Susan Pendergrass speaks with J.S. Onésimo “Ness” Sandoval, demographer and professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Saint Louis University, about what the data says about the future of the St. Louis region. They discuss record low birth rates and what they mean for school enrollment, why St. Louis is among the top regions in the country for deaths outnumbering births, how the region compares to Pittsburgh and Cleveland, and why suburbs like Chesterfield and St. Charles are aging faster than most people realize. They also discuss the role of housing supply, school choice, crime, and domestic migration in whether St. Louis can attract and retain young families, and more.

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Episode Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00): Well, certainly not the first time we’ve spoken, Dr. Sandoval. At St. Louis University, you are such a fascinating demographer of the region, and I’ve been following your work as new census data has been released. You’ve been writing about it and creating what I think are really cool mapping tools that folks can look at to see how the St. Louis region is impacted. Thanks for coming on to talk about that. But first I want to sort of expand our view, because pretty sure that I read within the last week that the number of babies born in the United States was at an all-time low. Is that right?

Ness Sandoval (00:35): Yeah, so every year the United States will probably be breaking records. The data coming out for 2025 is a record low, and the data coming out for 2026 is even lower. The first few months of 2026, the provisional data that’s out shows even fewer. And this is what we expected. We call this a demographic shock, because in 2026, whenever you create an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear, rational people do not have children until they understand that their job is safe, there’s not a recession coming, and we’re not at war. When you create this sense of fear, young people do the rational thing and don’t have children. We saw this in 2020 with COVID. We saw this in 2008 with the Great Recession. Anytime there is uncertainty, young people will postpone births. And that’s what we’re seeing. This started in November. We started to see the decline in births, and it’s continued from November, December, January, February. And so this is what we’re going to see.

Susan Pendergrass (01:51): So next year is going to be lower. And when you look at the state of Missouri, I’ve been saying this ad nauseum for years that our K-12 school enrollment is declining and will decline because of that sort of peak in 2008, just before the Great Recession. So our biggest kindergarten class was around 2012, and our kindergarten classes have by and large declined ever since. And so those kids are moving through the system. You can project that we will just have fewer and fewer kids enrolled in our K-12 system in the state of Missouri.

Ness Sandoval (02:06): No, we peaked in 2008.

Susan Pendergrass (02:11): By and large declined ever since 2012. And so those kids are moving through the system. So you can project that we will just have fewer and fewer kids enrolled in our K-12 system in the state of Missouri.

Ness Sandoval (02:24): Yeah, this is true, and we have a pretty good chart. We make these for every city. We’re replacing very large cohorts of children who were born. I have a son who was born in 2007, just before the recession. That cohort that graduated in St. Louis was 40,000 students. The baby birth cohort is now 27,000 students. So that’s just in that one year a 13,000 decline. And it’s going to decline every year for the next 15 to 18 years, because we don’t know what the bottom is yet. It has not reached the bottom.

Susan Pendergrass (03:01): Right. People say where are the kids going? I’m like, they’re not going anywhere. They weren’t born. The St. Louis region, like Clayton is declining, Ladue was, I mean, all of these school districts, I think almost everyone in the county has fewer kids today than they had 10 years ago.

Ness Sandoval (03:07): They weren’t born. Yes, and it’s not just St. Louis County. St. Charles County is experiencing this. There are some parts that are growing, in the Wentzville area, O’Fallon, but if you look at the old St. Charles areas, they’re experiencing decline. Families with children are declining in those areas. We had made an interactive map that I think shocked a lot of people, of seniors outnumbering youth. People could not comprehend this. Like, my gosh, this is not 2000 where youth were dominating these neighborhoods. I live out here in Chesterfield. The entire Route 64 corridor is senior citizens dominating the youth in Chesterfield. People are shocked. More seniors lived in Chesterfield than youth in 2010, and that’s only grown since. This is happening throughout West County.

Susan Pendergrass (04:14): Wow. And your maps actually go down to the zip code, right? You have very granular data.

Ness Sandoval (04:27): Across into Illinois, yes. The only way you can turn this around is young people from across the United States deciding that they want to make St. Louis their home, have a family there, create a business there. This is what I promote. We have to get younger. We really should have a preferential option for families with children. And that’s a hard message for a lot of people because they’re like, wait a minute, we grew from 1970 to 2020. And I’m like, but all of that growth was driven by babies born. Over 1.8 million babies were born. And I tell people, just do the math. 27,000 babies per year times 50. That’s the back of the envelope for what’s coming over the next 50 years. Unfortunately, that’s not what’s going to come. It’s going to be a lot lower than that. People are starting to get it. We’re not going to have 1.8 million babies born over the next 50 years.

Susan Pendergrass (05:33): Yeah, and I think about things like individual school systems building new elementary schools when there have got to be a lot of buildings that are empty. And also, won’t there be more competition for public resources between children and older people?

