that they neglect to cite any of the ample evidence showing that school choice succeeds, the Center's conclusion is that “In general, we find that school choices work for some students sometimes, are worse for some students sometimes, and are usually no better or worse than traditional public schools.”

In addition to simply being inaccurate, this conclusion does a great disservice to the students most in need of another educational option; particularly the students in the six Missouri school districts with the worst graduation rates (see above).

School choice may not be a cure-all, but the evidence is quite clear: students benefit from school choice. Indeed, students at Sumner and the other schools listed above may benefit the most. 

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The recent Missouri Supreme Court decision, which upheld the state’s inter-district school transfer law, has many in Kansas City on the edge of their seats. They have watched the events unfold in Saint Louis, where the two unaccredited districts, Normandy and Riverview Gardens, have already begun allowing students to transfer. Some are worried the law will bankrupt the Kansas City School District as it may do in the two Saint Louis districts. There is, however, good reason to believe student transfers may impact Kansas City much differently than it has Normandy and Riverview Gardens. That reason is school choice.

Students in Normandy and Riverview Gardens do not have access to charter schools or magnet schools. Until they were allowed to transfer, the only options they had were to move or to pay for private schools. In Kansas City, however, there are charter schools and magnet schools. In fact, more than a third of all public school students are already in a charter school (9,692 in 2013). Because so many Kansas City students are already in schools of choice, it seems unlikely that the percentage of students transferring will be as high as the 25 percent in Normandy and Riverview Gardens.

Nevertheless, the district may actually be better off if charter students decide to transfer. As I have written before, Kansas City spends more than most of the surrounding districts and could come out on top financially. Currently, charter school funds follow the child to his or her school through the district — to the tune of $12,482 per pupil. The average per-pupil expenditure in the 11 nearby districts highlighted in my last post is just $10,075, a difference of $2,407. That is $2,407 per student that the district could pocket, less transportation costs, if a charter student decides to transfer.

The existing prevalence of school choice in Kansas City will most likely make the impact of student transfers minimal in comparison to the experiences at Normandy and Riverview Gardens. If school leaders in Kansas City and the surrounding areas handle the situation well, this expansion of school choice could actually benefit the districts and the students.

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One of the great myths in education today is that all public schools serve all students. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nevertheless, opponents of school choice make frequent use of this falsehood in arguing against any expenditure of public money to help disadvantaged students attend private schools. They argue: “If private schools do not serve every student, they should not get tax dollars.” It is time to set the record straight: individual schools — whether public or private — do not serve all students. Nor should they.

One prime example of a public school that does not serve all students is Metro Academic and Classical High School, a magnet school in the Saint Louis Public School District. U.S. News & World Report ranks Metro as the No. 1 public school in the state, for good reason. Metro grads regularly go on to top-tier universities and perform exceptionally well on achievement tests.

There may be great things going on at Metro, but it cannot be denied that part of the school’s success is derived from its admissions process. To be admitted, a student must score proficient or advanced on the state MAP test. In 2013, nearly 14 percent of black eighth graders in Saint Louis scored proficient or advanced. That means more than 86 percent of black students in the Saint Louis Public School District do not meet the admissions criteria for Metro.

The Saint Louis Public School District has more than 25 magnet schools. Though most do not have admission standards as rigorous as those at Metro, they typically do have some requirements. By design, these admission standards keep students out.

Though they may not have magnet schools or a selective admissions process, other area districts do have special schools designed to serve their most disabled, disturbed, and/or disruptive students.

In 1992, the Parkway School District opened Fern Ridge High School. The school is designed to help “tenth through twelfth grade students, including those with disabilities, succeed when conventional methods have failed.” Students who cannot make it in the general population can be transferred to Fern Ridge. In other words, individual Parkway high schools do not serve all students.

Parkway is not alone in having a special school for students with unique challenges. In 1957, the Special School District (SSD) of Saint Louis County was established. It “was the net result of years of hard work and advocacy by parents of children whose educational needs were not being met by the existing public school system.” Today, the SSD serves approximately 23,000 students through services provided at district-run schools, independent sites, and two technical high schools.

Other students with disabilities attend the Missouri School for the Blind, the School for the Deaf, or use the Missouri Virtual Instruction Program (MoVIP) at home.

The bottom line is that individual schools do not serve all students. That is a good thing. There are great benefits that come from having highly specialized schools that are skilled at educating special students. Bright, gifted students are challenged and receive a tremendous education at Metro High. Students with special needs are encouraged and given the tools to succeed at Fern Ridge. By specializing, these schools are able to provide students with a better education than they might have received in a traditional school.

It is ridiculous to expect individual private schools to serve all students when individual public schools do not fulfill this task. Rather than place unrealistic expectations on private schools, or public schools for that matter, we should work to give every child access to the school that is going to best meet their needs. That may be a traditional district-run school, a magnet school, a special school, a charter school, and yes, even a private school.

Through school choice, every student can be served. As Milton Friedman once wrote, “The injection of competition would do much to promote a healthy variety of schools.” Isn’t that what we really need — a healthy variety of schools that can meet the unique needs of each of our students?

James V. Shuls, Ph.D., is the education policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.

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I believe the main reason for this disparity is that foreign languages are treated by our public education system as less important than math, science and English. In contrast, E.U. governments expect their citizens to become fluent in at least two languages plus their native tongue.

Another panelist laments the fact that “unlike Europe, the U.S. has no coherent strategy for making our society bilingual.”

I suspect European countries’ policies are a reflection of their citizens’ interest in languages, rather than the cause. Europeans have ample reason to study languages; they all live within a short distance of other countries where different languages are spoken. As Norman Matloff notes in his response to the Room for Debate question, Americans who live close to the border with Mexico show more enthusiasm for learning Spanish than do their fellow citizens to the north.

Could it be that although proximity to foreign language speakers can spark people’s interest, policies are what really make them use other languages? If that’s the case, I’d be hard pressed to explain what happened in Ontario, Canada, where a ceremony was conducted in English a few weeks ago. That was despite French’s status as an official language of Canada, and despite the French-language public school boards and community colleges that are established throughout the province. When a language isn’t useful to people, policymakers who promote it are wasting their time.

The United States shouldn’t order everyone to learn languages, but the education system should give opportunities to become bilingual to people who are interested. Magnet schools and charter schools are good environments for language specialization, as are the optional language-immersion programs offered by some traditional districts. (Examples in Missouri are Academie Lafayette, the St. Louis Language Immersion Schools, and the Kansas City School District’s Foreign Language Academy.) Parents who want their children to have a lot of foreign language exposure can enroll them in these schools.

If Chinese language education is to continue growing, more people must be free to choose schools that teach it. Policymakers who are worried about American students learning English only ought to try to make it easier to open new language-immersion choice schools.

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