The Missouri House of Representatives recently passed House Bill (HB) 2230, a bill focused on limiting screen time for students in public schools. This legislation is not about cell phones, which already cannot be used in Missouri public schools. This is about screens used for instruction.

The legislation is a scaled-back version of an earlier proposal that would have imposed a firm 45-minute cap on student screen use and mandated cursive instruction. Instead, the bill—passed by a vote of 143 to 10—requires individual schools to develop their own screen-time policies. It also requires schools to share information about student technology use with parents upon request.

The bill additionally establishes the Framework on Classroom Use of Screens Council, or “Focus Council,” which will be responsible for reviewing best practices for screen use and providing policy guidance, ensuring that sustainable monitoring systems of classroom screen use are present.

Currently, there is no statewide guidance or requirement addressing screen time in public schools. By establishing a baseline framework, the bill represents a step toward balancing technology use in Missouri classrooms.

Parents are increasingly raising concerns about the adverse effects of screens on student learning. For example, parents in the Los Angeles Unified School District are pushing for reduced screen time for instruction, consistent with the intent of HB 2230. Some teachers seem concerned, too: Chalkbeat recently covered a teacher who has taken screens out of his classroom entirely. He reports that his reduced reliance on technology has resulted in improved relationships with his students and better student effort and performance.

There is growing interest in unwinding the reliance on technology in our classrooms that accelerated with the onset of the pandemic. This may prove beneficial for students, parents, and teachers alike. While technology can still be an effective tool in education, there are downsides to being too reliant on screens. HB 2230 is a step in the right direction.

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The Missouri House of Representatives recently passed a bill requiring that the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) assign A–F letter grades to schools and districts statewide. The bill now heads to the Senate, which is also considering its own version.

The legislation is meant to build on and improve Governor Kehoe’s executive order from January. Unfortunately, it does not improve on the executive order; in fact, the version that emerged from the House is much worse.

The main problem with the House bill is that it has veered off topic. Governor Kehoe’s short and simple executive order mandates letter grades based on academic performance. This is what we need. The House bill adds language that would create new school climate ratings based on surveys of teachers, parents, and students, which would also go on the report card.

This is problematic for three reasons:

Most importantly, it will distract us from academic outcomes. Academics are where our schools are struggling, and until we focus on them, the situation is not going to improve. This is illustrated most easily with data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, which is widely viewed as providing the most credible test data in the country. Here are charts showing changes over time in Missouri’s national rank on NAEP, in 4th- and 8th-grade reading, since about the turn of the century:

Our 4th-grade reading results are especially bleak—we rank 38th out of the 50 states as of 2024, whereas two decades earlier we ranked in the low twenties. Today, an alarming 42 percent of our 4th graders score Below Basic on NAEP.

Making matters worse, our ranking decline since about 2015 is in the context of generally declining test scores nationwide. Our scores are declining faster than the rest of a declining nation.

Governor Kehoe was correct to focus on academic outcomes, and the focus should stay that way.

Unlike data on academic achievement, which we already collect, survey data for this new school-climate requirement do not exist. It is difficult to develop and implement a high-quality survey with a high response rate. Have our lawmakers considered how we would get these surveys done?

As one of several concrete technical issues, consider the survey response rate. We cannot make parents fill out surveys. So, what if they don’t? What if we end up with schools and districts where fewer than 10 percent of parents fill out a survey (which is very possible)? Are we going to hold a school with a 10-percent parent response rate accountable for negative survey results? If the results look good, are we going to give the school a high rating?

Even if we ignore the first two issues, do we really want to compel DESE to undertake this work? We hear a lot of grumbling around the capitol about how DESE has gotten too big. This is how that happens. Developing and administering surveys to Missouri’s more than 800,000 students and their parents, and 70,000 teachers, across thousands of schools and hundreds of districts would require more administrative expansion. That is far outside the low-cost, straightforward scope of the original report card plan.

Governor Kehoe issued a clear and simple executive order on school and district report cards in January, which properly emphasizes academic performance. The order is fundamentally sound. There’s always room for improvement, but the legislation that came out of the House has moved this effort in the wrong direction. We hope our lawmakers can get it back on track.

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House Bill 2274: Increasing Mobility for Teachers

On January 15, Show-Me Institute Senior Policy Analyst Avery Frank submits testimony to the Missouri House Elementary and Secondary Education Committee regarding an interstate teacher mobility compact.