Ness Sandoval (05:49): Yeah. At my previous job at Northwestern, we did a project on this in one of the suburbs because we were studying seniors. There was a debate about how to spend public money. Was it for transit for seniors or transit for children? This was 2006, and this was the debate happening in Chicago. How do you provide paratransit for senior citizens when that number is increasing? We’re just having this discussion because St. Louis is leading. We’re in the top three of regions. Pittsburgh leads the country, Cleveland is second, and St. Louis is third, tied with Tampa. More people dying than babies born. We simply don’t have the number of babies born for the size of our population. And it’s because we’re a very old region. We’re the ninth oldest region in the country.

Susan Pendergrass (06:58): Yeah, I mean, we used to have 800,000 people in the city of St. Louis, right? And now we’re 280,000 or something.

Ness Sandoval (07:05): Yeah, and I was just looking at the numbers. It is very possible within two years that Kansas City will have more babies born in absolute numbers than the St. Louis metro region. That’s how few babies. I’m talking about the region. Indianapolis is about 700 babies behind St. Louis. Nashville is about 800 babies behind. All of these smaller regions are having lots of babies, and young people are moving there. Your future depends on the number of children born. And when you look at population projections, I kind of know what this looks like. When you fall below Kansas City in number of births, at some point Kansas City will be larger than St. Louis. We can project this out. We’re talking absolute births, not birth rates. We had lots of babies born 10 years ago. We were fine 10 years ago.

Susan Pendergrass (08:09): Yeah, wow.

Ness Sandoval (08:29): We can go back and talk about what happened since 2010.

Susan Pendergrass (08:35): Yeah, please. I’m curious what did happen. I know you call it the death spiral when there’s more deaths than births, but how did we get into this?

Ness Sandoval (08:41): So I moved here for the Great Recession. I moved in 2008 to start my job at SLU. And there was hope when I got here. There was some positive momentum happening. I think the region took it for granted that it didn’t have to do anything. We just have to be St. Louis. We don’t have to do anything. Unfortunately, Nashville came on the scene. Then you started to see regions change. Regions thinking we need to get young. And St. Louis absolutely did nothing. Since I’ve lived here, there’s been a lot of resistance to economic development in the region. Nashville, I think it was the popularity of being young, being pro-development. I went to Nashville to actually look at it, like why are young people there? And I went to Vanderbilt. And I saw this really interesting integration between the city and Vanderbilt University. That does not exist here in St. Louis. Making it a vibrant, cohesive, urban experience.

Susan Pendergrass (09:47): Yeah. Right. Now you step off campus at SLU and you’re in an area you don’t want to walk at night.

Ness Sandoval (10:00): Yeah, and even if it was WashU, right. And then you can talk about the Loop. It never recovered from COVID, traffic is down. I think the region has really struggled to attract young people to stay here and live here.

Susan Pendergrass (10:13): Well, we’ve been looking into the issue of crime in St. Louis quite a bit, and I know it’s down and everyone’s celebrating that fact, but I’m not sure when you survey people and ask how they feel walking alone at night, that it’s changed all that much. Even if the number of murders are down, I don’t know that people feel safer walking alone at night, and that’s got to have an impact on whether you want to stay in St. Louis after you have kids.

Ness Sandoval (10:47): Yeah. I think in the city you move out to the suburbs. The challenge is they work and you live for affordability. So many suburbs are against new development, even though they can develop. We see these debates in Chesterfield, that debate in Creve Coeur, several debates out in St. Charles. They don’t even talk about Jefferson County, because they’re celebrating voting down housing. My point is if you don’t want to build housing, Indianapolis is going to build it. Columbus is going to build it. Nashville is building it. We are no longer in the top 50 in new housing permits in the country. We’re 58th.

Susan Pendergrass (11:34): Why though? Is it because there’s not demand, or is supply being constrained?

Ness Sandoval (11:42): Supply is being constrained. Part of it is, when I speak to people, they say it’s going to hurt my home values. People want supply down. But you understand there’s a consequence to this. And home values are always good in St. Louis. But again, we always say there’s a city that we can look to that’s our future, and that’s Pittsburgh. If you really study Pittsburgh and look at it, you’re like, wow, there’s a lot of things we can learn as a city, and say this is not what we want to be. Pittsburgh leads the country in discounted rates on home sales. When people offer their price, most people do not get the price that they want. It’s a significant discount because the demand’s not there. We are about 20 years behind Pittsburgh.

Susan Pendergrass (12:25): Wow. I think a lot, in what I do, about the educational offerings in the region. Before we were recording we were talking about Texas. Texas, number one, doesn’t have an income tax, and also you can pick your child’s school from the get-go. They have hundreds, if not thousands of charter schools. And now they have a private school choice program that I think 250,000 families apply to. And Missouri has an extremely limited private school choice program, maybe 6,000 or 7,000 kids in the state, and not even the ability within St. Louis County to go outside of these tiny little districts. You can’t even go from Clayton to Brentwood. People really feel strongly about this and fight the idea of opening up the county and letting kids go within the county to any school district, and then the legislature fights it every year. And I’m like, we are just becoming less and less competitive.

