Susan Pendergrass speaks with Chad Aldeman, education policy researcher and founder of Read Not Guess, about Missouri’s early literacy crisis and why the legislature has struggled to address it. They discuss what it means for a fourth grader to be below basic in reading, why three-cueing may be harmful to early readers, the science of reading and what it actually prescribes, the case for third-grade retention policies, and more.

Learn more about Read Not Guess at www.readnotguess.com.

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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00):
Looking forward to this conversation with you, Chad Aldeman. I just want to give you a little background on why I want to talk to you today. Missouri just wrapped up its legislative session in late May. This is the second year in a row that we have tried to make some inroads into what I consider to be a crisis, which is that 42 percent of our fourth graders are below basic in reading. We have tried to force the state education agency, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, to improve how reading is taught and to create a system of guardrails around kids being promoted without knowing how to read, all of which have failed. What does it mean for a fourth grader to be below basic in reading? Given that more than four in ten Missouri fourth graders scored below basic, what does that mean?

Chad Aldeman (00:59):
Below basic is a very low level. It means that kids cannot read an unfamiliar passage and understand what it means. In fourth grade, maybe you’re not super worried about those kids, but you probably should be, because that is a key milestone. If you’re not reading in fourth grade, you’re really going to struggle with everything that comes next. You’re not going to be able to understand social studies and science. You may not be able to read owners’ manuals or instruction manuals when you’re trying to build things at your house. You’re really going to be dependent on other people interpreting words and language for you. YouTube is helpful, lots of things are helpful, but we’re still in a written culture, and there’s lots of information that’s written that if you can’t pass even the basic level you’re going to struggle with in life going forward.

Susan Pendergrass (02:02):
Yeah, so this is kind of the problem, which I consider to be basically a crisis. Forty-two percent of our kids are below basic. What we call it when we’re trying to fix it goes by a bunch of different names: early reading, early literacy, read to learn. But when my kids were little, about thirty years ago, I think it was called whole language, this language-rich environment where kids would just learn to read. But now there’s a thing called three-cueing. What is three-cueing? I assume it means that kids are supposed to look three different places for cues, but what specifically is it?

Chad Aldeman (02:37):
Three-cueing and whole language have a lot of similarities. They’re basically trying to get people to memorize words. Rather than sounding out, like my name is Chad, which is pretty phonetic, rather than understanding that the CH combination makes the ch sound, they want you to just memorize the picture in your head of what the word looks like. Really good readers do have a lot of memorized words. I don’t have to sound out my name. There are lots of words that my brain just goes to instantly because I’m so familiar with them. But taking what expert readers can do and using that as a method to teach kids is actually really harmful. Kids develop those skills by learning the core elements. The CH combination makes the ch sound, and they need to practice that when they’re learning to read. Over time they’ll just see it and recognize it quickly. English is quirky. English is not entirely phonetic, but it’s still quite phonetic, and phonics is still the building block of reading. There are cases when CH doesn’t make the ch sound, when it makes the hard C sound. Kids need to understand and recognize those as well. They need repetitions, and they need to understand what the normal rule is and what some of the exceptions are.

Susan Pendergrass (04:04):
So would three-cueing be considered part of the science of reading or not?

Chad Aldeman (04:08):
Three-cueing is not part of the science of reading. Three-cueing is saying, rather than teaching kids the building blocks of the language, have them guess at the words based on a picture they see. So there’s a picture of a horse, and they see a word, and they just guess horse. The text may actually say pony, and sometimes those differences really do matter.

Susan Pendergrass (04:29):
Ha.

Chad Aldeman (04:38):
The second cue is the first letter of the word, and the third is other context clues. So if it’s a story about horses, you might guess horse. And those cues are actually detrimental to learning how to read, to knowing what the words and letters actually translate into.

Susan Pendergrass (05:02):
Why? Why is it detrimental?

Chad Aldeman (05:04):
Because it leads to guessing. It might be harmless for a four-year-old to say pony when the word actually says horse. But as kids get older and start reading more complex texts, those types of mistakes really do matter. And if you haven’t learned the phonetic skills, you’re not going to be able to read a word like ribonucleic acid or something like that. When you start reading more complex words, all of a sudden you can’t break them down. Your mind doesn’t have the ability to understand how to break down a word that you’re not familiar with.

Susan Pendergrass (05:33):
Mm-hmm. So two years in a row at least, the legislature has tried to ban three-cueing so that teachers would not be allowed to use it. They punted a little bit and said it can’t be the first thing they use, but could still be a tool in their toolbox. They’ve gotten a lot of pushback. In Missouri, legislators are sometimes former teachers, sometimes married to a teacher, sometimes their best friend is a teacher. And they’ll just say, you know what, we’re a local control state, so we can’t tell these teachers what to do. When they’re in the moment in the classroom, they know best, and that’s how we roll in Missouri. But what I hear you saying is it can actually be harmful.

Chad Aldeman (06:39):
Yeah, and there actually is a science about how kids learn to read. It’s been well documented for a long time through empirical researchers looking at whether kids do better under method A or method B. What they found is that teaching kids the building blocks of reading, the phonetics, is more helpful, particularly for students who might struggle, or who are dyslexic, or have other language issues. If you teach the three-cueing strategies, you’re teaching them the wrong thing and leading them down a side road. It can lead to bad habit formation, which is then really hard to kick later on. The other thing that’s relevant here is that reading is somewhat sequential, and kids need a lot of practice in the early grades in order to be proficient readers. If you use the three-cueing tactics, you will not be giving them the building blocks they need to develop. And it’s a challenge to get kids back on track if they’re off. There’s all kinds of data about delays in reading, and kids who aren’t proficient by third grade will struggle in the short and long term. So it’s really important to catch those issues as early as possible in K through two.

Susan Pendergrass (08:14):
Well, on that note, another component to the legislation that’s been considered and that we have been supportive of is that if a child at third or fourth grade has demonstrated that they are substantially behind in learning to read, they should not be promoted to the next grade. What do you think about that policy?

Chad Aldeman (08:34):
Some people may hear that policy and think it’s punitive and it’s going to be bad for kids, but it’s not really about what happens at the end of third grade. I see that policy as more of a threat to the adults in that student’s life about making sure that doesn’t happen. In K through two, those students are being flagged and identified as being at risk of potentially being held back.

Susan Pendergrass (08:39):
Mean.

Chad Aldeman (09:04):
And they’re given interventions and supports so that they’re ready to take and pass the assessment in third grade. That’s really my read of the evidence. In the states that have these types of policies, kids who are flagged as needing more help get the help. That is the key: this sort of threat of being held back, and then the interventions and all the adult behaviors it changes. Teachers then know which kids need extra help. They then communicate to parents, hey, your child is behind and they need to catch up, and here’s what we’re going to do to help them. I wrote about this in Mississippi. They have learning plans, specific, tailored, individualized instructional plans for children who are at risk of being held back. And parents are brought into the conversation. It’s pretty scary that your child may be at risk of being held back, and here’s what we’re going to do in the interim to get them ready. That is the key for me. It’s not what happens in third grade. It’s all the stuff that happens before and what the adults can do to make sure kids are ready.

Susan Pendergrass (10:19):
Yeah, because if I understand it correctly, Mississippi has that policy, but they don’t actually retain that many kids.

Chad Aldeman (10:26):
Yeah, that’s right. In state after state, the states that have these types of policies, the number of kids who are ultimately retained is not that high. There are screens that are identified earlier in K through two, and then interventions are put in place. There are oftentimes some exceptions for students with severe disabilities or English learners who are newly arrived, and chances for retakes if there’s something about stress on the day or they go through a summer program. There are other ways to get students ready. It’s not just the third-grade cut point.

Susan Pendergrass (11:07):
Yeah, it seems like one of those situations, and I doubt it’s unique to Missouri, where people in charge of teaching young children to read feel threatened or feel like they’re being criticized, because we have a real problem with 42 percent of our kids being almost illiterate. And the adults are taking it personally, and therefore they’re resistant to any policy that would force the hand of these districts or teachers. And to me that’s just a shame.

Chad Aldeman (11:47):
Yes, I agree. I think part of it goes to the culture in education where every teacher is supposed to create their own idea and method for how to teach. We don’t really give teachers the building blocks of here’s a well-scripted curriculum, and if you follow this your kids are likely to be successful. Some of the highest-performing schools, school districts, and countries do a much better job of being clear that here’s a well-defined, articulated curriculum, and we’re going to support teachers to do it. There’s still the question of how it gets implemented, but the what is pretty well articulated. And this goes back to the science of reading idea: there is a science. It is evolving in the sense that there’s still more research being conducted and we’re still learning new things, but we know a fair amount about how kids learn to read. So teachers, schools, and teacher preparation programs should be equipping their teachers to use those things.

Susan Pendergrass (12:58):
So you have spent a lot of time studying and writing about this, and you decided to take a leap and start your own company?

Chad Aldeman (13:06):
Yes. I got interested in this because my own child was taught to read using three-cueing. He came home during the pandemic and I was oblivious. I kind of thought my son could read. We had been to school and celebrated his reading superpowers that the teachers had taught, and they were things like guessing at pictures, picture power.

Susan Pendergrass (13:26):
Yeah.

Chad Aldeman (13:33):
During the pandemic, he was a kindergartner and he came home, and we sent him up to his room to do silent independent reading. It turns out he was just guessing. He hadn’t been taught how to sound out words. After working with him, I came up with a program called Read Not Guess. It’s designed for parents to work with their kids, both to build early literacy building blocks like phonetic skills, and also as a way that they can spot early reading issues with their own children. It gives parents the tools to work with their kids, support them from home, and be an advocate by their side.

Susan Pendergrass (14:12):
And your son was in what’s considered to be one of the top school districts in the country, Fairfax County, Virginia.

Chad Aldeman (14:17):
Yeah, Fairfax County Public Schools. People move here for the schools, and yet we were using a balanced literacy three-cueing approach to teaching reading. To the district’s credit, partly because the state forced them to change, they have now moved to a more phonics-based approach and are using something called content knowledge building. So they’ve adopted a curriculum that’s also trying to build

Susan Pendergrass (14:22):
Yeah. Sure.

Chad Aldeman (14:47):
content knowledge along the way, which I’m supportive of. I’m sure there are people within the district who are upset, but the state said this is what we’re going to do, and so they’ve moved in that direction.

Susan Pendergrass (15:01):
You’re certainly not anti-teacher. You’ve been working on teacher issues for as long as I can remember, right?

Chad Aldeman (15:06):
No, I’m very pro-teacher. I’m pro-good policy. I’m pro-helping kids learn to read, and I think that’s one of the basic things that schools can do and that they should be doing.

Susan Pendergrass (15:08):
Yeah. Yeah. It really is frustrating to me that when something’s not going well in our state, we have 520 school districts, not county-based like Virginia’s, and it just feels like a throwaway line to say, well, we’re a local control state. As a matter of fact, somebody in our state education agency said out loud in a recorded meeting, it’s not our fault the kids can’t read, we’re local control. Everyone passes the buck and no one takes any responsibility. Some of them actively work against retaining third graders who can’t read or banning three-cueing. The last thing we were looking for was just that every student in the state would take essentially the same test with the same cutoff score so we could know consistently across districts which students are in that at-risk group so that we could identify them early. We got pushback on all of it. It’s baffling to me. We’re not trying to be mean to teachers. We’re trying to help little kids, because I see it ultimately impacting the Missouri workforce and everything else. We are graduating kids from high school who cannot really read.