To the Honorable Members of This Committee

Thank you for the opportunity to testify. My name is Avery Frank. I am a senior policy analyst at the ShowMe Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, Missouri-based think tank that advances sensible, well-researched, free-market solutions to state and local policy issues. The ideas presented here are my own and are offered in consideration of fostering flexibility in Missouri’s public education system.

Reducing Uncertainty for Out-of-State Teachers

In 2020, Missouri adopted a form of universal licensing reciprocity allowing most licensed professionals (with some exceptions) who have held a valid license issued by another state for at least one year to practice in Missouri at the same occupation or level, meaning that they would have Missouri examination, educational, or experience licensing requirements waived.¹

Teachers are among the many licensed professions in Missouri, and this reciprocity regime is beneficial as it currently stands. However, uncertainty remains for many out-of-state teachers who may seek to relocate to Missouri. For example, which Missouri teaching license is equivalent to their current out-of-state license?² Additionally, existing statute allows relevant licensing authorities up to six months to issue a licensing waiver.³ Together, these uncertainties can reduce Missouri’s attractiveness as a place to move and teach.

House Bill 2274 would establish the Interstate Teacher Mobility Compact in order to address these challenges. If enacted, the compact would require each participating state to create and maintain a list of licenses it is willing to consider for equivalency. This would help teachers more clearly understand their potential teaching options and reduce uncertainty when considering relocation.

The interstate commission created by the compact would primarily function as a clearinghouse, or central information-sharing hub, for licensure and disciplinary information. Each state would retain full authority over who is licensed within its borders and under what conditions. While Missouri already provides a broad pathway for recognizing many out-of-state licenses, the compact would provide additional transparency and consistency that could make the state more attractive to prospective teachers.

Helping Address Teacher Shortages in High-Need Subject Areas and Schools

Missouri’s teacher shortage has received significant attention in recent years⁴. A closer examination of the state’s pipeline and hiring trends suggests that Missouri does not face a broad, statewide shortage of teachers. Instead, shortages are concentrated in specific subject areas and in particular high-need, challenged districts.⁵ 

For example, between the 2017–18 and 2021–22 school years, the Hickman Mills C-1 school district reported a substantially higher percentage of vacant teaching positions than other Kansas City–area noncharter public school districts—more than five times higher than the second-highest district, Kansas City 33.⁶

While the compact alone will not provide a targeted solution to these types of deficiencies, it should improve Missouri’s overall teacher pipeline by making it easier for qualified out-of-state teachers to fill vacancies in hard-to-staff schools and subject areas, such as special education or physics. Kansas is already a member of this compact, and facilitating mobility for teachers living near the Kansas–Missouri border could benefit western Missouri districts in particular.⁷

Conclusion

House Bill 2274 offers an opportunity for Missouri to continue leading on occupational licensing reform while modestly improving access to qualified teachers in areas of greatest need. For these reasons, this bill could help make Missouri a better place to teach and live.

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Missouri’s budget is growing faster than the state’s economy, and if this troubling trend continues it could soon prove disastrous for state taxpayers.

The Solution

Limit spending growth, increase accountability, and improve budget resilience through reforms that prioritize Missouri’s long-term financial health.

Key Facts

• Missouri’s government is growing faster than inflation, wages, and the state’s population.

• Currently, state budgeting practices actually encourage greater spending.

• Most state budget documents aren’t easy for citizens to find, nor are they available in a form that is easy to use.

• Missouri awards nearly $1 billion each year in tax credits, which are the fiscal equivalent of state spending, completely outside of the normal budgeting process.

• According to Moody’s Analytics, Missouri is one of the least-prepared states in the nation for an economic downturn.

Spending at Record Levels

Missouri’s budget has been growing unsustainably for years, and may finally be reaching a fiscal cliff. After a year when a reduction in spending was promised but not delivered, our state is facing a one-billion-dollar shortfall. Missouri’s Hancock Amendment, which was once thought to provide protections against unchecked government growth, has proved incapable of meaningfully constraining spending. In fact, if Missouri’s budget growth hadn’t drastically outstripped both inflation and population growth over the past five years, the current fiscal crisis could have been avoided entirely.