Ness Sandoval (13:36): I don’t think people understand. I do a lot of work with schools now. We’re going to lose at a minimum 100,000 children under 15 by 2045. This loss is built into the system based on 27,000 births right now. The numbers are starting to show up in kindergarten. We have a smaller kindergarten class, a smaller first grade class coming in. And so a lot of schools are like, wait a minute, what’s going on? This is just starting. You have another 20 years, because we have these large cohorts that were still born after the Great Recession that are going to be replaced by smaller cohorts coming in. And there is no significant migration of children coming into the region.

Susan Pendergrass (14:28): So there are going to be difficult staffing decisions, and people don’t want to hear it. Like, we cannot continue to hire more teachers.

Ness Sandoval (14:32): You have to close schools. You have to close schools, have to merge schools. I’m doing some work in Parkway. People should not be surprised. Parkway is having meetings this month about what Parkway looks like going forward, and people are discussing consolidation. Rockwood is talking about a 15% decline in 10 years. Go out another 10 years, Rockwood will be talking about school consolidation. St. Charles will be talking about school consolidation in the old St. Charles area, the city of St. Charles. This is coming. Everybody focuses on the city and says the city needs to close schools. But you will see a discussion, I think, between Clayton and Brentwood.

Susan Pendergrass (15:06): For sure. Clayton had 2,500 kids. Now they’ve got closer to 2,000. I mean, that’s teachers, that’s buildings. And I know in Indianapolis, I’ve talked to a superintendent in that area. All parents can pick a public school. And he was like, I had some under-enrolled elementary schools and it was great for me because I put a language immersion program in one to bring parents in. I think the resistance to this idea is all about not wanting kids who aren’t paying property taxes, but I think it’s going to flip. Then you’ll be like, we’ve got to fill these seats. We’re paying the same teacher for 18 seats that we could pay for 22 kids. At some point they’re going to have to start laying off teachers. So I think there are some very difficult decisions ahead that you can see now, and there are things that could be done now, like at least not filling open positions.

Ness Sandoval (16:16): I think universities are seeing this, because many of them are relying on tuition and those dollars are not coming in. A smart university has to make cuts because it doesn’t get any better next year or the following year. There will be fewer students coming in. So universities that want to survive are making necessary cuts to survive.

Ness Sandoval (16:45): Again, we don’t know what the bottom of the birth decline looks like. We just happen to live in a state and a region that has seen a significant decline in children. I keep saying we’re modeling the future for people, either as a good or bad thing. They’re like, we want to be like St. Louis, or we don’t want to do what they did.

Ness Sandoval (17:13): I think a lot of people are starting to understand this. It’s like, we’re letting our children go, and we’re not doing a very good job of trying to keep them here. When you had 1.8 million births, you had enough to let children leave your region, leave the state. You don’t have that luxury anymore. Our models show the region should have anywhere between 1.3 million to a million births coming in over the next 50 years. We hope it’s not a million births, because that means you have an 800,000 decline in your population under 50. Or it’s 1.3 million births, which is only a 500,000 decline. But that’s coming.

Susan Pendergrass (17:43): How does immigration factor into it? Because I remember the last time we talked, you said that St. Louis is not very immigration friendly. And of course, the current national environment is not very immigration friendly.

Ness Sandoval (18:03): Missouri and St. Louis cannot rely on immigration to save it. It’s not a state that immigrants are going to come to in large numbers. They’re going to go to Florida. Miami leads the country. Even though domestic migration has people leaving, international migrants are going there as their top destination. They’re going to Philadelphia, they’re going to New York. We get immigrants who come here, but it’s a very small number, like 6,000 a year. We’re not even in the top tier as a top 25 metropolitan region. And Missouri is not either. So Missouri has to rely on domestic migration.

The data will show that probably for the decade, there will be more people dying than babies born in Missouri. Missouri will start to have from a natural perspective more people dying than babies born. And 91 counties across the whole state will have more people dying than babies born. So Missouri will become dependent for growth on domestic migration.

Susan Pendergrass (19:29): Or do we just accept that we’re not going to grow anymore? What’s the impact of that?

Ness Sandoval (19:33): Again, it’s going to be specific. I do think the Springfield area is going to grow, the Branson area, there’s growth. Part of this is retirement, I think. Kansas City is growing.

Susan Pendergrass (19:42): Why Kansas City more than St. Louis? What’s attracting younger people to Kansas City that is not happening here?

Ness Sandoval (19:49): Kansas City is a younger region. St. Louis is a fairly old region. Kansas City is a lot younger and it has a large Latino population, and that’s the largest growing population in the country, birth-rate wise. Latinos are now the second largest population in Kansas City. They surpassed the Black population, which I think even shocked me, because we thought we knew this was coming, but we thought this was going to be post-2030. The fact that it already happened shows just how many Latinos are moving there. And then you have an exodus of Black residents leaving Kansas City as well as St. Louis. I always tell people, when you have young Black families leave or young Black adults leave, those children ultimately leave too. And so that’s part of the story.

