Jamison White is the director of data and research for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Before joining the National Alliance, Jamison worked as a data analyst and freelance consultant in Boston and the greater New York area.

Listen on Apple Podcasts 

Listen on SoundCloud

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post The Wide World of Charter Schools with Jamison White appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Visit MoSchoolRankings.org

About the Project

In response to DESE’s failure to perform one of its most basic functions, we launched The Missouri School Rankings Project and MoSchoolRankings.org.

The mission of The Missouri School Rankings Project is to make student performance data more transparent by providing parents, policymakers, educators, and taxpayers with access to easy-to-understand information about every Missouri school and school district in order to motivate actions that will result in dramatic reforms to Missouri’s education system.

Why School-level Data Matters

Parents Need Information to Choose

Parents need accurate information to make informed decisions about which school will best serve their children. MoSchoolRankings.org provides a detailed picture of student performance for each school.

Comparison Reveals Problems and Solutions 

The MoSchoolRankings.org comparison tool allows users to compare student performance from up to 3 schools at a time.

By comparing schools that serve similar student populations, we can identify successful schools and learn from them.

The ability to compare individual schools also allows families who are relocating to make informed decisions about which districts or school boundaries to move into. The comparison tool also highlights that many Missouri families, who are not able to move, are trapped in low-performing schools and districts.

Spending Data

The public sector should make it easy for citizens to see how their money is being spent. The powers that be shouldn’t tailor spending numbers to include some things and exclude others. So we’re providing everything, and users can decide what they consider to be relevant. The entire data set of nearly 500 variables for each district available for download. And the DESE accounting manual can be accessed on the site.

The Rankings

Each student performance metric is given a grade of A through F. The grades are combined to produce a grade point average, or GPA, which is then converted to a single letter grade. Each school and district receives a letter grade and is ranked accordingly. Information on how grades and ranks are calculated can be found on the Grading Methodology page.

The performance rankings are calculated using several performance metrics that measure student performance.

These metrics are:

• Student performance in ELA and mathematics
• Low-income student performance in ELA and mathematics
• Student growth in ELA and mathematics
• A comparison of student performance in ELA and math to each school or district’s expected performance based on its enrollment of economically disadvantaged students
• 4-year graduation rate
• ACT scores

If multiple schools or districts had the lowest possible score for an item (for example, if 0 percent of their students scored Proficient or higher in math), then they would share a rank.

Key Terms

Definitions and further explanations of the terms used to determine rankings can be found in the glossary section.

Some key terms to understand while exploring the portal are:

Achievement Levels

• Below Basic—the student has only a minimal understanding of the material.
• Basic—the student has a partial understanding of the material.
• Proficient—the student has an adequate understanding and is able to apply subject matter as defined by the Missouri Learning Standards.
• Advanced—the student demonstrates a thorough understanding and ability to apply subject matter.

Academic Growth

A statistical model used to identify differences in student academic growth from one year to the next among schools or districts with similar baseline scores.

Adjusted Achievement 

For each school or district, the percentage of low-income enrollment was multiplied by the baseline rate and subtracted from the baseline. The result is the school’s (or district’s) predicted score. If a school’s (or district’s) expected score is higher than its actual score, it underperformed. If a school’s (or district’s) expected score is lower than its actual score, it overperformed.

Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI) and Targeted School Improvement (TSI)

Schools with these designations are low-performing schools. 

Additional Information About Districts and Schools Includes:

• Percent of low-income students
• Percent of students with disabilities
• Full-Time Equivalent teachers
• Average teacher salary
• Total expenditures
• Total expenditures per pupil

About the Research

The Missouri School Rankings Project is led by Show-Me Institute’s Director of Research and Education Policy Dr. Susan Pendergrass. Before joining the Show-Me Institute, Susan Pendergrass was Vice President of Research and Evaluation for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, where she oversaw data collection and analysis and carried out a rigorous research program. Susan earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Business, with a concentration in Finance, at the University of Colorado in 1983. She earned her Masters in Business Administration at George Washington University, with a concentration in Finance (1992) and a doctorate in public policy from George Mason University, with a concentration in social policy (2002). Susan began researching charter schools with her dissertation on the competitive effects of Massachusetts charter schools. Since then, she has conducted numerous studies on the fiscal impact of school choice legislation. Susan has also taught quantitative methods courses at the Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies, at Johns Hopkins University, and at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. Prior to coming to the National Alliance, Susan was a senior policy advisor at the U.S. Department of Education during the Bush administration and a senior research scientist at the National Center for Education Statistics during the Obama administration.

Contact Us about the Project 

The post The Missouri School Rankings Project appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Ron C. Rice has over 15 years of public policy experience in the fields of education, urban development, and community empowerment initiatives as an executive state government appointee and two-term local elected official.

Prior to joining the National Alliance, Ron served as the Special Assistant/Chief Policy Analyst for the Chief of Staff to the Commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Education, and as a city councilman for two terms in Newark under Mayor Cory Booker where he created his ward’s Education Support Committee and consistently supported charter school facility needs and their growth and advancement throughout the city, specifically working with KIPP (TEAM Rise and SPARK Academies), Uncommon Schools (North Star Academy), and community charters such as Marion P. Thomas Charter School, Lady Liberty Academy, and Adelaide Sanford Charter School.