Current Practices Encourage More and More Spending

Missouri currently uses what is called an “incremental” approach to budgeting, which means that budget items from one year automatically roll over into the next and establish the new baseline for state spending. This practice makes budgeting easier for legislators because it allows them to focus attention on new funding requests, but it also allows many old programs and spending items to escape annual scrutiny. The result is snowballing government growth. Missouri should require legislators to evaluate program effectiveness through performance audits and to regularly use “zero-based budgeting,” meaning that lawmakers must build the state’s budget from square one each year.

You Can’t Fix What You Can’t See

Currently, most state budget documents are difficult to find, hard to interpret, and in a form that requires citizens to manually transcribe the data to be studied. Such hurdles mean that lawmakers and state bureaucrats can act with greater impunity and less oversight. There is no good reason why the documents that detail where taxpayer money is going should not be easy for any citizen to access and understand.

Additionally, Missouri leads much of the nation in the subsidization of private entities with state tax dollars, yet there’s little to no mention of these subsidies in the yearly budget. Last year, Missouri awarded nearly $1 billion in various tax-credit programs with little to show for it. These tax credits are the fiscal equivalent of state expenditures, but because the state forgoes revenue instead of spending it, the credits are allocated completely outside the state’s normal budgeting process. The exclusion of tax credits from yearly scrutiny also removes them from the calculations lawmakers must make when tasked with balancing the state’s budget. A truthful accounting of all tax obligations is required if Missouri is to right its fiscal ship.

Missouri Isn’t Ready for the Next Recession

The boom-bust cycles of state finances create budgetary chaos. Each economic downturn forces elected officials to make difficult spending decisions that can be at odds with the state’s long-term funding priorities. As a result of the 2007-2009 Great Recession, general revenues fell by over $1.2 billion, leading to abrupt cuts in education, corrections, and other spending that lasted for several years after the recession. Almost every other state in the country has a rainy-day fund to help weather these situations, but Missouri’s Budget Reserve Fund is too small and too hamstrung by restrictions to be used in a downturn. In fact, it’s never once been used for this purpose.

Policy Recommendations

• Establish clear and meaningful state program performance metrics that allow for objective assessments.

• Implement zero-based budgeting.

• Make all state budget documents available in easily accessible, machine-readable formats (e.g., in Excel or CSV format).

• Include all tax credits, or tax expenditures, in the state’s yearly budgeting process.

• Create a separate budget stabilization fund with the sole task of stabilizing revenues in the event of an economic downturn. The fund should be large enough to fully replace state revenues during a crisis comparable in magnitude to the Great Recession with strong protections against improper use. Repayment to the fund also should be dependent on the pace of economic recovery.

FY 2026 Operating Budget

With approximately 58% of all state spending devoted to education and healthcare, continued budgetary growth puts enormous pressure on every other state spending priority.

Budgetary Growth: Fy 2016-2025

Missouri’s state spending has grown by more than 58% over the past decade.

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Startling to me, anyway. None of the legislators on the committee seemed bothered.

Is there any public benefit to this secrecy?

There can be when vendors are bidding competitively for a state contract—say, road construction. Protecting proprietary financial or technical details in that context may encourage better bids and serve the public interest.

But stadium subsidies are different—there’s no obvious reason why secrecy is necessary or helpful. When public officials negotiate deals to hand out taxpayer money, the public deserves transparency. Teams may want discretion. State representatives may want to negotiate without tipping off competing states. But neither, in my opinion, is a good enough reason to give it to them.

Yet secrecy has become the norm. Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas won’t release the city’s proposal for a downtown stadium to the Royals—even though Clay County released its proposal. The city also kept its 2017 Amazon HQ2 bid under wraps, while many other cities disclosed theirs.

Judging by the lawmakers’ lack of reaction, non-disclosure agreements are now standard operating procedure. They shouldn’t be. Even if elected officials are fine being left in the dark, the public shouldn’t be.

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On June 10, 2025, Patrick Tuohey, senior fellow at the Show-Me Institute, testified before the Missouri House Economic Development Committee during a special session focused on proposed stadium subsidies for the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals. In his testimony, Tuohey argued that the proposed funding package is based on a false sense of urgency, fueled by non-competitive offers from Kansas and a misleading June 30 deadline. He questioned the economic value of the proposed subsidies, highlighted concerns about taxpayer risk, and warned against allowing professional sports teams to play local governments against each other.