Ness Sandoval (20:48): When young people leave, the children that traditionally were born to those young people are now being born in Charlotte, Atlanta, Houston. The number one challenge for St. Louis and the state is the decline in births. If that doesn’t change, then you’re going to see that decline start to show up in five to ten years in our schools.

Ness Sandoval (21:17): And the private schools will simply go out of business because that’s dictated by the private market. Or they’ll do what many of the Catholic schools are doing. They think, we’re going to have middle school now, or we’re going to be K through 12. But then what about the parochial schools? There’s no growth. They’re just taking children out of other schools and putting them in their school system.

Ness Sandoval (21:45): And so again, I go back to Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is about how do we manage population decline? The city is growing a little bit, but 100% of the growth in terms of the losses is in the suburbs. And that’s going to happen in St. Louis. When this loss starts to show up in the demographic accounting, most of the loss is going to be outside of the city of St. Louis. It’s going to be in the Chesterfield areas. It’s going to be in St. Charles.

Susan Pendergrass (22:18): So what could be done from a policy perspective? Chesterfield is trying to have this arts and entertainment district. They put in Topgolf and the concert venues. They’re trying to attract younger people there. Is it working?

Ness Sandoval (22:34): It’s not working. I mean, they have the same slight increase. I just posted this yesterday. People are shocked. The growth is in non-family households in Chesterfield. If you look at the new development, I call it downtown West Chesterfield. These are million-dollar homes, very expensive. Very few families with kids are there. These are empty nesters or dual-income, no-kids households. It’s very expensive for young families to get into Chesterfield today, when your entry-level home that was $170,000 in 1980 is $600,000 today. These are the challenges.

Susan Pendergrass (23:23): So build more starter homes?

Ness Sandoval (23:32): You need more entry-level homes. I’m not even going to use the word affordable. You need attainable homes for two incomes. And they can be built. But what I’ve heard is that a lot of cities do not want these homes. They want the $600,000 to $700,000 homes because of taxes. And so there is this tension there.

Ness Sandoval (23:56): Parkway and Rockwood are going to look very different in 30 years. They were very attractive amenities for young families with children. But I look at the data, and my kids are in Parkway. These schools are under-enrolled. You go and objectively look at the classrooms, you’re like, there should be 30 kids in these rooms and there’s 15. It’s great for me as a parent. I’m glad there’s only 15 kids for my fourth grader. One of the classes in Parkway Central, in the middle school, in his math class, there are eight students. I love it as a parent, but as someone who looks at the data, this is not sustainable.

Susan Pendergrass (24:45): Yeah, lots of one-on-one. Yeah. I’m just trying to figure out what would cause a renaissance in St. Louis. It doesn’t feel super safe. It has some great amenities and a great food scene and now MLS soccer. What would it take? Well, number one, you do have the school system problem where the St. Louis public school system is kind of a dumpster fire. So people want to move out if they have small children.

Ness Sandoval (25:32): Yeah, the decision to move out is made within the first three years once the baby’s born. We can see that in the data. When we moved from Chicago, because we lived in the city of Chicago, we wanted to live in the city of St. Louis. I think most people who move from Philadelphia or Boston are living in the city. We thought the city of St. Louis would be offering the same amenities. Because of the Great Recession, I came a year before my family, and we soon realized the city of St. Louis was not the city of Chicago in terms of amenities. And so we ended up in St. Charles. And I think most people make that same decision.

Susan Pendergrass (26:25): Yeah, my husband and I moved right into the city.

Ness Sandoval (26:27): We see it in the data. People are moving into the city from Philadelphia, from Boston, from Houston. But then, like me, if you have children and you’re not going to pay for private school, because that’s a tax in many ways, they’re going to exit out. And then with the Catholic schools closing in the city, there are going to be fewer options.

Susan Pendergrass (26:50): Yeah. But the public transportation is no good. I mean, there are things.

Ness Sandoval (26:57): And it’s interesting. We did see a kind of experiment during COVID. When COVID happened, the Catholic schools in the county opened up. A lot of families wanted their children in face-to-face instruction. So they left the city. They did not stay. So we had kind of a quasi-experimental design there. Education was very important.

Ness Sandoval (27:26): A lot of people left the city because of that and never came back. And that started before COVID. But I think this idea of school choice is something where parents want it. We have enough anecdotal evidence. When Normandy closed, the school system closed, families moved to Normandy to get their kids into Francis Howell. There’s enough evidence to show that families want to make these decisions. The question would be, would Parkway accept all of the students that would want to be in Parkway?

Susan Pendergrass (27:56): Yeah, the law would have to say that they would have to. You couldn’t let them pick and choose.