Chad Aldeman (16:30):
Yeah, there’s a reason that the state created an education system in the first place, and the districts are entities of the state. They’re state standards, and so they should be teaching kids to those standards, and reading is a big essential building block of that. How far they get down into curricular choices is something that people can still debate, but the ultimate goal of teaching kids to read, and the argument that here are some methods that have been fundamentally disproven that we should as a state abandon, I think is a good and valid argument.

Susan Pendergrass (17:09):
Mississippi seemed to lead the way with this with the Mississippi Miracle, and then we have Louisiana and some other states. Do you see this spreading nationwide, this idea of forcing schools to use the science of reading?

Chad Aldeman (17:25):
Yeah. More states have science of reading laws, and they vary in their components. Last I saw it was 42 states. So Missouri is one of the last stragglers to not have one of these laws. The laws vary across the country in terms of how strict they are, what the state does versus what they put on districts, in terms of the third-grade retention policy versus state mandates on curriculum, whether they’re giving districts a menu of

Susan Pendergrass (17:37):
Right.

Chad Aldeman (17:56):
options or just saying they can’t use three-cueing. There are also other things around screening what happens for students in K through two, how much parents are notified, and what they’re given to help their children. All those things vary, but I think the most interesting point for Missouri is that most states have now adopted one of these laws and are pushing in this direction because they see the crisis as you’ve articulated it and the urgency for it. There’s still some important implementation work to get right if Missouri wants to see strong outcomes. Being focused on third-grade reading is very important, building it into accountability systems, building it into everything the state does, trying to simplify that and keeping it a priority. If the state is saying we don’t really care if it happens, then you’re not going to get outcomes. But if you focus on it and think about ways to drive it, there are levers that can be used.

Susan Pendergrass (19:03):
Yeah. Well, I hope we do it. Read Not Guess, where do folks find out more about that?

Chad Aldeman (19:10):
Read Not Guess is a website. It’s an email-based program. Parents can sign up for free at any time. There are three levels, starting with a beginner level, level one, then level two and level three. They’re all 30-day sequences. When parents sign up they receive

Susan Pendergrass (19:17):
Free, right?

Chad Aldeman (19:32):
a sequence of 30 emails for each of the levels. I also have one for slightly older kids who just need more practice, called a daily decodable program. There’s an app version of that program as well, or a workbook if parents want it in print form.

Susan Pendergrass (19:43):
Well, that’s great. Way to jump in and try to solve the problem yourself. I appreciate that. Thanks so much, Chad. Always great to talk to you. This was fairly narrow. We might need to have you come back and talk about school finance and teacher pipelines, but I’m going to reserve you for early literacy today. Thank you so much.

Chad Aldeman (19:52):
Thanks for having me.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Missouri’s Reading Crisis with Chad Aldeman appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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.

Avery Frank, Elias Tsapelas, and David Stokes join Zach Lawhorn to break down the final week of the 2026 Missouri legislative session. They discuss the constitutional amendment heading to voters that would begin the process of eliminating Missouri’s state income tax, where property tax reform efforts stand heading into the final days, the early literacy bill’s uncertain path through the Senate, the legislature’s approach to A through F school report cards, what the state budget does and does not get right, the Ferguson city council’s rejection of a major data center tax subsidy, and more.

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Episode Transcript

Zach Lawhorn (00:00): Welcome to the Show-Me Institute podcast. I’m Zach Lawhorn from Show-Me Opportunity. Today I’m joined by Avery Frank, Elias Tsapelas, and David Stokes from the Show-Me Institute. It is the last week of the 2026 Missouri legislative session. Today we’re going to go through what has crossed the finish line, mostly what has not crossed the finish line, and see what these guys think about the possibility of that happening here in the home stretch. Elias, we’ll begin with something that has crossed the finish line, and that is the start of a discussion about phasing out Missouri’s state income tax. Legislation did pass. It goes to the governor, and he gets to decide when it goes on the ballot. So what do we know right now, what passed, and what are Missouri voters going to be asked sometime in the fall?

Elias Tsapelas (00:50): By May 22nd, the governor needs to decide whether this constitutional amendment will go on the August or November ballot. What it says, essentially, is to Missouri voters: do you want to start the process of getting rid of Missouri’s income tax? It comes with three main components. The first piece is the legislature will be required to enact legislation that would get rid of the state’s income tax based on revenue growth. Once that income tax is gone, it cannot be reinstituted. Previous versions of this bill had some details lined out about how the income tax rate would be cut based on revenue growth, but in later versions this was stripped back to just the legislature will decide this later. The other two pieces say you will also be authorizing the legislature to expand the state sales tax base, meaning the things the state sales tax applies to. This could also involve changing the rate, because right now Missouri’s constitution does not allow the state legislature to expand the sales tax to anything that was not taxed in 2015. But this does come with a guardrail: if the legislature does change the state sales tax, it has to be done in a revenue neutral fashion. So expanding the sales tax base or raising the rate to bring in additional tax revenues has to go towards lowering the state income tax. That gives the legislature the authority to change how much revenue comes in, which would speed up the process for getting rid of the income tax. The last piece is a component for local governments. If the state changes the number of things that the sales tax applies to, this would also increase revenues to local governments. Those additional revenues would have to go towards a list of other taxes that would be lowered. In places like St. Louis and Kansas City, that would go towards lowering the earnings tax. For other local governments, they get to choose whether it goes towards lowering the sales tax, property tax, personal property taxes, or real property taxes. The key piece being revenue neutral. This is not going to be a windfall for anyone. It is basically the start of a discussion, because they don’t say what the rate might need to go to, what the sales tax could be expanded to, or what revenues would trigger income tax elimination or cuts. This is just the start of the discussion, giving the legislature the authority to keep moving in the direction we started around 2014.

Zach Lawhorn (03:57): Taking those a piece at a time: the first one, if it passes and the income tax is eliminated at some point, it cannot come back. That seems pretty straightforward. The next two seem like responses to opposition that we hear on a regular basis. The first being the revenue triggers, which seem designed to prevent what we often hear about with Kansas, where they cut the income tax without cutting spending, leading to revenue shortfalls. And the expansion of the sales tax base seems like protection against having to raise the sales tax rate on goods. Do I have that right?

Elias Tsapelas (04:40): Yes. The revenue trigger piece is basically what Missouri has been doing for a while, waiting to see how much revenue we have before lowering the income tax by that amount. We’ve been doing that for over a decade now and have lowered the top individual income tax rate from 6% to 4.7%. We’re just continuing down that path to be sure we don’t create some enormous budget hole. Now, when you look at the sales tax, Missouri has a very complicated, out-of-date sales tax system. The state sales tax rate is 4.225%, but when you go to the store you’re paying something significantly higher, largely due to local governments and a lot of special taxing districts. Missouri also has a lot of sales tax exemptions. Missouri really needs a full look at its entire sales tax system. But economically, when thinking about switching a state from being primarily funded by income taxes to something closer to sales taxes, the best way to fund a state is to tax as broad a base as possible so you can have the lowest rate possible. You want to be taxing final consumption, not business inputs. As we start the idea of transferring to more of a consumption tax in Missouri, the goal is to make sure it doesn’t become a tax increase for some people while things change elsewhere. It’s trying to keep it level the whole way, and at least right now it seems like a pretty neutral proposal going forward.

Zach Lawhorn (06:24): David, for people who don’t think about taxes as a corresponding tax system, can you explain the idea of local governments rolling back certain taxes and how people might experience that on their property tax bills or personal property tax bills?

David Stokes (06:44): It’s trickier than you might think, but it’s vital that it be done right. If you expand the sales tax base at the state level, as Elias discussed, you don’t want local governments to start collecting significantly more sales tax revenue for no reason. At the state level we’ll do something good with that and phase out the income tax, but at the local government level we don’t want just more revenue with nothing to spend it on. You need tax relief for citizens, which is why they’re going to require rollbacks. They’ve given local governments some options in how you roll that rate back, which is a good thing, but they need to give them a few more options. For example, they said you could roll back property taxes, real property taxes, personal property taxes, or sales taxes. A few things that need to be considered: many municipalities don’t have a property tax, so they won’t be able to roll back the property tax. And it’s trickier to roll back sales taxes than you might think. Unlike property taxes and income taxes, which can be reduced in small increments, sales taxes have to be done in set increments. You can’t go from a 1% sales tax to a 0.92% sales tax. It’s just not allowed and would be incredibly difficult for retailers to implement. So local governments need even more flexibility in how they roll back taxes. I would say the utility tax, which just about every county imposes, is a great option to add to the choice mix for rollbacks. These are the sales taxes that can be placed on utilities, which unlike other sales taxes can be rolled back in small increments. That’s a very good option. The biggest challenge of all, though, is the special taxing districts that Elias mentioned earlier, such as transportation development districts and community improvement districts. These usually only have sales taxes and nothing else. You have to address what they do if their sales tax collections go up 30% and they have no legal way to roll it back by that same amount. So we need to adjust that. I would also hope that part of this whole deal would be a substantial cap on how these special taxing districts like TDDs and CIDs operate in the first place, to really restrict their continued expansion in Missouri, which has been very harmful. Those are just a few ideas out of many in how local governments are going to have to address this.

Zach Lawhorn (09:59): Finally, Elias, as you said, it’ll be on the ballot sometime in the fall. But between now and either August or November, people interested in this topic are going to see a lot of data, modeling, estimates, and projections. We want to be honest about what we can know and what we cannot know. With the legislation that has passed now, what should people keep in mind when they see some of these estimates or models or projections this summer?

Elias Tsapelas (10:39): The first thing is, if you see anything claiming this is going to generate a tremendous budget shortfall or major harm to local governments, this thing is set up to be revenue neutral. This is not something that is going to create enormous holes. Most of the time, estimates that reach that conclusion assume this would work in an entirely different way than what is allowed. So that is something you don’t necessarily need to worry about. What people are more reasonably worried about is: if you empower the legislature to expand or raise the sales tax, how is that going to impact everyone? Missouri’s state and local combined sales tax rates are relatively high already. The state’s portion is pretty low, but combined it’s relatively high. So what the state decides to do in terms of how much it expands the sales tax base, whether that involves more services versus goods, will impact different people differently, in different parts of the state and at different income levels. Anything right now that says this is definitely going to be bad for X person, we just can’t know that, because there’s not enough information out there. Everyone should keep an open mind and also recognize that the reason for this amendment and this proposal is that Missouri’s economy is falling behind. We are falling behind our neighbors in terms of tax competitiveness, and the only way to change that is to improve Missouri’s tax standing. Our sales tax system is incredibly broken, so this is something that is going to need to be fixed. At least right now we are at the point of asking: do we want to go down this path? Let’s hope the legislature does a good job. We’ll be shining a light on whatever they do, but we can’t know some of the things that people are warning about right now.

Zach Lawhorn (12:50): David, after the legislature got the income tax bills out the door, they shifted to talking about property taxes, which is something we hear a lot about. People want property tax reform. With only a few days left in the session, where do those efforts stand and what are your thoughts?