Listen on Apple Podcasts 

Listen on Sticher 

Listen on SoundCloud

The post Podcast: Charter Schools in America with Ron Rice appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post SMI Podcast: Charter Schools ARE Public Schools – Ron Rice appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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

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

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

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

RSVP here.

Featured Speakers:

Susan Pendergrass, Director of Research and Education Policy

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

Abigail Burrola, Analyst

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

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

As we kick off National School Choice Week, it is worth remembering that charter schools are designed to meet the needs and wants of families through innovation and flexibility. Whether parents and children want an academically stronger school, a safer school environment, or a school with a particular mission or focus, families should be the driving factor for when and where charter schools open.

Simply put, Missouri is letting down its students by functionally limiting charter schools to only two districts in the state. There is proposed legislation that would purportedly expand the ability to open new charter schools, but it places other conditions on where charter schools may open:

1.      A district must have at least 2,800 students—which is only 75 out of over 500 districts in Missouri.

2.      A district must have at least one school building that scored 68% or less on the Annual Performance Report for two of the last three years.

3.      The charter school can only serve the same grades as the school that meets the above criterion.

4.      The charter school must give preference to students living in the attendance zone of the struggling school.

5.      The charter school must apply to the local school board for sponsorship first.

This bill also creates rules for closing charter schools based on the results of their Annual Performance Review rather than the charter school’s performance contract with its sponsor. Overall, these provisions undermine the charter school model: more freedom in exchange for strong performance. Missouri’s charter school laws currently have our state ranked 30^th out of the 44 states by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. We can do better for students by allowing for a strong charter school market that is responsive to the demands of families, not distant government officials.

If parents in a particular area are happy with their neighborhood school, that’s great! Charter school operators will most likely not try to open a school there. On the other hand, if a significant number of families want an alternative to their traditional public school, shouldn’t they have that option available?

This week, there will be over 30,000 events nationwide celebrating the educational opportunities that charter schools and other school choice programs have given students. By allowing charter schools to serve more communities in Missouri, we could see even more families joining the celebrations in the years to come.   

The post On Charter Schools, Let Families-not Politicians-Decide appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This information is valuable for families who want to ensure their children are assigned to good schools. And it’s also an illustration of what is, unfortunately, the most common form of school choice: moving.

According to a survey conducted by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, 31 percent of parents said they moved to their current neighborhood so that their children could attend a specific school. Among families whose annual income was less than $50,000, however, only 25 percent of parents moved to a specific school district. For those making more than $150,000, it was 36 percent.

As lawmakers consider education savings accounts, charter schools, and course access this legislative session, many of their constituents have expressed doubts about these school choice initiatives. Certainly, we should consider such programs carefully; but we should also realize than many families in Missouri already practice school choice by moving out of one district and into another.

James Shuls, the Show-Me Institute Distinguished Fellow of Education Policy, called this “School Choice by Mortgage”:

Parents with the financial means can move their families to neighborhoods with good schools or they can afford private school tuition. The problem with our current system of school choice is that it leaves many parents with no options. The wealthier a family is, the more choices they have, while the most disadvantaged are left with little or no choice.

School choice programs like ESAs and charter schools are not meant to disrupt quality public schools where parent and student satisfaction is high. Rather, these programs are designed to provide opportunities to families who don’t have the means to buy a home in a good district or pay for private school tuition. Regardless of what neighborhood a family can afford to live in, shouldn’t their children have access to a quality education—whether it is at a public, charter, or private school?

The post School Choice for Those Who Can Afford It appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This is, for all intents and purposes, the deal that Judge Russell Clark offered to those who wanted to reform the Kansas City, Missouri, School District starting in the mid-1980s. He implemented policy recommendations by fiat. He raised the property taxes of the residents of the school district without allowing them to vote on it. He required the state to contribute hundreds of millions of dollars to fund new programming. What the plaintiffs in Missouri v. Jenkins, wanted, they got.

Well, except for one thing: a school district that met the needs of their children.

As Joshua Dunn points out in Complex Justice, an engrossing history of the court case, Judge Clark was hemmed in. Kansas City’s geographic peculiarities have it spread across two states, and families of means have always been able to move to the green, suburban pastures of Johnson County, Kansas. At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court had handed down the Milliken decision, which forbade judges from requiring actions from suburban districts to alleviate segregation, essentially boxing in the district and those hoping to reform it.

So Judge Clark started cutting checks. Experts were called in, surveys were administered, and program after program popped up. Slavic studies? Can do. A model UN with simultaneous translation? Sounds great. An Olympic-quality swimming and diving facility? Whatever you think will make the school district work.

Kansas City in the early 1990s was the apogee of what Rick Hess and I describe in our new volume, Educational Entrepreneurship Today, as the “system” approach to school reform. It is marked by careful planning, alignment, and coordination, all driven by the wisdom of experts and implemented by clear-eyed technocrats—or at least that’s how it is supposed to work. Kansas City shows, even with a boatload of money and a judge who can implement programs with the stroke of a pen, just how hard it is to pull that off.