Ness Sandoval (28:15): Yeah. And so the question is, you have a lot of people who would love to be in Parkway. I gave a talk at Marquette and I was shocked because a good percentage of the students there were saying those public school students, but the parents had left to get out to West County for their children. So the question is, do you just let the private market dictate this? Those who can leave the city will ultimately leave the city and get out to West County.

Susan Pendergrass (28:50): There’s movement out. And I think in terms of domestic migration, to get parents to move in, you can go to our northern border, Iowa. The state pays for private school tuition. Oklahoma to the south, the state pays for private school tuition. Kansas, you can go to any public school in the state. It’s 100% open enrollment. Arkansas is one of the strongest for school choice, both public and private. I think we’re going to be surrounded by it and just have our arms folded across our chest. Because Parkway doesn’t want all those kids coming, or Rockwood doesn’t want all those kids coming. Parents are simply going to move across the border to a state where they can pick any public or private school. I’ve talked to some parents who have reached out to say, I’m thinking about moving to the region, is it true I can’t pick a school? And I’m like, it is true. You cannot pick a school. And I think they’re like, forget it. I’m not going to make this big decision on where to buy a house. I think if we don’t do things that are family friendly, and if we don’t get crime under control in some way, or have a 911 system where when you call somebody responds, I think it’s interesting that St. Louis will become this example for the nation of what a dying city looks like.

Ness Sandoval (30:08): We have three examples today: Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and St. Louis. Tampa is kind of unique because it is a destination for retirees. The Wall Street Journal has an article today on Cleveland, the renaissance of downtown Cleveland. And Detroit too, it’s a renaissance.

Susan Pendergrass (30:29): Wow. What about Detroit now? So St. Louis hasn’t figured out our renaissance yet.

Ness Sandoval (30:49): And to be honest with you, I think it will be hard. I’m not pro anything, but I find this whole debate about the city and county interesting. I’m not from here, so I don’t have this history of growing up here. But I think objectively, when I look at the budget of the city of St. Louis and compare it to Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh is a little bit bigger. It’s got 25,000 more people. But their budget is significantly smaller than St. Louis City’s budget. Part of me wonders, because the city is both a city and a county, it doesn’t have enough people or revenue to operate as both. And this is what’s helping Pittsburgh out. This is what’s helping Cleveland out, because that county revenue is spread among more taxpayers. In St. Louis City, the county functions are spread among a dwindling number of taxpayers. The city probably cannot be a county anymore. There’s just too few taxpayers to provide both city services and county services.

Ness Sandoval (32:08): I looked at these budgets and I’m like, my gosh, why is St. Louis’s budget so much more? I’m talking not a little bit more, a lot more than Pittsburgh’s budget. Pittsburgh is having trouble. And I don’t see the long-term fiscal situation turning around for the city because it’s got to provide all of these services. The tax base is going to decline. The next three years are probably going to see population loss in the city. The numbers just came out in March, but we’ll get the numbers in May. It’ll probably lead the country again in population decline for large cities.

Susan Pendergrass (32:58): Are we still a top 20 city? We’re number one in population decline, but what about in population size?

Ness Sandoval (33:01): We’re number one in decline. Last year, St. Louis City was number one. We’re declining. We’re not in the top 20 yet, but we’re very close. If we go back to 2020, we’re smaller than we were in 2020. The only reason we’re not number one in decline is because we had so many immigrants that offset our domestic migration loss. But this will be an interesting 2030 census, because it’ll be the first time the region will go into a census with more people dying than babies born. In the last census, we had about 75,000 natural growth. We’re looking at about 25,000 to 30,000 natural decline going into this census without any domestic migration. I tell people that this story is just starting. We have 74 years of the century left.

Ness Sandoval (34:18): I’m just trying to get people to move from the mindset that this is 2010 St. Louis. You don’t have 36,000 births anymore. You have 27,000 and it’s declining, one of the fastest declines in the country. Because of it, we’re aging very fast, and so we have to shift. The region has to make a choice that we start to organize our economy around senior citizens. There’s lots of money to be made from senior citizens, but we will never be viewed as Nashville or Austin as a place for young people.

Susan Pendergrass (34:52): Absolutely. That Route 64 corridor is just going to be all retirement homes.

Ness Sandoval (35:04): We won’t be talking about single family homes anymore. We’ll be talking about senior housing. We’ll be talking about a workforce that’s going to work with seniors instead of a workforce for children. And there is money to be made in that economy. I’m not saying that this is a bad thing. But again, we can look at other parts of the country where this transition has happened. Local government spending is being consumed by senior citizens, the healthcare of senior citizens, the paratransit of seniors. Seniors will lose their ability to drive. That cost typically gets covered by local governments. And so you will not be providing buses for children. You’ll be providing paratransit to get seniors to their doctors. Churches will have to think about being accessible to seniors. I go to Church of the Ascension and they are not prepared. At Easter, one of the Masses, one-third of this section was senior citizens in wheelchairs. The churches are simply not prepared for a parish that’s going to be 50% of the population at 70 years old and older. Restaurants have to think about this.