David Stokes (13:11): Unlike a lot of the property tax changes of the past few years, I actually like the property tax changes being proposed this year. At least one property tax bill is in conference committee being debated between the House and Senate right now. Another major bill has passed out of the Senate but hasn’t made it through the House yet. I’m told there are going to have to be some compromises on both sides to get a bill across the finish line, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The biggest change this year, which seems very much in the weeds but is significant, would take the way property taxes are imposed in St. Louis County and apply it to the rest of the state. St. Louis County has different tax rates for all the different types of property: residential, agricultural, commercial, and personal property, which includes your car, boat, farm equipment, livestock, and the like. Those rates adjust differently as assessments go up and down each year. This approach was originally intended to be extended to the rest of the state about 20 years ago when they did it in St. Louis County, but the following year they came back and said the rest of the state didn’t have to do it. It’s a good idea. It might sound strange to some people, but a good example of why it would be beneficial came from stories in the St. Louis Business Journal about the real decline in commercial property values in the city of St. Louis over the past year. Because they set one tax rate measured under one unified property value, residential homeowners in St. Louis end up making up with their taxes for the decline in commercial property. In St. Louis County, with the siloed tax rates, if commercial property goes down, the commercial property tax rate will go up to offset that instead of passing it on to homeowners. In rural Missouri, which has so much agricultural property, this would allow agricultural property tax rates to increase to fund goods in rural areas without as dramatically impacting commercial and residential property. I think this is a good idea and I hope it passes. There are also some good amendments that would put taxpayer protections in place to avoid the temptation of local officials to target commercial property with these new different tax rates. It’s in the weeds, but I think these are good changes this year.

Zach Lawhorn (16:24): That sounds like the other side of the coin from what’s happened in Jackson County, where over the last few years people have been very upset that their assessments have gone up by more than 20% and residential homeowners have seen gigantic leaps in their property taxes. Is this kind of like having to turn one knob one way and another knob the other way?

David Stokes (16:55): Sort of. The tricky part is that the situation in Jackson County for the past 10 years has been so bad, it’s hard to compare it to other counties. It’s been uniquely horrible for the people of Jackson County. But it does start with one basic truth: 15 to 20 years ago, Jackson County was under-assessed. The assessor was ordered to increase the valuations because they were improperly low, and probably artificially and intentionally low. The right approach would have been to raise those assessed valuations to more accurate totals while lowering the rates at the same time to avoid crushing people with higher taxes. But Jackson County’s taxing entities have not really done that, starting with the Kansas City 33 school district, a very large school district in Kansas City, which is the only taxing body in Missouri exempt from rolling back rates as values increase. So you’ve seen these giant increases within that school district and they don’t even have to roll back rates. They just get to keep their same rates, as they have frequently over the past 10 years. So people are getting walloped. And then you throw in the fact that the Kansas City Assessor’s Office has done a terrible job managing the process year after year, not hitting deadlines for notifying people about changes and not properly running the appeals process. It’s just been a terrible system in Jackson County, and almost uniquely so.

Zach Lawhorn (18:30): All right. Before we have Elias read the budget line by line, Avery, I want to get an update on the education items here in the last week of the session. Early literacy, the reading bill, we’ve been talking about it all session long. How’s it looking?

Avery Frank (18:47): When it first passed out of the House before spring break, 131 to 10, I was genuinely excited. It wasn’t necessarily that it passed so early; it was that it passed with such little resistance and such bipartisan support on both sides of the aisle. Teaching our students how to read, giving every student the best chance to become a confident, capable reader, that seems like common sense and a goal that everyone wants to work toward to help our state improve and perhaps become the next Mississippi. It looked that way before spring break, but the Senate version of the early literacy bill got filibustered and set aside. The House bill has made it through the process and is on the informal calendar for third reading, so it could be taken up at any time. If it does pass the Senate, I anticipate it would easily pass the House again. But that is the problem with a lot of education legislation: can it pass the Senate? There have been different concerns about the early literacy bills. Some people are concerned that the MAP test, or the Missouri Assessment Program, which we use to test all of our students, is not a good measure and we shouldn’t be basing anything on it. Some are concerned with third-grade retention and whether it actually helps, looking at states like Mississippi and noting that while fourth-grade scores are great, eighth-grade scores have only improved a little. Those are the main pushbacks we’re seeing. I would still say this is something we really need to do. The early literacy bill is built on two different pillars. The first is a mandatory third-grade retention policy. Missouri already tests all K through third-grade students with a reading screener to see how they’re doing with reading. What this bill would do is set a passing score for those screeners. If students don’t meet that score, they would be retained in third grade, because reading is such a foundational skill. If you don’t know how to read, that’s something worth holding back for, to make sure students get it down before moving on for the rest of their educational career. Students would still have the opportunity to retake the screener, and there would be good-cause exemptions for students with disabilities, for students who have been held back previously, and for English language learners. The second main pillar is reforming our teacher preparation programs. In 2023, the National Council on Teacher Quality conducted a survey of all of our universities and teacher preparation programs and found that half of them received an F in teaching the science of reading, which is the best evidence-based way to teach students to read. The early literacy bill would align our teacher prep programs with those best practices. If they don’t do it, they can’t certify teachers. You can see how there could be pushback and reason why people would filibuster or not want it to come to the floor. That’s where it stands right now. I’m hoping people set aside their objections and recognize that this is a great first step to get Missouri back on track. Our reading scores have been really poor, especially after the pandemic. They continue to decrease and have not bounced back at all. They’re lower now than they were the first year after the pandemic, and we have to turn things around. These early literacy bills, I hope people see the common sense in them.

Zach Lawhorn (22:30): It’s not even the perfect being the enemy of the good. It’s just people being afraid to push back against the status quo. Missouri has fallen back in reading test scores, and other states, most notably Mississippi, have found ways to improve. I don’t think it’s helpful to frame this as some kind of radical moonshot. In the final days of the session, the urgency cannot be overstated. The other thing we’ve talked about a lot this session is A through F report cards, a transparency measure. Governor Kehoe issued an executive order before the session started. What’s the status of the legislature trying to adhere to the governor’s executive order?

Avery Frank (23:19): The legislature has tried to legislate its own way into how the executive order gets implemented, because DESE, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, could implement it in their own way. The legislature wants to determine how things are going to be scored instead of letting DESE make that decision. There’s been a lot of back and forth, and a lot of different interested parties. Not to get too in the weeds, but some districts really want academic achievement, their base score on the Missouri Assessment Program, to be weighed the most heavily because that would give them the highest score. Some want growth to be weighed the most heavily for the same reason. Some want basically no grades and a lot more qualitative information. There are a lot of different factors. The best vehicle for A through F report cards right now looks like Senate Bill 1351, which continues the long legacy of education omnibus bills used in recent years in Missouri. It combines the report card, limits on screen time for young students, and a couple of other things. I’m not sure if that’s going to make it past, to be honest. People are still concerned about whether the Missouri Assessment Program is something they want to base all of this on. Personally, I think the executive order is better than the legislation as it currently stands. They got rid of one aspect I liked as a researcher: in Governor Kehoe’s executive order, there was a penalty if districts didn’t report their data properly. In the current legislation, Senate Bill 1351, if districts don’t report sufficient data, it’s just written as an aside, basically saying they have to note on their report card that there is not sufficient data, and then they’re not included in the ranking as much. I don’t like that. It gives districts, especially poorly performing ones, an incentive not to report their data so they can have this qualifier on all of their report cards. I also don’t like it because, from all the education research I’ve been doing, we really do have a data reporting problem and we need to be a lot better about transparency. I hope we get some good report cards, because right now at the Show-Me Institute we do our best with the data we have, but we have to work with unsuppressed data, meaning we don’t have data that could potentially identify certain students. So there are some districts we have no data on because they’re so small. But DESE and the state have the best data possible. They could make a really good report card even better than we could, because they have better data than we do. That’s why I’m really hoping we get a good report card, because it would be very helpful for all the parents, legislators, and researchers across the state to see which districts are doing well and learn from them, and which ones are doing poorly and need more support.

Zach Lawhorn (26:42): Let’s talk about the budget. Elias, the legislature passed the budget a little early this year. They beat the deadline by a couple of days, right?

Elias Tsapelas (26:53): They finished early, which is a little bit different than the last few years.

Zach Lawhorn (26:56): Are we spending more or less money than last year?

Elias Tsapelas (27:01): Spending less, but I’m not throwing them a party. There’s just a lot less federal money going around. There was a lot of COVID money in recent years, and Missouri hasn’t spent all of it. The current budget this year is about $54 billion. What the legislature passed is a little bit less than $50 billion, depending on whether you count different construction items. But there was a lot of federal money in that total. At the end of the day, what we’re looking at is a budget that is still going to spend more general revenue, where our income and sales tax dollars go. It’s still going to spend more than we expect to bring in. So we’re still going to exhaust all of our surplus that we built up over those years. There were some positive things that happened this year, but ultimately part of how they got the budget done early was by spending just a little bit more, so they left some of the good on the table.

Zach Lawhorn (28:20): So we’re spending the surplus, as you’ve been warning about for several years, the federal money is drying up, and to circle back to the opening segment, I think part of the trust the legislature is going to have to build this summer is demonstrating we’re getting spending under control. You said you’re not throwing them a party. But is this reduction, whatever the reason, directionally good enough for the legislature to say they’re working on the spending side of things, or is it just not good enough?

Elias Tsapelas (29:00): I think I’ll know a lot more going into next year, because there were a lot better discussions this year, especially looking at spending incentives. As was mentioned, DESE is going to have a new funding formula, or at least the governor has a task force working on one. The way education is funded for K through 12 is going to change. There was also a big fight this year about how to fund higher education. What seemed to me like a common sense idea, essentially having the legislature fund colleges based on how many students are enrolled, turned out to be considered too radical and was pushed off for the future. But there’s talk of coming back with a performance funding measure going forward. There’s also some movement on changing how the state does its IT work. There are a lot of IT changes coming, including things affecting Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Missouri has a very bad track record with IT. Part of this budget moves some IT resources over to the Department of Social Services to support getting things going there, because most IT for the state of Missouri is currently consolidated in the Office of Administration. While that can seem efficient because every state department doesn’t need its own IT department, it also makes it a lot harder to hold people accountable. There has been a big issue recently with the state’s accounting software, where a contract is millions of dollars behind schedule and not working. The budget tries to get at that too, and it raises this major incentive question: are the people in charge of implementing new IT going to do their best at something that will ultimately try to eliminate their job? I think the legislature is finally starting to deal with that. Ultimately, if we go down the path of a more efficient government and a better tax system, that may mean fewer state employees, and that is something that hasn’t come up much but I think the legislature is finally starting to look at. Pushing toward better funding models, a better state workforce, all those type of things, is moving in the right direction as opposed to how it has been, where the budget just grows larger every year. They’re looking in the right direction. I would have liked to see more, but I think we’ll know a lot more in the next year, especially because the federal COVID funding will essentially be gone.

Zach Lawhorn (32:12): Our final topic, partly so we can put it in the title of the episode for clicks, but also because it seems like every week there’s a story from across the country or across the state about data centers and communities pushing back for a lot of reasons. The most recent one was Ferguson in the St. Louis area. David, can you catch us up on what was on the table for this data center in Ferguson and what happened?

David Stokes (32:40): The vote that the Ferguson city council took last week was strictly on a tax subsidy, I believe about $1.8 billion in tax abatements and various subsidies for the project. It was not a vote on approving the data center itself. This was a commercially zoned area, so it didn’t need any permission to put a data center there, and that’s a good thing. But the city nonetheless rejected the tax subsidy, which I thought was the right call. These data centers are very profitable and important, and I’m certainly not anti-data center. But the demand that they get enormous subsidies everywhere they seem to be going is improper. Festus was right to approve the data center operation there, but I think very much wrong to approve the enormous tax subsidy the city granted, which I believe was about a half a billion dollars. Avery can correct me if I’m wrong on that exact number. I like what Ferguson did, and I hope the data center moves into the old Emerson complex there nonetheless. We need data centers. Data centers produce so much tax revenue that they can generate their own tax cuts, and I don’t mean a special subsidy for the data center itself. I mean they go into a city or a small area, generate so much revenue, and you can cut taxes for everybody in that community, including the data center itself. I think that’s the road to follow, and hopefully that’s what we’ll have in Missouri. I also think we need to change the way data centers are taxed in an upcoming legislative session, taxing them a little more like utilities to reduce the incentive for one city or county to hand out a big subsidy and instead spread those tax benefits around a little more.