Read his submitted testimony here: https://bit.ly/4kXtdII

See the recording of the full hearing here: https://house.mo.gov/MediaCenter.aspx

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Click here to read testimony on the Show-Me Sports Investment Act.

Click here to read testimony on Senate Bill 3 and property tax adjustments.

Watch Patrick Tuohey’s Testimony

Watch David Stokes’ Testimony

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Missouri taxpayers don’t have to look too far to find an example of the last time so-called budgetary savings were illusory—we can look at this year’s budget. When the FY 2025 budget was passed last May, our state’s elected officials celebrated their “conservative” budget. They said it was the first budget in a decade that was smaller than the previous year’s, which I noted at the time didn’t amount to much. It was true that the budget they initially passed did call for less spending than years prior, but in the months since, we’ve discovered that claims of budget cutting didn’t hold up.

When the budget passed last May, I explained that the totals were likely misleading, and the general assembly’s recent approval of a supplemental funding bill all but confirms it. To finish out the year, Missouri’s government needs nearly $2 billion extra dollars, with almost $400 million of that total coming from general revenue (state income and sales tax dollars).

As the above table shows, once you take into account all the funds that are truly needed for the year, this year’s budget exceeds last year’s by more than $700 million. What’s worse is that the general revenue portion is similarly higher than last year. This is problematic because not only is Missouri on track to spend more than the state projects to bring in (which was the case even before this extra spending was added), revenue collections are now behind where they were one year ago.

In other words, Missouri is in worse fiscal shape today than it was last year, and despite efforts to make it seem as though spending was being reined in, we’re once again on a path to spend more this year than ever before. As Missouri’s Senate begins its work on the state’s FY 2026 budget, it should be clear that taking real steps to rightsize state government is essential. Taxpayers should keep a close eye on the budget negotiations in the coming weeks. Legislators may try to sell Missourians on a bill of goods again.

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In February 2025, Saint Louis University (SLU) released an update on likely Missouri voters’ views on education policy, including open enrollment (the polling was conducted in 2024). The results showed broad support for open enrollment, including bipartisan approval and a preference for a universal model. SLU surveyed 900 likely Missouri voters and used both demographic and voting history data in an attempt to create a representative Missouri sample. One of the more interesting findings was the bipartisan agreement on open enrollment. Recent votes on open enrollment in the legislature have been split along party lines.

Figure 1 displays the general support for open enrollment among likely Missouri voters. Figures 2 and 3 indicate that the majority of likely Missouri voters prefer that an open enrollment policy be universal (meaning districts must accept students if they have seats) and let students transfer out. This suggests that a universal policy is not an “extreme” position, but one that is well aligned with public opinion. It is worth wondering whether carveouts and “compromises” that would restrict open enrollment reflect the priorities of students and families or those of other education stakeholders.

Figure 1: General Measure of Support for Open Enrollment

Survey Question: “Do you support or oppose the following policies . . . allow students to enroll in public schools outside of the school district where they live?”

Figure 2: Public Opinion on Limiting Students Transferring Out with Open Enrollment

Survey Question: “If Missouri allows students to enroll in public schools outside their residential school districts (that is, the district where they live), indicate whether you support or oppose the following . . . school districts may limit the number of students who transfer out of their district.”

Figure 3: Public Opinion on Limiting Students Transferring in with Open Enrollment

Survey Question: “If Missouri allows students to enroll in public schools outside their residential school districts (that is, the district where they live), indicate whether you support or oppose the following . . . school districts may opt out of having students transfer into their district.”

Universal Open Enrollment for Missouri Families

Different versions of open enrollment bills have circulated around Jefferson City, with the House passing a voluntary version (HB 711) and the Senate weighing a universal version (Senate Bill (SB) 215). A good open enrollment policy is a universal policy, and SB 215 would provide students with greater access to public schools that serve them best. Open enrollment is a pro-student, pro-family, and pro-public school policy. The research supports it, the public supports it, and Missouri students would benefit from a robust open enrollment environment.

Want to Learn More?

Susan Pendergrass and I address the most common objections to open enrollment in our recent paper, Open Enrollment: Erasing Seven Myths in Missouri. Read the full report here.

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