Susan Pendergrass (36:30): Wow, that’s crazy. Well, interesting stuff. I hope you’ll come back and talk about this more. And certainly I’m very interested in reading everything that you write about what St. Louis can do. We need to figure out a renaissance.

Ness Sandoval (36:51): We’ve got to get younger. The kids are giving us a try. They’re coming to school, they’re coming here because they have hopes. We just have not responded the way we need to. A lot of companies are starting to recognize this. I talked to the mayor and said, you need to be a more proactive voice on this. But the region, this is not a city of St. Louis issue. This is a St. Charles issue, a Jefferson County issue, a Chesterfield issue. Most of the people live outside of St. Louis city. The loss we’re projecting is going to come from the suburbs. And that’s what’s happening in Pittsburgh, that’s what’s happening in Cleveland. 100% of the demographic loss is in the suburbs.

Susan Pendergrass (37:21): Yeah. Wow, that’s crazy. Well, fascinating. Thank you so much for explaining it. I don’t want to be depressed about it, but it’s not super optimistic. We’ll find a silver lining. Thanks, Dr. Sandoval.

Ness Sandoval (37:59): All right, thank you very much.

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The 74’s Bright Spots project identifies public schools across the country that are beating the odds in reading. Specifically, “Bright Spot” schools have literacy rates that are significantly higher than what is predicted based on their student poverty rates. In other words, these schools are outperforming expectations in terms of teaching kids to read.

The project is impressive in both scope and purpose. Using data from 41,883 schools across 10,414 districts in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., it shines a light on excelling schools. Too often, education debates fixate on failure. Highlighting success—and learning from it—is just as important.

While there are surely all kinds of interesting tidbits in the data, in this post I want to focus on the disproportionate representation of charter schools among Bright Spots.

Charter schools make up seven percent of The 74’s national sample, but 11 percent of schools identified as Bright Spots. This means charter schools are overrepresented among Bright Spot schools by more than 50 percent. If performance were unrelated to charter status, we would expect charter schools to comprise seven percent of the Bright Spot list—not 11 percent.

This adds to a large and growing body of evidence showing that charter schools produce stronger academic gains than traditional public schools, on average. This does not mean that every charter school is more effective than every traditional public school, nor does it mean that there aren’t high-performing traditional public schools (indeed, the Bright Spots project highlights many!). But it does mean that, more often than not, a school system with more charter schools will outperform a school system with fewer charter schools.

In Missouri, we’re missing the boat on charter schools. Our outdated charter laws result in them operating in just four jurisdictions in the state (Boone County, Kansas City, Normandy, and the City of St. Louis). This leaves most Missouri families without charter school options.

The fundamental reason is that outside of these four jurisdictions, a charter school can only open with the approval of the local school board. But because the local school board has a vested interest in maintaining resources for its own traditional public schools, this rule effectively serves as a ban on charter schools in most of our state.

If state policymakers are serious about improving student outcomes, they should modernize Missouri’s charter law. A simple solution is to allow the Missouri Charter Public School Commission to authorize charter schools statewide, rather than relying on local school boards to approve them. This would allow the charter sector to expand and result in more students attending high-quality public schools.

The post Charter Schools Are More Likely to Be Bright Spots appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The school choice landscape in Missouri is improving, but most students are still limited to narrow district offerings.

The Solution

Fully commit to a modern school-choice landscape by requiring all school districts to participate in statewide interdistrict open enrollment, increase funding for the MOScholars program, and remove barriers to charter schools in any school district where demand exists.

Key Facts

• Because Missouri does not offer interdistrict school choice, students here are required to attend a school assigned to them based on their address, even if that school chronically underperforms academically or is persistently dangerous.
• As it is currently funded, the MOScholars program can provide scholarships for only about 20,000 of Missouri’s 880,000 public school students.
• Students have access to charter schools in just three of Missouri’s more than 500 school districts.

Interdistrict Choice

Under Kansas’s new interdistrict open enrollment law, every K-12 student can attend any public school in the state, regardless of where they live, as long as there are available seats in the desired school. School districts must participate in the program, and the Kansas Department of Education audits each district’s capacity annually to ensure compliance. Missouri students are largely denied this level of educational choice. In most cases, they are required to attend the school assigned to them based on their home address. In 2024, the Reason Foundation graded all states’ public school transfer and open enrollment laws, and Missouri received an “F.” There are many reasons why a family might want an alternative to their assigned school. The school could be too big or too small, a child may face bullying, or the school might not be able to meet the terms of an Individualized Education Program (IEP). Another issue that has come into focus of late is school safety—new federal guidance emphasizes that students who attend persistently dangerous schools must be provided with an opportunity to attend a safe public school.

Missouri students should be permitted to cross district lines to access any public school, and Missouri school districts should be required both to allow students to transfer out and to receive students from other districts when they have space. Information on available capacity should be posted on school and district web pages and monitored by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE).