Zach Lawhorn (34:46): Avery, are you heartened by this rejection? Because as David said, we need the data centers, but we really want to avoid this new layer of corporate welfare that could pop up everywhere. So how do you feel about it?

Avery Frank (35:00): I’m actually very excited by the rejection in Ferguson. I’ve talked to a lot of people on both sides of the data center debate, those who have gone to the meetings and stayed up until 3 a.m. and protested, and those who want them. When I look at this Ferguson project specifically, the numbers David was talking about involved granting up to 15 years of tax abatements on real estate, personal property, and sales tax for a data center project. When I see something like that, it gets at what David was talking about. The only true significant benefit of a data center is the tax revenue it could bring. It doesn’t bring a lot of jobs. It takes a lot of electricity and a lot of water. It generates noise. It already makes a lot of people upset, and there are concerns about housing values and everything else. So if you’re not getting any tax revenue, there really is no strong incentive to have a data center project. That Emerson complex in Ferguson had thousands of employees. A data center does not take very many employees at all. So when you have people coming up and saying this data center project won’t succeed unless we get all these tax subsidies, I say that’s fine and I hope you don’t build a data center there, because the tax revenue is really the only benefit you’re getting from it. One of the bigger things is just something about Missouri in general. I’m from Tennessee and there are a lot of concerns there about having too much growth. Missouri sometimes feels like the opposite of Tennessee. We’re so desperate for growth that we’re willing to hand out a bunch of money. We don’t have enough pride. This Emerson complex is a good building and a good place. Ferguson has a STEM high school that produces very high test scores and graduates people who can work in the tech industry or an engineering industry. We shouldn’t waste a good building and a good workforce on a project that’s going to get all these tax subsidies and not bring a lot of jobs. The same thing happened over in Independence, where they gave out billions in subsidies for a data center project. Whenever I see that, I think we have to have a little bit of pride in Missouri. We can’t just be giving out all this money to get anyone to come. We have a good parcel of land, a good workforce, a lot of water, and a central location in the country. We can attract good projects, data centers or not, without giving out a bunch of subsidies. We need to understand what the benefits and costs of a data center are and what data center developers are actually looking for. They have a lot of money already. If you give them a good workforce, a place to build, and community support, I think they’ll come, even without a bunch of money.

Elias Tsapelas (38:28): I was really hoping this was the discussion we were going to have this year in Missouri’s legislature, because it started off so well with the discussion of how to get rid of the income tax and everything that goes with that. Talking about the income tax is really about how you make your state more desirable and how you grow faster. But Missouri for so long has just said: we want this industry or this type of business, so let’s give it an economic development tax credit. Let’s give out a billion dollars worth of those. Let’s give out sales tax exemptions. As far as I know, data centers in Missouri already get state and local sales tax exemptions. We just give those out. If we’re really going to start thinking about how to make the state the most desirable place, how to grow the fastest and be the most desirable for families and businesses, that’s really more about making the tax climate the best for everyone, not constantly picking winners and losers. Unfortunately, the budget didn’t see as many cuts as I had hoped. As we go into the last few days of the legislature, there are plenty of tax credit bills waiting to pass. The film tax credit is back and there’s talk of extending the sunset on it. There are other tax credits. We’re still going down that path. There are still more sales tax exemptions being considered. Missouri just needs to decide what direction we want to go, because ultimately if we do get rid of the income tax, a lot of these economic development incentives don’t even really work anymore. You have to look at different things. You have to look at what is really the criteria for families and businesses. States across the country are dealing with these issues, changing their economic conditions, their tax policy, and people are moving there. We know people are leaving Missouri. We know income is leaving Missouri. We need to change things. The status quo is not going to work going forward, and I was hoping that would have sunk in a little bit more this year than it did.

Zach Lawhorn (40:37): We will leave it there this week. We’ll talk to everyone again after the session ends over the next few days and see how everything turned out. As always, plenty more at showmeinstitute.org. David, Avery, and Elias, thank you very much.

The post Missouri’s 2026 Legislative Session Final Week appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00)
Great. Mike McShane, EdChoice, always great to have you on the podcast. I read your Substack, Informed Choice. I know you do not write them all, but you write a lot of them, and I think they are super interesting. A month or so ago, there was a lot of “what’s out, what’s in,” closing down 2025 and starting 2026. I really liked your post about six words for 2026, but…

Mike McShane (00:03)
Always great to be with you. Thanks for having me. I tried to.

Susan Pendergrass (00:28)
I want to talk about that, but generally speaking, I have been having this feeling, and I think we have even talked about this on the podcast, that something has changed in K–12 education in the United States. Something seems different than it did. You track the number of kids in private school choice programs, which took forever to get to a million, and now it is like a million and a half, right? It just seems to have been growing so fast.

Mike McShane (00:52)
Yeah. I think there has definitely been a shift. I have noticed that, with the start of the year and legislative sessions starting across the country, I am talking to journalists and other folks, and it seems like the normal conversation I would have had in the past was, “Are we going to have these programs, is there going to be choice, or what?” Now it is, “What is the shape of it going to be?”

So much of choice now is being taken as a given. I think we are even seeing that within public school districts. Even in states that might not have private school choice or robust charter schools, they are at least saying, “Parents are going to need to have choice, and maybe we can keep the genie in the bottle by just having it within public school districts, or in between public school districts.” But the idea that we are going to go back to residentially assigned public schools…

Susan Pendergrass (01:41)
Like Kansas.

Mike McShane (01:50)
…with the odd aberration here and there, it just seems like that shift has happened. Now it is a question of what it is going to look like, and it is going to look different in different states. It is not a “whether,” it is a “how.”

Susan Pendergrass (02:03)
That’s right, because we have a whole bunch of second-generation choosers, right? We have parents of young kids whose parents chose it, so they are not, like you said, going to go backwards.

Another interesting outcome you have talked about over the years is that the Catholic school movement is growing again, right? Like in Florida, we are seeing a resurgence in Catholic schools, and in Iowa, because parents did not necessarily not want to send their kids to Catholic schools. Some got mad about the scandals…

Mike McShane (02:05)
Yeah, for sure. Iowa, Florida, and probably other places when data comes out, for sure.

Susan Pendergrass (02:32)
…or they did not want to pay tuition, and now they can. And certainly this survey you all have done for so long, on where parents would send their kids to school versus where they do send their kids to school, maybe we are going to see some sort of convergence where parents can actually send their kids to the school they want.

A couple of the words you said are going to be big in education in 2026, “participants,” is that right? Participants.

Mike McShane (02:34)
Yeah. Totally, absolutely. “Participants” is one of them.

Susan Pendergrass (03:02)
And “supply side.” What do you mean by “participants”?

Mike McShane (03:06)
“Participants” is, there is this big debate now, and in the piece I started with very general words that are part of the broader conversation, and then I got very narrow into school choice research words. “Participants” is kind of a school choice research word, but not entirely. I think it is going to be part of broader debates about choice in general.

There is a big question out there, who uses these programs? Who is going to participate? There are competing theories. Skeptics say it is going to be all rich kids, or kids who are already in private schools. Stronger advocates say it will be low-income kids, or kids desperate for more options.

The answer is probably somewhere in the middle, and it will probably be different in different places at different times. Some of the emerging research suggests that when universal private school choice programs first start, for reasons that are perfectly predictable, students who are already in private schools are the first movers.

Susan Pendergrass (04:01)
Sure.

Mike McShane (04:28)
That is probably because private schools find out about these programs and have an audience. They can say, “Hey, you all know how you are paying to go here? Now you do not have to do that anymore.” And then over time, the circle expands outward.

Susan Pendergrass (04:33)
They pass out a piece of paper in every backpack, yeah. “You should get this.”

Mike McShane (04:48)
More and more, those families have neighbors, cousins, and people they play YMCA basketball with. The word gets out over time. A lot of traditional channels for educating people do not work as well. It is not like everyone watches the nightly news or reads the local newspaper.

Susan Pendergrass (05:08)
“Put it on your website.” That’s a Missouri legislative mainstay, put it on your website.

Mike McShane (05:14)
So a lot of this comes out via word of mouth or discussions. You could look at the same state and see participation change over time.

Because these programs are rolling out in different states at different times, there is not going to be one national answer to who is participating. It could be the first year in Mississippi, but the second year in Alabama, and the makeup of students will be different. Because of the nationalized nature of coverage, people will keep pushing for “the one answer,” but there isn’t one. Though, to be fair, some people will say there is. I do not think that will be true.

Susan Pendergrass (06:07)
Yeah, I get a ton of questions around the rural issue. Either it is going to be the demise of our rural school system because we are all going to close, or rural families do not need it, which are opposites. It is opposites, right?

Mike McShane (06:09)
Yeah. It cannot be both. And yet a frequent criticism is that it will be both of them.

Susan Pendergrass (06:25)
But I get that a lot. “There are no private schools for them to go to,” and “it is going to cause rural schools to close.”

Certainly in Missouri, even our MOScholars program is quite small, and we do not really have charter schools outside of two districts, two very far away places. So I think for a lot of folks in Missouri, it is mysterious, who would do this, and why would anyone want it? And of course, “All the poor kids are going to go to the wealthy school districts.” Still a lot of talk about property taxes. It is almost like 2005 in Missouri, a lot of that going on.

But the reality is, in long-running programs, and now I am thinking open enrollment, anywhere you let parents pick, you get a lot of rural participation. They have the fewest choices, right? And you get a lot of urban participation, and some suburban participation. Like you said, I do not think you can…

Mike McShane (06:55)
Yeah, right.

Susan Pendergrass (07:20)
I have had so many parents over the years say, “We do not need that here because all our schools are good.” And I am like, I promise you there is a child who got on the bus with a stomach ache this morning because they did not want to go to school, for whatever reason. They think the teachers do not like them, or they are being bullied, whatever it is. I promise you there are families who would leave if they could easily do it.

Mike McShane (07:30)
Yeah, for sure. Totally.

One thing that is going to be interesting, as we watch this play out, with questions about who is participating and who is leaving public schools, is that there are broader trends of public school enrollment decreasing. You hear in some states, “My gosh, all these public schools are closing because of choice programs.” But the state next door that does not have a choice program, their public schools are closing too, because there are just fewer kids than there were before.

So that is another thing we have to disentangle, the broader population trends. I was just seeing something earlier about how congressional seats and electoral college seats are going to change because of population shifts.

Susan Pendergrass (08:17)
It’s huge.

Mike McShane (08:26)
You look at states like New York and California losing large numbers of people, Florida and Texas increasing numbers of people. These are people in general, because that is how it all happens. We have to start with that baseline and then layer these other things on top, because I feel like school choice is going to get blamed for this, even in places where it does not exist.

Susan Pendergrass (08:36)
Yeah. I cannot tell you how many times I have talked about this and shocked people. Every school district in St. Louis County, for example, has declining enrollment by large numbers. Clayton’s declining enrollment, Ladue declining enrollment, all declining enrollment. People are like, “Where are they going?” And I say, “They were not born.” They simply were not born.

We had our biggest kindergarten cohort in 2013. That moved through to senior year of high school like two years ago. It is just demographics. They just were not born.

Mike McShane (09:00)
Right? Yeah.

Susan Pendergrass (09:20)
We have net out-migration of some groups of people, people with bachelor’s degrees, but for sure, it is demographics. These kids were not born.