What were the results? When Judge Dean Whipple eventually dismissed the case, 20 years after it began and after Clark himself had retired, he summed it up well, writing, “Despite the expenditure of vast sums, the prolonged oversight of a federal court and its appointees, the efforts of multiple parties, and the passage of forty years since the end of official de jure segregation in Kansas City, Missouri, the KCMSD still struggles to provide an adequate education to its pupils.”

I grew up in Kansas City during this time, so it’s no surprise that I have a different view of how to improve the education system. Rather than looking for the grand solution or trying to impose “best practices” on every school and classroom, I favor a more decentralized approach marked by experimentation, trial and error, and smaller entrepreneurial organizations working to solve the problems that are right in front of them.

Fortunately for residents of Crown Town (sorry—we’re still basking in the glow of last year’s World Series win and will be for some time now), this more decentralized approach has been adopted to a large degree, and some seeds for future success have been planted. As the court case wound down, Kansas City opened its doors to charter schools.

Today, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the Kansas City Missouri, School District has the 5th-highest percentage of its students in charter schools, at 41%. And it appears that the market share will only grow in the future.

It has not been all roses. Several charter schools have failed, and some have failed spectacularly. However, a loosely aligned network of schools is gradually emerging in Kansas City and meeting with success. Recently, the public policy research firm Mathematica released an evaluation of the Ewing Marion Kaufmann School that showed incredible gains from its students. French language immersion school Academie Lafayette has a waiting list over a hundred students long. The Crossroads Academy, a popular urban charter school that was bursting at the seams, is opening new campuses, and the Citizens of the World network is coming to Kansas City after a group of enterprising parents issued their own RFP to charter organizations to attract a school operator.

Is change happening fast enough? Of course not. Will all of these schools meet with success? Maybe not. But given the backdrop they are working against, they are beating the odds. What’s more, if one school fails, the damage can be contained. If a whole district falls into disarray, it can take a city down with it.

The lesson from Kansas City for the rest of the nation is one of humility. We often don’t know what we don’t know, and are overconfident that our one great idea is the silver bullet can turn things around if embraced by every teacher or every school. We think that we can impose our views and shape the behaviors of people by administrative diktat, even when the people we’re working with deeply disagree with us about the proper course of action. The world doesn’t work that way, and we must keep that in mind as we chart a path forward.

The post The Great Urban School District That Wasn’t, but May Be Soon appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Tenth out of 18 doesn’t seem like much to brag about, but if we look at the criteria used for the ranking, we see that Missouri’s charters are doing some impressive work to rank as highly as they do.

What are we doing well?

• We don’t cap the number of charter schools in the state
• Our charter schools enjoy a high degree of autonomy
• We’ve seen strong growth in our charter sector from 2010 to 2015; 25 new charter schools were opened during that period.
• Missouri charter schools offer diverse programs, with 36% of the state’s charters having a special focus like international/foreign language or Montessori.
• Best of all, students in Missouri’s charter schools achieved higher academic results in math and reading than their traditional school counterparts.

What’s holding us back?

• Missouri doesn’t fund charters as well as it does traditional schools.
• Missouri unique laws have limited charter schools to only operating within the Kansas City and Saint Louis school districts. As a result, 98% of charter schools are located in non-suburban areas and only 2% of students are enrolled in charters. Saint Louis and Kansas City are the only 2 communities in Missouri that had more than 10% of their students enrolled in charters.

It’s awfully hard to blame our charter schools for the factors pushing our rank down. A close look at the report shows that charter schools are simply doing more with a lot less. So why aren’t we giving them equal funding, and why are we keeping them from operating outside of Kansas City and St. Louis?

The post How Healthy Is Missouri’s Charter School Movement? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The trend line (see the graph above) is also significant.  Charter enrollment is going up, and traditional public enrollment is going down.

A few quick reactions:

1.       The narrative, at least coming from the Kansas City School District, is that the district is improving.  Graduation rates are up, and test scores show that the district might be on the path to full accreditation.  If that’s true, it would stand to reason that charter schooling is helping (or at the very least not hurting) the Kansas City public schools.

2.       It is important to remember that the city and the school district are not coterminous; in fact, 16 different school districts cover some part of Kansas City proper. Why charter schools are only allowed in one subsection of the city, especially when there is such clear demand for them, is beyond me.

3.       This report does highlight just how small the Kansas City School District has become.  I don’t think a lot of people realize this, but there are only 14,230 students enrolled in the Kansas City public schools.  When you think that Omaha’s main school district has 51,000 students, Des Moines’ has 33,000, and even Little Rock’s has 25,000, you realize just how much the district has shriveled up over the years.

Ultimately, Kansas City needs to have a conversation about what to do with the school district. If trends continue and more and more students attend charter schools, we have to think about transitioning the district from an institution that operates schools in addition to funding and regulating them to an institution that funds and regulates schools, but leaves operation up to others.

The post We’re Number 5! We’re Number 5! appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In other findings about Missouri, the report found that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post CREDO Charter Study: Missouri an Outlier appeared first on Show-Me Institute.