Expanding the MOScholars Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) Program

MOScholars, Missouri’s private school choice program, provides scholarships for students with disabilities and for low- and middle-income families to attend private schools. These scholarships are distributed through education assistance organizations (EAOs), which receive funding from two sources: (1) $50 million in public funding appropriated during the 2025 legislative session, and (2) private donations, for which donors receive full state tax credits subject to certain limitations. The total value of tax credits is capped at $75 million annually.

The 2025 appropriation of public funding for MOScholars was a step in the right direction, but there is more to be done. If all available tax credits are used, the combined public and private funding would total $125 million— enough to provide scholarships for approximately 20,000 Missouri students. While this is great news for the students who receive funding, it accounts for only a small share of Missouri’s nearly 880,000 public school students.

Voter and parent support for school choice programs is widespread. In a survey of parents taken in June 2021, approximately 75% of parents responded that they somewhat or strongly support ESA programs like MOScholars. If the legislature is serious about supporting this program, it should continue to expand funding to reach more students.

Charter School Expansion

Flexibility, freedom from bureaucracy, and the opportunity to innovate make charter schools a valuable addition to any school district—including those in remote, rural areas. Research shows that on average, charter schools outperform traditional public schools in raising academic achievement and some charter schools deliver results that are substantially better.

In nearly every state, charter schools are available to families in every type of community. In 2022–23, there were 984 rural charter schools enrolling 394,400 public school students nationwide, including 119 schools in communities designated by the Census Bureau as “remote rural.” However, of the 43 states with charter schools, Missouri is the only one with none located in rural areas.

As of 2025, charter schools are currently available to Missouri families in just three out of more than 500 school districts (Kansas City, the City of St. Louis, and Normandy). The reason is simple: In Missouri, charter schools in accredited districts can only open with the approval of the local school board. This is effectively a ban on opening charter schools in most locales. Legislation passed in 2024 allows charter schools to open in Boone County without the sponsorship of a local school board. No charter schools are operating in Boone County yet—it takes a while to open a new school—but they should be soon.

This legislation is a step in the right direction, but the real solution is to eliminate the requirement for local board sponsorship and let the market decide where charters belong. Every Missouri family should have access to this form of school choice.

Policy Recommendations

• Allow students to choose schools outside their residentially zoned districts in order to access broader education options.
• Continue to increase public funding for the MOScholars ESA program.
• Remove restrictions on where charters can open and who must sponsor them.

The post Statewide School Choice appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

What Is Off Limits?

As Show-Me Institute analysts have written about extensively, Missouri parents have fewer public schooling options than families in many other states, including many of our bordering states. First, Missouri does not have a cross-district open enrollment program. This means that the man I spoke with cannot have his son attend a public school outside of his zoned district unless another district chooses to accept him and he pays the tuition set by the new district.

Next, since he is zoned to attend a school district in western St. Louis County, charter schools are also off limits. Charter schools currently only exist in the City of St. Louis, Kansas City, and Normandy. Why is this the case? Charter schools require sponsors, and for accredited districts, the local school board must approve the charter school to operate. This has never happened in Missouri—the requirement of local school board sponsorship has essentially acted as a ban on charter operations in most of Missouri. And without open enrollment, no one outside of a charter school’s local district can enroll. In other states, schools like the Arizona Autism Charter School attract parents from far and wide.

The Good News

After these options were crossed off, the family is left with the options of the local public school district, a private school, or homeschool.

Private schools charge tuition, but thankfully, Missouri has an education savings account (ESA) program—MOScholars—that can help meet some of those costs for interested families. If the student has an Individualized Education Program (IEP), or if the student’s family household income is less than 300% of the federal poverty level, the student is eligible for a scholarship that can be used for private school tuition. However, the program is capped at $75 million in total funding. That means that even if a student qualifies, there may not be enough money for every eligible applicant to actually receive a scholarship. (If you are interested in MOScholars, you can learn more here.)

Unfortunately, there are not many choices available to the parent who reached out to me, and there is no choice at all when it comes to public schools. This is true for most Missourians. The Show-Me State needs more public options for our students and families. Next year, when someone asks me a similar question, I want to have a better answer.

The post What Are My Schooling Options as a Missouri Parent? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This argument rests on two assumptions. First, it assumes that the beneficiaries of private school scholarship programs (ESAs and vouchers) tend to be those already in private schools. Second, this argument assumes those in private schools are “the rich.” Thus, by creating programs that use direct government subsidies or are funded by tax credits, school choice programs are “welfare for the rich.”

This is an incredibly disingenuous argument. Indeed, the argument is nothing more than a red herring.

As everyone is aware, “the rich” are allowed to send their children to public schools. They can do so without facing any financial penalties. The United States Census Bureau calculates Small Area Income & Poverty Estimates (SAIPE) for each school district. This calculation estimates the number of students in each school district who fall below the poverty line. According to these SAIPE estimates, the Clayton, Kirkwood, Ladue, and Rockwood School Districts in Saint Louis County all have poverty estimates below three percent. Meanwhile, the nearby school districts of Riverview Gardens and Normandy have estimates above 35 percent. Yet, no one attempts to keep these wealthier school districts from receiving education funding because it is “welfare for the rich.”