There is going to be this push and pull between five-to-seventeen-year-olds and retirees, basically, because we are getting more old people and fewer young people. Do we build a school or a nursing home? I think it is going to be a thing.

And we still have school districts getting bonds, 30-year bonds, to build schools and buy buses. I do not know if that is the right answer. At least the charter school sector, and probably similarly the private school sector, figured out how to not be in the real estate business, how to lease a building, or do different types of arrangements. They are going to benefit from this, while the public school system is still building schools. The kids are not being born, but we will see how that plays out.

Another thing you mentioned, one of your words I have been thinking about a lot, two of them, is “transparency.” I have wondered, can I start calling accountability transparency? Because accountability is kind of negative, but transparency, of course.

And you talk about “rage bait.” Sorry, I am rolling these into one, but with early media stories around some of these private school choice programs, like Arizona, people really jumped on what parents were spending their money on. As though they cannot be trusted to spend this money, in the way the public school system can be trusted with billions, I mean trillions, of dollars. Parents cannot be trusted with this $8,000, they will simply…

Mike McShane (10:52)
Totally. This is the irony. The irony is kind of like the discussion earlier, how there are no places in rural America, and everyone will leave rural schools to go to these non-existent places. Both cannot be true at the same time.

We cannot say these programs are not transparent and then talk about all the individual purchases families are making. That has to be transparent for you to be able to make those arguments. It is kind of a shell game people are playing when they talk about transparency.

When you say, “Here are ways in which ESA programs are not transparent,” your research is a perfect example of the opposite. Transaction-level data, you have published papers that offer transaction-level data on every purchase in the ESA program.

Susan Pendergrass (11:59)
Trust me, there are hundreds of thousands of records.

Mike McShane (12:00)
Right, hundreds of thousands of records that are available for anybody to look at.

I think this is actually good. We need to have discussions about what should be included in these programs and what should not. It is an education savings account, not just a savings account, so we have to draw the borders around what is an educational purchase and what is not.

We live in a big, vibrant democracy, so we need to have these discussions. Should you be able to buy a trampoline, or a Lego set, or whatever? Let’s talk about it. That’s fine. Maybe we decide in some cases it is allowed, and in some cases it is not.

This is part of transparency and accountability. You are democratically accountable, we need to participate in this.

But I am still blown away by the number of people who claim these programs are not transparent, when what we know about what parents are doing is more granular and more detailed than any public school district, any charter school network, almost any institution you are going to see. You just do not get transaction-level data on anything.

We can debate whether those are good purchases or not good purchases, but to say they are not being transparent is wild to me.

Susan Pendergrass (13:09)
No, I mean, my kids all went to public school. They certainly went to amusement parks. They certainly watched a lot of movies. They would not want anyone scrutinizing every, you know, you have 30 teachers buying 30 whiteboards. Decisions were made that were not the best.

I did not see anything in the transaction-level data that made me think, “This is outrageous.” And who am I to say woodworking is not an okay thing for your child to learn? Swimming lessons, I had to swim. I do not know.

I do not want to get into that conversation because I assume the best intentions for parents. I cannot understand why a parent would invest the time and effort to get into these programs to simply buy themselves a trampoline, and not really care if their kids are reading or not. I do not understand that, but that is what…

Mike McShane (14:04)
Right.

Susan Pendergrass (14:15)
…they are throwing mud at the wall to try to discredit. Clearly, it is what parents want.

I am baffled that, when you look at politics in the United States right now, those on the left just refuse to accept this fact. It is a fact. Parents want to choose their school.

There are certainly Democrats for education reform, and plenty of people working hard from the left, but the general approach feels very last century. The teachers’ union saying, “Nobody wants this, we have to stop it at all costs. We have to put a halt to this and put more money into the public school your address sends you to. We need to fund those fully first before we can ever let kids out.” That is such a failed argument to me.

Mike McShane (15:18)
Look, this is why “accountability” and “transparency” are two of the words for 2026. Opponents to choice have figured out they cannot just go out hammer-and-tongs against it, or directly say, “We are against choice.” People do not learn lessons in politics, but they learn that one.

I was looking at the gubernatorial candidate just to Missouri’s north in Iowa. It was interesting. There was an interview with the Democratic candidate for governor, Rob Sand. He would not come out and condemn the ESA program outright. The interviewer perceptively drilled down and asked, “Are you saying you are not opposed to this program, you just want changes?” He never said yes to that. He has never said, “I am for this program.” If you read between the lines, he is saying, “I am not for this program, but I cannot come out and say it.”

His pivot was immediately, “I am just talking about accountability and transparency.” He wants private schools to follow every single one of the same rules that public schools do, and expects them to somehow do better.

Part of it is, these are folks working in red states who need to make arguments that appeal to conservatives. Accountability appeals to conservatives. Fiscal responsibility appeals to conservatives, not wanting to waste tax dollars. So it is smart strategy. People need to see what it is.

If this is a blue state, these exact same people are making arguments that appeal to progressives. But you are in a red state, so they are trying to make arguments that appeal to you. If you think about it for a little bit longer, what they are saying does not hold a lot of water.

Susan Pendergrass (17:41)
Yeah, and with this federal tax credit program, even though every state has to decide whether or not they are going to take the money, it is going to be a weird shifting of resources. If I live in a state that says, “We are not going to take the money,” that is fine. I can give my $1,700 to a scholarship group in any state. I will just send my $1,700 to another state.

Some states, like Virginia, the governor, one of the last things he did when he left was opt in. Now the new governor is going to have to make this weird choice. Do I want to go against it? If you looked at any poll of parents, any poll, you would know they want to be able to choose where their kids go to school. Do you really want to be the person that withdraws?

Mike McShane (18:21)
Yeah, when she seems to be in a perfect position to just say, “Oh, the last guy did this on the way out, so I guess we are going to do it.” Once they do it for a year and everybody is fine with it, it is just, “Oh well, whatever.”

Susan Pendergrass (18:33)
I do not know. I did not do it.

I think it is going to be really interesting because, again, the way we started this, there is a groundswell. I do not think you are going to turn it back. If you stay on the side of saying it is better when kids can only go to their assigned public school, you are in quicksand. You are going to bury yourself.

Mike McShane (19:03)
Yeah. The only thing I would say, and it was another one of my six words, is “rage bait.” It is always lingering in the background for me. I am seeing it more and more, all day, every day, stuff that shows up in your feed deliberately to upset you, terrify you, whatever.

Rage bait is unpredictable. You never know what is going to catch fire and cause a big shift. There is obviously potential for rage bait content, as we mentioned, we have crossed one and a half million, hundreds of thousands of people in various states, with lots of flexibility in what they can buy. People making bad decisions, people stealing things, it is totally possible that happens. Something egregious could happen.

With a large enough population, even very improbable events can happen. One fear I do have is that something rage-bait-y happens and people lose their minds over it.

But this is the key, if one parent in Arizona does something crazy, that does not mean the other 1,499,999 parents around the country should not have the right or opportunity to do this. We have to be able to say, “This is rage bait, this is not actually what is happening.”

Susan Pendergrass (20:51)
Yeah, we have talked about this. Those of us who have pressed for school choice for so long have said, “We will do anything you want, take our arm. We will put all our data out there, we will be as transparent as possible.” And your colleague, Marty Lueken, had a Substack about this recently, like, “We will take half the money. We do not need all the money, half the money will be…”

Mike McShane (21:08)
For sure.

Susan Pendergrass (21:19)
…150 percent transparent. We will jump through all these hoops just to get this thing that everybody wants, and it is from that transparency that we are going to get those stories. We are going to pay for that.

Mike McShane (21:29)
Yeah. It is important for people to be more attuned to the rage bait they are getting. People ask, “Have you seen this thing that happened in this place?” And I am like, okay, yeah, even if it did, what do you extrapolate?

A teacher in Sacramento did something crazy. There are north of a hundred thousand schools across America. There are north of three million public school teachers. At any given moment, someone is doing something dumb. I do not know what to extrapolate from that. It could just be one crazy person.

This is not just education. Across public policy, you point to one person in the military doing something terrible to delegitimize the military in general. Do not fall for this.

To be fair, sometimes we in the school choice movement, or education reform, have done rage bait of our own. People have used social media to point out, “My gosh, look at this assignment that a second-grade teacher in Poughkeepsie did, this is why we need school choice.” People have done that.

The measure with which you measure will be measured back to you. If you live by the sword, die by the sword.

Susan Pendergrass (22:54)
John Oliver did a story on charter schools. Remember, it was the guy in Florida that was letting a charter school be a nightclub at night? There is no way that is representative of charter schools.

Mike McShane (22:58)
Yeah, I remember that.

Susan Pendergrass (23:10)
That was an example I found shocking, but it is not representative. And you are right, they will find those stories.

Mike McShane (23:13)
Yeah, totally. We should all use less rage bait. We should not use rage bait to say just because one teacher in one place did something dumb, that is an indictment of public education in general. Nor should we allow the same thing to be done in reverse, which is, because one family did something crazy, we should not have choice at all.

Susan Pendergrass (23:49)
That leads to another one of your words, “slop.” There is so much talk about AI in schools and what to do about it. Is one person going to figure this out for every school everywhere, or are we all going to figure it out individually?

Mike McShane (24:03)
Yeah, I played out the scenario I am worried about. I do not know if it will happen in 2026, but it might.

We have heard a lot about AI in schools, students cheating, which is real and worrisome. But the specific scenario I have not heard as many people talking about is the prevalence of AI video, and the ability to create videos of things that did not happen.

How many, if you have a student in a classroom, after taking a picture or a short, unrelated video of their teacher, they can put it through a series of prompts, “Hey, have this teacher do,” and then insert whatever horrible thing, say something horrible, do something horrible.

Susan Pendergrass (24:34)
Yeah.

Mike McShane (24:53)
And if you are not savvy, and I will be the first to say I think I am a savvy consumer of the internet, I have been fooled or very close to fooled. AI videos of animals doing things, dogs protecting people from bears, or that one recently that went around with a bald eagle that had ice on its beak that someone knocked off, whatever.

Susan Pendergrass (24:58)
It is like a parlor game, right? No dogs are going off diving boards, just to clarify. The rabbits on the trampoline, these are not happening. But you are right.

Mike McShane (25:20)
People who are not as savvy, the thing I spelled out was, someone does that, and then suddenly the next PTA meeting is flooded with people because this viral thing went around. The superintendent or principal has to say, “This did not happen, it is not real.”

If you do not have the media literacy, it is like one person’s word versus another. “We saw it happen, it is on video.” “No, it did not happen, it is AI.” How we adjudicate those things, and how it could be weaponized by teenagers, or by bad actors, all of that stuff will happen. Whenever a new model is released, everyone tries to break it immediately, they are much more creative than I ever was.

I am worried for teachers, worried for schools, worried for school board meetings. It could be anything. It could be taking video at a football game and saying something happened that did not. Even if it all works out eventually, the time and energy wasted dealing with it…

Now, again, I am hoping more and more schools, this could be a real kick in the rear end to get phones out of schools and say, “We are not going to have phones in schools, because people are going to be making AI videos of their teachers.” That is one of a thousand reasons we should not have phones in schools.

But it is not the only place kids are interacting with one another, or with teachers. So we have to be really skeptical when we see that video of that teacher, or that student, or that principal doing something. Take a deep breath and ask, “Is this video real? Does this pass the smell test? Does this sound like something a teacher would actually do?” I am increasingly worried about that. There are many other things people worry about that I do not really worry about, but AI video in the context of schools, bad news bears.

Susan Pendergrass (27:53)
Yeah, I think we are going to have to start adjusting our thinking to only believing things that happen in front of our face, things we can touch. The prevalence of, you know, Amazon ads now, they are… I mean, I went to get my haircut and somebody was holding up a picture, and she was like, “Okay, well, that is not a real person.” We are going to have to default to disbelief if it is on a phone or on a screen. If it is happening in front of you, you can touch it, you can believe it. But the rest of it, I think we are going to become extra skeptical, because I do not believe much stuff anymore.

Mike McShane (28:22)
Totally. Are schools going to need CCTV cameras everywhere? Are we going to be oddly surveilled in a lot of different ways, just for CYA? “If people are going to be making up fake videos, we need the real video of what is going on.” I do not know how that is going to go, but…

That was the “rage bait” one, my plea to people, please do not fall victim to rage bait. It is pinging parts of our brains that we should not. I get wrapped up in it too. “My God, I cannot believe that is happening.” Then you take 10 seconds and you are like, “Wait, why am I fired up about this road rage incident in South Carolina?” Someone cut somebody off on the highway. Who cares? I am not there. It is not my deal.

I think this “slop” stuff is also something we are going to have to be really cautious about and thoughtful about, because it could cause lots of problems.

Susan Pendergrass (29:35)
Yeah, but then people are like, “I am not going to allow AI, I am going to check it.” I think AI, we are going to have to accept, right? We have to live with it.

Mike McShane (29:41)
Yeah, we are going to have to realize this is just part of it. There will be so many great things that come out of it, the creativity it will unleash.

In our own Substack, a bunch of the graphics we do are AI generated. I could not, I laugh, I have young kids, they are better drawers, I am horrible at it, but I can do this stuff with a couple of prompts in ChatGPT. “Hey, make me…” and they can be funny. You can do someone in the style of a famous painter and suddenly it is a Renaissance painting of me.

That is incredible productivity. The fact that I do not have to have a graphic designer, I can basically do it myself and put out essentially a small newspaper with some contributors and a bit of AI. That is an insane productivity increase, and it is incredible, but we have to be cautious of the downsides.

Susan Pendergrass (30:48)
Finally, your last word, “supply side.” In Missouri, folks will say, “Well, we do not need private school choice in our rural areas, there are no private schools,” as though the supply of private schools is fixed. It is treated like a natural result of how much interest there is, the kind of people who live in the community, and what is there is there, without thinking that if parents suddenly had $7,000 or $8,000 to spend, maybe somebody would open a new school.

Or not even a new school. Maybe somebody would open a visual arts business, or a soccer academy, tutoring, dyslexia therapy, whatever it is they think parents want or need. You would be free to be an entrepreneur in that space. That piece is largely overlooked, because it is like, “We have this many private schools with this many seats, so we can only have this many scholarships.” It is like, no, that is not fixed. Do you think we are going to see a lot of changes in that area?

Mike McShane (32:00)
Yeah, because another dimension where people think things are fixed is not only the number and locations, but the shape of what schools look like. “We are not going to have a private school in this small area because we cannot have a brick-and-mortar building with 30 rooms and 250 kids.” That is not what we are talking about.

If you can get 10 kids together at $8,000 apiece…

Susan Pendergrass (32:26)
There are no buildings.

Mike McShane (32:36)
…you can do a lot of interesting stuff. Especially if you can get space donated, leverage resources in the community, maybe some online stuff, and a local teacher. You could put together a heck of an education on $80,000 or $100,000.

It is happening. What makes it challenging to talk about is that it is happening across different dimensions. At the same time we are talking about Catholic schools growing and starting new schools in a traditional sense, two blocks away in some rented bungalow people are creating a Montessori micro school.

Because these things get spoken about in national terms and in a thousand-word news story, we struggle to discuss multiple dimensions. Existing schools are growing, new schools are emerging, and those new schools are going to look different. Some will grow, some will shrink, all these things can be happening at once.

Our job as researchers and observers is to do a lot of descriptive work, describe what is happening. There has been a push in earlier generations of school choice research toward causal results, horse-race comparisons, “Are they better than public schools?” “Is this type of private school better than that type?” But the only reason we were able to do that in 1998 is because, for a hundred years before, people did descriptive work to know, how many schools, what are they doing? Then you can talk about who is doing better, because you have to decide what they are doing, where they are, who is attending, are there differences.

It is almost like we are starting over.

Susan Pendergrass (34:39)
Yeah.

Mike McShane (35:01)
…doing that basic descriptive work. What is actually happening? What are people doing?

Susan Pendergrass (35:08)
Yeah, I know somebody who started a school in a barn on their property, and the parents came and converted the empty barn to a school. I know somebody who started a mobile school, basically in a big van, so that the school came to their house one day a week. And I know someone who started one in a high-rise in Queens. It is only limited by people’s imagination, basically, right?

And a like-minded group of parents. There are more people homeschooling now than used to be, so you could do this individually, but there are many more opportunities to do it. Parents, what emerged from the pandemic, at least, is they want their kids home maybe two days or three days. That is popular, and people are finding that two days out of the house creates unique opportunities in that space.

I think it is limited by people’s imagination, and some curriculum standards, and perhaps some accountability. But if you can meet those, I think we are seeing this idea.

I am not trying to be anti-traditional public school, but I butted up against this when my kids were little. “We are the only ones who know how to do this, so you have to accept our way of doing it because it is tried and tested and comes out of our schools of education at the universities.” This is the one and only way you have to teach the number line in third grade. “This is how it has to be, we cannot vary it because we are the great equalizer of civic society in the United States.”

Your boss, Rob Enlow, really shut me down on this. It has not panned out. We only read and do math less well each year.

I cannot imagine that letting all these flowers bloom is going to have a worse result. If we fast forward 20 years and look at median earnings and educational attainment rates, and we let this thrive, I think the outcome would improve. I do not see how it goes down.

Mike McShane (37:23)
That is the thing. You mentioned the interesting times we are living in now. So many of the “parade of horribles” choice opponents talked about forever, polarization, balkanization, people retreating to silos, it is like, hey guys, that already happened without choice. You cannot blame choice, because choice did not exist yet for that to happen.

Lots of people pushing each other in the streets went to public schools. Statistically, these are public school graduates having large problems with one another.

The conservative in me says things can always get worse. The fundamental progressive view is things can always get better, and the fundamental conservative view is things could always get worse. That strand in me says, yes, things could get worse. But across a lot of these dimensions, academic outcomes, civic outcomes, there is a lot of room for growth, and not nearly as much bottom end to fall out. So the risks associated with giving people more choices are not nearly as severe as proponents of the traditional public schooling system make it out to be.

Susan Pendergrass (38:58)
Yeah. Well, in Missouri, 40 percent of our fourth graders are below the basic level in reading, which means they cannot read at all. They cannot read. They are illiterate.

Would 40 percent of parents, if given the money to spend on their child’s education, have a nine-year-old and say, “Turns out they cannot read. I tried and tried, we just did not get there. They just cannot read.” I do not think so.

I know this is not the perfect solution, that accountability through parental choice is the answer. I am not saying that. But I do not think that if parents were truly put in charge, four out of 10 would just say, “Gosh darn it, this kid is never going to read, there is probably a lot of opportunity in the service industry.” I do not think so. I think that would be a much better check on the system.

Interesting stuff. Thanks so much for joining us. I really appreciate it, always.

Mike McShane (39:42)
Yep. Yeah. I agree with you. Agreed, 100 percent.

Susan Pendergrass (39:59)
So great to talk to you. What is your Substack called?

Mike McShane (40:02)
Informed Choice, so people can check that out. Informed Choice on Substack. Subscribe, it would be great.

Susan Pendergrass (40:05)
Yeah, it is really interesting. Great. Thanks so much.

Mike McShane (40:10)
Thanks for having me.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post The Six Words Driving the Education Debate in 2026 With Mike McShane appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

“We have gone from about 80 properties to about 480 properties,” Hulshof explained. “My cup runneth over.”

Like supporters of government-managed economic development programs everywhere, backers of the plan in Charleston think that if the government approves the right plan here, with the right subsidy there, with the right government agency approval soon, that government plans can magically turn a struggling city into a boomtown. As economist Dick Netzer once mocked these eco devo officials, “Who needs oil wells, when a state can be another Kuwait just by increasing the budget of a tiny agency?”

A Chapter 353 plan with mass property tax abatements would not help Charleston. It would, in fact, almost certainly hurt it more. If property taxes are too high for businesses in Charleston (which I doubt, to be honest), then the city, school district, county, etc. should lower the rate for everyone, not give some property owners in downtown Charleston a big tax abatement that will almost certainly force tax increases on everyone else to make up the difference.

There are a multitude of studies that demonstrate the fallacy of believing that government economic development agencies can successfully engineer economic growth through various subsidies. Here is one simple summary from two economists who have looked at the question thoroughly: “The best case is that incentives work about 10% of the time and are simply a waste of money the other 90%.”

There are other economists who wouldn’t even agree they work 10 percent of the time. As one economist said after he reviewed a similar tax-subsidy laden plan for north St. Louis:

Among the most vocal critics of the NorthSide plan was the chair of Washington University’s Department of Economics, Prof. Michele Boldrin, who testified at the trial that the benefits promised by McKee such as new jobs and increases in property value were “dreamy,” “out of thin air,” “unreasonable,” and “completely arbitrary” and further stated that “if an MBA student came up with it, I’d throw him out of my office.”

St. Louis and other cities in Missouri have been using tax incentives as a prop for politicians to claim they are “doing something” for decades. How has it worked out for St. Louis? As author Colin Gordon wrote in him study on that precise question in his book, “Mapping Decline”:

The overarching irony, in Saint Louis and elsewhere, is that efforts to save the city from such practices and patterns almost always made things worse. In setting after setting, both the diagnosis (blight) and its prescription (urban renewal) were shaped by — and compromised by — the same assumptions and expectations and prejudices that had created the condition in the first place.

If you think the results in Charleston are going to be any different, I have a bridge over the Mississippi to sell you. A Chapter 353 plan for Charleston will allow politicians and planners to claim they are doing something, it will benefit the politically connected and the lucky, and it will empower city government to get more involved in the local economy. All of these things are, by the way, bad things. What a 353 plan won’t do for Charleston is help revitalize the city or grow the economy.

The post A Chapter 353 Tax Abatement Plan is the Last Thing Charleston Needs appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The premise is simple: if you can effectively teach students to read in their early years, then they will be better at reading to learn for the rest of their years.

While there is of course need to continue reforming education practices at all grade-levels, the research literature and recent real-world examples show the positive outcomes that can result from focusing on helping students learn to read effectively at a young age.

This report explores the beneficial effects of a focus on early literacy. Drawing on the findings of a 2023 study by John Westall & Amy Cummings at Michigan State University, it provides a road map for Missouri: establishing a mandatory, academic-based third-grade retention policy, fully eliminating the three-cueing method for teaching word reading, and aligning teacher preparation programs with the science of reading.

Click here to read the full policy brief.

The post Third-Grade Retention and Early Literacy Policies appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The premise is simple: if you can effectively teach students to read in their early years, then they will be better at reading to learn for the rest of their years.

While there is of course need to continue reforming education practices at all grade-levels, the research literature and recent real-world examples show the positive outcomes that can result from focusing on helping students learn to read effectively at a young age.

This report explores the beneficial effects of a focus on early literacy. Drawing on the findings of a 2023 study by John Westall & Amy Cummings at Michigan State University, it provides a road map for Missouri: establishing a mandatory, academic-based third-grade retention policy, fully eliminating the three-cueing method for teaching word reading, and aligning teacher preparation programs with the science of reading.

Click here to read the full policy brief.

The post Third-Grade Retention and Early Literacy Policies appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Port districts exist, in theory, to build and manage port facilities along rivers. When they actually focus on that job, I have no complaints. But in reality, many of the port districts are focused on other things, such as granting tax subsidies or engaging in government corruption. (The latter is less common, thankfully.)

The City of St. Louis’s port authority legitimately operates port facilities along the Mississippi. However, it is also substantially engaged in the granting of tax subsidies, usually for businesses that have absolutely nothing to do with rivers or shipping. For example, the port authority passed a one-cent special “port” sales tax for the St. Louis soccer team to be charged at the soccer stadium that the team gets to keep for its own purposes. (The soccer team has stated that it will use those funds to fix groundwater issues, so I guess it’s at least related to water.)

That was the city’s first “port” sales tax. Now there is a hotel, retail, and condo redevelopment downtown that also wants in on the game. The Jefferson Arms redevelopment has also requested a “port” sales tax of one percent. This is on top of the tax-increment financing subsidy it has already received, as well as the state and federal historic tax credits it got, and the community improvement district and transportation development district extra sales taxes it has applied for and will likely receive. Could it be that the developer wants to socialize the risk and cost, while privatizing the profit?

But a strange thing happened when the developer and its consultants tried to get the sales tax approved by the port authority. The port board said, “Wait, not just yet.” (Trust me, I wish I could say it said “no,” but the vote was tabled, not defeated.)

As Commissioner William Kay Jr. noted at the hearing: “If all three districts are approved, the Jefferson Arms building would have the highest sales tax rate in the city at 12.67%. We’ve got the CID, we’ve got the TDD—the tax rate right now will be 11.67%,” Kay said. “That’s the high mark for the city. I do not think the port authority needs to get into the business of subsidizing these projects.”

Let me reiterate: the Jefferson Arms project has nothing to do with a port. The use of port authorities to create one more tax subsidy opportunity in St. Louis, Kansas City, or anywhere else is terrible public policy. It’s great to see one agency say “not yet.” Hopefully, that “not yet” becomes a “no” in the future, both for this instance and many other subsidy proposals around the state.

Furthermore, the state legislature should remove the ability of port districts to issue tax subsidies or institute new sales taxes. Ports should be funded with user fees to the largest extent possible, and should not be another tool in the corporate welfare toolbox.

The post Denied Entrance at the Port of Call 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.

Pushing Back Against Policies that Dilute Standards

Currently, Missouri students are categorized into one of four performance levels based on their state standardized test scores. From lowest to highest, these are: below basic, basic, proficient, and advanced.

HB 607 proposes the addition of a fifth performance category, called “grade level,” which would be above basic but below proficient.

• Proficient: Demonstrates mastery over all appropriate grade-level standards
• Grade level: Demonstrates mastery over appropriate grade-level subject matter
• Basic: Demonstrates partial mastery of essential knowledge and skills for the grade level

This definition of “grade-level” implies that it should not be expected for Missouri students to have mastery over all appropriate grade-level standards.

Rather than diluting standards, Missouri should implement policies that make meaningful use of state assessments. One such example is a third-grade retention policy. The transition from third to fourth grade is pivotal—students shift from learning to read to reading to learn. To combat the well-documented fourth-grade reading slump, states such as South Carolina and Mississippi adopted mandatory retention policies paired with targeted phonics-based interventions. The result has been very positive.

Open Enrollment—Better Choice, Better Accountability

Currently, where you can attend school is largely determined by where you live. This prevents many families from changing schools. Establishing a cross-district, universal open enrollment program would allow more families to vote with their feet. Markets excel at revealing best practices, and districts with best practices will likely attract more students and pressure other districts to change.

There is some potential to align open enrollment with Missouri’s accreditation process. In December 2024, it was announced that for the 10th year in a row, the state’s accountability system would not be used for district accreditation. Perhaps there is fear of a trigger in the policy that would allow students to transfer out of unaccredited school districts, especially because the unaccredited districts must pay the tuition for the transfers to receiving districts. If universal open enrollment were adopted, lawmakers could revisit the tuition rule for transfer students out of those districts and implement a meaningful accreditation system.

These strategies offer ways to maintain high standards for our schools and children. Better accountability systems in education are the key to learning which strategies are working and which are not. Encouraging transparency and openness will generate more competition and innovation in our schools, and should ultimately strengthen our education system.

The post Accountability in Missouri’s Public Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The 2024 results indicate that 4 in 10 Missouri 4th graders scored below the Basic level on the assessment. What does that mean? According to a researcher from the University of Virginia, “students performing below NAEP Basic level have less vocabulary knowledge and less world knowledge, which would limit their inferencing and comprehension capability.” Another researcher describes it thusly: “Below Basic on the NAEP means that a student is performing below the minimum expected level of academic achievement for their grade, indicating a lack of foundational skills and inability to demonstrate even basic mastery of the subject matter being assessed.”  The 42 percent of Missouri 4th graders who scored at below Basic last year are most likely now in the 5th grade trying to figure out what the heck their textbooks in any subject are trying to teach them.

Here is how the performance of Missouri 4th graders has changed over time.

This graph shows scale scores (NAEP is on a scale from 0 to 500). While Missouri was hovering just above the national average until 2017, we then began a steep slide that is barely leveling out.

But scores everywhere have declined because of COVID, right? Not so. In 2024, we outperformed just five states—Oregon, Alaska, New Mexico, Oklahoma and West Virginia. Here is the same chart for Mississippi.

Twenty six years ago, we outperformed Mississippi by 16 scale score points. Now, it’s ahead of us by seven.

What will Missouri look like in 15 years, when almost half of 25-year-olds are barely literate? We have a new governor and a new commissioner of education. Perhaps these questions should be put to them.

The post Missouri Public Schools Have a Very Serious Reading Problem appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

There are two key factors to consider when answering this question: academic promotion and social promotion.

• Academic promotion is straightforward—as students gain an understanding of the material, they advance to the next level and build on what they learned in the grade before.
• Social promotion is based on age and allows students to stay with their friends and peers throughout their school experience.

Social promotion largely wins the day in schools. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 40 percent of Missouri 4th graders scored below basic on the 4^th-grade reading assessment in 2022. Additionally, 15.1 percent of the same 4th graders scored below basic on the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP).

However, recently, some states have put more emphasis on academic promotion.

Some States Are Focusing More on Academic Promotion

In states such as Mississippi, Tennessee, and Florida, 3rd grade students can be prevented from advancing to 4th grade if they do not meet reading requirements. This is typically referred to as a “third-grade retention policy.”

All three states have seen significant gains in reading achievement. Mississippi’s commitment to mandatory phonics instruction and 3rd-grade retention has contributed to such a large boost in reading scores, it has been referred by many as the “Mississippi Miracle.”

On the NAEP, Mississippi’s scores increased by almost 10 percentage points between 2013 and 2022. Missouri’s decreased by 6 percentage points over that time period.

Mississippi also implemented targeted reading instruction based on evidence-based reading. It is hard to disconnect 3rd-grade retention from intentional instruction.

Considerations for Weighing a 3rd-Grade Retention Policy

After the pandemic, reading scores in Missouri not only initially nosedived, but they sadly continued to decrease and remained low. Missouri may need to consider new strategies to help our students in need.

However, social promotion is not unimportant. For students who are trying hard and get left behind, this can be a very tough social situation. Having friends go on to the next grade means the student left behind has less interaction with friends—different classes, different sports teams, different lunch schedules, and more.

Additionally, kids being older than their peers can create awkward social situations and increase bullying.

Mississippi’s policy attempts to balance different priorities when considering retention. It has the :

• Limited English proficient students who had less than 2 years of instruction in an English Language Learner program.
• Students with disabilities whose Individualized Education Program (IEP) indicates that participation in statewide assessment programs is not appropriate.
• Students with disabilities who demonstrate a reading deficiency but whose IEP has provided them with intensive reading remediation for more than two years.
• Students with disabilities who demonstrate a reading deficiency but were previously retained in a K-3 grade.
• Students who meet an acceptable level of reading proficiency on an alternative standardized assessment approved by the Mississippi State Board of Education.
• Students who demonstrate a reading deficiency despite having received two or more years of intensive reading intervention and have been retained in a K-3 grade for two years without meeting exceptional education criteria.

Third-grade retention has a demonstrated track record of success in other states, and it should be given consideration as Missouri students continue to struggle in reading.

The post Should Missouri Consider a 3rd-Grade Retention Policy? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In one moment, they counted him out, and in the next, they were amazed at his determination. I’m hoping for an epic comeback story like this in Missouri public schools. Our scores faded badly following the COVID-19 pandemic. And sadly, with the recent release of the preliminary 2023–2024 Missouri Assessment Program (MAP) results, it is fair to say we are not running past everyone yet.

One state board of education member stated she was “a little deflated that we didn’t see more growth and progress.” I agree that the results were a little disappointing, so let’s delve into the specific statistics.

It is worth noting these are preliminary results for the 2023–2024 school year, so they could be subject to minor changes.

Overall, English/language arts (ELA) scores remained stagnant and math scores continued to gradually improve.

Figure 1: Missouri Assessment Program: ELA

Figure 2: Missouri Assessment Program: Math

After the pandemic, math scores fell more than ELA scores, but math scores have bounced back, and even surpassed pre-pandemic levels in some areas. Growth in math scores has been driven primarily by success in middle school mathematics, as 6th and 7th grade scores have surpassed pre-pandemic levels and 8th grade scores now match 2019 levels (not shown in Figure 2).

For elementary math, scores still remain below 2019 levels. Third grade scores have declined the most. 5th grade scores did not improve from 2023 and remain below pre-pandemic levels. There could be a need for greater focus in elementary instruction.

ELA scores continue to remain flat and far below pre-pandemic levels. They have actually dipped even further after the initial COVID drop. No grade-level cohort has exceeded its pre-pandemic levels, and only two cohorts (4th and 7th graders) improved from last year. Sixth graders have particularly struggled in ELA post-pandemic, as their pre-pandemic scores have declined more than any other grade level.

Missouri needs drastic action to help our students improve their ELA skills. A solid reading foundation is paramount for educational success, and we need to do everything in our power to catch our students up. Further commitment to the Missouri’s LETRS program (an evidence-based reading initiative) could yield results. Focus on evidence-based reading instruction has proven successful in other states such as South Carolina, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Those three states have also made phonics instruction mandatory. Reams and reams of research support evidence-based reading instruction.

Let’s dig deep and further commit to helping our students grow. I want to see a legendary comeback story.

The post Is There a Comeback Story in Missouri Schools? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In a few states around the nation—particularly South Carolina, Tennessee, and Mississippi—dedication to the science of reading (explicit phonics instruction) has done more than solve Wordle puzzles. It has helped English/language arts (ELA) scores in these states surge past their pre-pandemic levels.

If you’re wondering if other states are experiencing a similar surge in scores, the answer is no. Researchers at Brown University have examined scores from nearly 30 states (data are not available for all states yet) and only Iowa, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee have exceeded pre-pandemic performances in reading.

With Missouri’s ELA scores continuing to decline post-pandemic (29% of Missouri 3rd graders had a below basic understanding of ELA), I believe that our new science of reading program, LETRS, will help our students, and I am happy that DESE is using it. However, I also think there is reason and opportunity to further commit to the science of reading.

For background, Missouri’s new LETRS program provides optional training opportunities for teachers in “evidence-based reading” and requires comprehensive reading examinations for K-3 students. Any student who is diagnosed or at risk for dyslexia must be provided evidence-based reading instruction. While this in itself is a good program, there is a key lesson from South Carolina, Tennessee, and Mississippi that we could adopt: Fully commit to the science of reading—for all students.

As I have discussed in previous posts, commitment to explicit phonics instruction could be key to making Missouri a leader in reading. Phonics instruction has a proven track record in independent research, in other states, and even in our own backyard. Back in 2019, the Greenville School District in South Carolina, with 77,000 students (largest in the state), failed to meet state literacy standards. Due to this, teachers in the district had to receive two years of training in the “science of reading” and use a new curriculum rooted in explicit phonics instruction. However, this “punishment” actually turned into a blessing: district scores on the SC READY state assessment have risen past pre-pandemic levels.

All three of these states have committed to the science of reading being the core of literacy instruction, while Missouri appears to emphasize it only after a struggling student is identified. When breaking out the scores by demographics, the data show that the science of reading was useful to all groups. While data were not available for Mississippi, ELA scores for every ethnic group improved at a near-equivalent rate in Tennessee and South Carolina.

In Tennessee, school districts with poverty levels between 0–10 percent and 15–25 percent saw the largest gains. In Mississippi, districts with poverty levels between 10–15 percent and more than 25 percent saw the largest gains. In South Carolina, districts with poverty levels between 15–25 percent saw the most improvement. These numbers demonstrate that students of all different backgrounds benefit from the science of reading, and it should not be compartmentalized into one particular group.

These states understand that our institutions of higher education are not adequately instructing our teachers how to teach reading. Mississippi requires that all prospective elementary school teachers pass a test in the foundations of reading (which largely includes phonics). Tennessee requires that all K-5 teachers complete at least one approved foundational literacy skills course. South Carolina requires classroom teachers to use evidence-based reading instruction that includes phonics. These states have also tied the science of reading to their third-grade retention strategy, which may be valuable for Missouri to evaluate. Missouri should strengthen LETRS by creating a requirement for all elementary teachers to participate in the program, and further commit by targeting science of reading instruction to all students, not just the ones struggling.

The post Some States Making Large Reading Gains Post-Pandemic appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Mississippi (which typically holds back between 4–10 percent of third graders) is viewed as a successful model for this type of retention policy. Started in 2013, the Mississippi policy requires a sufficient score on the state English/language arts assessment or on either of the two retest opportunities (with certain exceptions made for English-language learning students and students with disabilities). This strategy is rooted in the idea that students need to receive a firm foundation in reading before advancing to higher grades. Mississippi has seen its efforts pay off—between 2013 and 2019, the state’s 4th-grade reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) rose by 10 points, while the national average decreased by 1. Mississippi moved from rank 49th to 29th in 4th-grade reading over this time period.

There are also drawbacks to this policy. For students who are trying hard and get left behind, this can be a very tough social situation. Having friends go on to the next grade means the student left behind has less interaction with friends—different classes, different sports teams, different lunch schedules, and more. This can be demoralizing for a student. In Mississippi, students can be held back for up to two years before automatically advancing to the next grade. Kids being potentially two years older than their peers can create awkward social situations and increase bullying. You could be driving a car in 8th grade, be an 18-year-old sophomore, or be a 20-year-old senior. One concern is that being 18 as a junior or sophomore may increase drop-out rates. However, Mississippi actually reached an all-time high in its high school graduation rate in 2022—rising from 74.5 percent in 2014 to 88.9 percent.

Can families bear these unconventional social situations in order for their children to succeed in school? Mississippi has seen drastic improvement in both scores and graduation rates since implementing its reading policy. Missouri’s 3rd-grade scores—and frankly all of our state’s test scores— indicate drastic action is needed. Implementing a reading policy such as Mississippi’s may be a good place to start.

The post Should More Missouri Students Be Held Back? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A couple of weeks ago CNBC released its annual list of the Top States for Business 2023. Missouri was an unimpressive 32nd out of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia. Wondering what pulled us down? Well, this year CNBC decided that workforce quality would get the most weight of the 10 components of the index. And in that category, Missouri ranked 49th. We must not stack up too well against other states when it comes to the percentage of workers with college degrees or even industry credentials. Apparently, we also don’t compete well on the outmigration of educated workers, or on worker training programs, or on worker productivity.

So, imagine my surprise when the governor had a press conference just days later to announce a long list of Missouri’s “top” rankings. On some list we rank first in on-the-job-training. That would be for the number of participants, not quality or outcome, but still. There’s a list out there where we’re ranked second for apprenticeships and one where we are fourth for small-business jobs. The list of rankings is described as “incredible statistics that prove why Missouri is the Show-Me state.” Incredible indeed. Sadly, the governor’s list doesn’t include any source information, so we can’t tell who is saying all these complimentary things about our state.

As someone who follows the Missouri K-12 education system pretty closely, I’m not that surprised by the CNBC ranking. Education in the state is in a downward spiral. Last year, 70 percent of our fourth-graders scored below grade level on a nationally administered test. These children are moving on to the reading-to-learn years, and they haven’t learned to read. Middle school isn’t any more promising. Less than one-quarter of our eighth-graders can do math at grade level, according to the latest (2022) national assessments, and just 28 percent have grade-level reading skills.

When students start high school without having mastered the skills they need to succeed, the effects are predictable. Last year, just 60 percent of our 2022 high school graduates met the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s (DESE’s) criteria for being college or career ready. It’s hard not to feel sorry for the 40 percent who walked across the stage and were handed a diploma even though they were unprepared for the next stage of their lives. Since we’re looking at rankings, did you know that last year Missouri ranked 43rd for the percentage of high school students who took a college-level Advanced Placement (AP) test in high school? We’re not talking about passing an AP exam; only one in five high school students even took one. Also, less than 8 percent of graduating high school students completed the Career and Technical Ed (CTE) certificate program.

What are the consequences of the poor job we’re doing of preparing our students for life after high school? According to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, the percentage of Missourians with bachelor’s or master’s degrees has been declining in recent years. Not by much —just from 31.9 percent for bachelor’s to 31.7—but is that the direction we want it going? There’s a similar trend line for graduate degrees, which had been increasing every year until a couple of years ago, when they began to decline.

We seem to have a workforce problem, and it appears to be getting worse. Our K-12 enrollment has been declining since before the pandemic and will continue to decline based on the size of recent kindergarten classes. And within those smaller groups of students, the percentage of kids who are at grade level is declining. Smaller percentages of smaller high school graduating classes will be ready for the next stage in their lives. We need leaders who are ready to confront those facts and do something about them. The future of the state depends on it.

These leading indicators may signal what’s next for our work force, but it’s not too late to turn things around. States all around Missouri are letting parents pick where their children attend school—public or private—and having state education money follow them. Families in these states can tailor the education of each of their children, even when those needs differ within the same family. Neighboring states are implementing aggressive early literacy programs, with Mississippi being a standout, and rethinking high schools. Innovation and true accountability are happening . . . elsewhere. Meanwhile, Missourians are being handed a cherry-picked list of statistics that we’re supposed to get excited about.

The post Cherry-picked Data Can’t Hide the Truth about Missouri’s Workforce appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In the years since Wright’s appointment, Mississippi has reversed its last-in-the-nation status with an impressive increase in the percentage of its fourth graders who can read at grade level. In 2013, only 21 percent of Mississippi fourth graders achieved a score of proficient or above on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), well below the 2013 national average of 34.8 percent. By 2019, Mississippi had improved that by a whopping 11 percentage points, a magnitude of gain that is rare on NAEP. In just six years, Mississippi fourth grade reading scores were equivalent to that year’s national average of 34.6 percent.

While scores have only just hit the average mark, Mississippi’s literacy growth in 2013 to 2019 exceeded that of every other state by seven points. During the same time period, Missouri continued to tread water. Our fourth-grade proficiency rate actually decreased by one point, from 35 to 34 percent. So, what did Mississippi do differently?

In 2013, along with appointing Wright, Mississippi passed the Literacy-Based Promotion Act (LBPA), requiring third graders not reading at grade level by the end of a school year to remain in third grade for intensive reading intervention. This requirement stems from research showing that students learn to read in kindergarten through third grade, then read to learn from fourth grade onward. Because of this, third graders who can’t read proficiently are four times more likely to fail to graduate from high school than those who can. Mississippi’s retention of students with literacy deficiencies gives them another chance to reach this important milestone and ensures that students are fully prepared to hit the ground running in fourth grade.

Missouri has already made some progress on this issue. Governor Parson signed SB 681 this spring, which requires reading intervention for struggling K-3 students. The new law, however, doesn’t require that third graders who demonstrate reading deficiencies be retained, and early research suggests that Mississippi’s strict enforcement of its retention policy may have played a major role in the NAEP score increase. If that proves true, Missouri lawmakers should consider taking a page out of Mississippi’s book by requiring that students read proficiently before starting fourth grade.

The post A Lesson on Early Literacy from the Magnolia State appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

It’s why I don’t quite understand the logic of a handful of proposals being floated in the legislature this year that would adopt “compact” licensing legislation for doctors. A compact is an agreement between and among states that facilitates cooperation on a given issue and is often overseen by a third-party regulatory group. For instance, the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact (IMLC)—launched by the Federation of State Medical Boards to oversee interstate physician licensing—has been adopted in about half the states in the union.

If a state has no license reciprocity statute at all, it might make sense to join a compact. After all, access to two states’ resources is greater than access to one, and in the case of the IMLC, about half of the states is certainly greater than one state alone.

But if you’ve already opened the door to your residents accessing doctors from all FIFTY states, what incentive is there exactly for a state like Missouri to delegate any authority to an association of other states’ medical boards?

We touched on the idea of medical compacts in our 2016 paper on health care licensure reform “Demand Supply: Why Licensing Reform Matters to Improving American Health Care,” and we noted our concern about reinforcing a licensing system that is overly fixated on protecting the prerogatives of state-based medical boards. As Cato Institute adjunct scholar Shirley Svorny wrote about a similar proposal in Mississippi in 2016:

The [IMLC] compact may seem like a positive step to those who don’t have the time to look at it very closely. Surely, respected representatives of physician groups and the Federation of State Medical Boards will encourage Mississippi legislators to adopt the model legislation and join the compact. These groups are overselling the contribution the compact can make to improving access to telemedicine because they do not want federal licensing. (At the same time, the Mississippi State Board of Medical Licensure is seeking to squash private telemedicine providers, thus diminishing health care access even further.) [Emphasis mine]

Therein lies the issue. Compacts like the IMLC market that it makes it easier for doctors to go through the arduous process of licensing in multiple states, but the point of interstate license reciprocity is that it shouldn’t be an arduous process to begin with, and barely a “process” at all for doctors already licensed and in good standing in their home states. Throw in the self-interest of the Federation of State Medical Boards of establishing its own national umbrella organization to protect its turf from federal regulation, and you have all the reason in the world to question why Missouri would adopt the IMLC at all.

The future of licensure is fewer licenses, and to the extent a proposal works in the opposite direction and supports the status quo, policymakers and the public should be highly skeptical of whether such proposals are more useful to the public—or whether they’re more useful to the interest groups that would control the proposed system.

The post A New “License Compact”? Why? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Lee Habeeb is CEO and founder of American Private Radio and host of Our American Stories.

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About the Speaker

Lee Habeeb got his start in radio co-creating The Laura Ingraham Show, which launched in 2001. By 2007, it was the #1 show in America in its time slot. He moved to Salem Media Group, where he serves as VP of Content, overseeing shows hosted by some of conservativism’s greats: Bill Bennett, Dennis Prager, Hugh Hewitt, Larry Elder, and Eric Metaxas. Habeeb also writes a weekly column at Newsweek. A University of Virginia Law School graduate, he lives in Oxford, MS with his wife Valerie and daughter Reagan.

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