A student from a rich family can attend any school district in Missouri and the district will receive funding for that student. But, if a parent, rich or poor, chooses to send their child to a private school, they lose that benefit. The issue is not that the family is rich, but that they have the audacity to choose a non-governmental school.

This is what makes the argument a red herring. It is a distraction from the real question—should families be denied educational benefits when they choose a non-public school?

Writing on this very issue in 1958, Father Virgil Blum lays the point out clearly: “It is fundamental that the state’s educational obligations are not to institutions and systems; its obligations are to children—the individual children of the state. Educational institutions and systems are but means to help the state carry out its educational obligations.”

Opponents of school choice will make any argument that seems to gain traction. Their fundamental objection, however, is against educational freedom. They simply do not believe individuals should be allowed to take their education dollars with them to the school of their choice.

The post Is School Choice “Welfare for the Rich”? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Around a decade ago, both these districts failed to meet state standards and received the status of “unaccredited.” Because these districts lost accreditation, students were allowed to transfer to an adjoining district—and Riverview Gardens and Normandy had to pay tuition to these nearby districts.

Over 2,000 students (a quarter of the two districts’ enrollment) immediately took the opportunity to transfer—with many enrolling in Kirkwood, Mehlville, Hazelwood, Ferguson-Florissant, and Francis Howell. No receiving district gained more than a five percent increase in its student body. This exodus of students was rooted in families’ desire to improve their children’s livelihood—a sentiment that still exists today. One mother described the ability to choose a different district as follows: “She is thriving and has found a place where she fits in. She feels safe in her school environment and as her mother, I don’t worry about her safety while she’s at school.”

Reverting back to the local control is probably not going to dramatically improve the situation in Riverview Gardens or Normandy; these districts have performed terribly both before and after state control.  Parents need to be able to hold these districts accountable. Parents demonstrated they wanted choice back when students transferred out of these failing districts, and they still want it now.

Some people worry what would happen to struggling districts if families had school choice. However, these districts would not simply collapse, as they are allowed to use enrollment from any of the past four years for funding. And school choice could have other benefits for these districts. A smaller student body could lead to more academic success, and the threat of closure could serve as a wake-up call to those who love these school districts.

How much better would it be for a district if students were enrolled because they actually wanted to be there? Perhaps having a student body who actually wants to be at their school would lower the soaring absentee rates we see in these two districts and throughout the state. While I cannot guarantee that parental accountability through choice will save these districts, saving particular school districts isn’t the goal of education policy. It’s giving every student in Missouri the best opportunity to succeed. And that means giving every student in Missouri the chance to pick a school that best fits their needs.

The post Riverview Gardens and Normandy Are Regaining Local Control appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The adjoining St. Louis County municipalities of Normandy and Glen Echo Park are considering merging.

Learn more here.

The post A St. Louis County Merger? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post The Normandy and Glen Echo Park Merger Proposal appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The key to successfully operating a small city, town, or village (Greendale is a village) is to not try to do everything yourself. Small towns need to contract out, share services, or privatize as many services as they can. These are valuable strategies for all cities, but they are vital for microcities such as Greendale, Champ, Lichtenstein, or Sealand.

Greendale is reopening its police contract for a nearby department to bid on providing police and court services for the village’s people. I understand those services are currently being provided by Normandy, but best practices are to rebid contracts like this at regular intervals. The most important thing is that Greendale is not attempting to provide its own police services. Whether a neighboring city such as Normandy, the St. Louis County police department, or the new North County police cooperative win the bid is not the point. The point is that Greendale deserves credit for this municipal policing strategy. There are plenty of other towns in Missouri that bid out services, but even more should.

Many people in Warson Woods went nuts when the city proposed merging police services with neighboring Glendale, even though the two towns had shared fire services for decades. That very modest proposal to share services failed. Hopefully, the Greendale plan is the future for St. Louis County instead of the Warson Woods reaction.

The post Municipal Contracting Is What Missouri Needs More Of appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Two paragraphs in the Post-Dispatch story are worth highlighting:

Normandy schools have not been fully accredited for the last decade and are under the control of the Missouri Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. Starting in 2013, the district paid tuition and transportation for about 1,000 students to transfer to higher-performing districts, as allowed under state law. The district nearly went bankrupt after spending $35 million on the transfer program. It returned to provisional accreditation in 2017, effectively ending the transfer program.

The district’s test scores still rank as lowest in the state, with 15% of students proficient in English and 7% proficient in math in 2019. There have been recent improvements, including the graduation rate at Normandy High rising from 53% in 2013 to 78% in 2019.

Families are already voting with their feet. Normandy has been shedding students, either through the transfer program or now just the old fashioned way (the Post-Dispatch reports elsewhere in the story that enrollment in the district is down 316 students, or 11 percent, this school year).

It is the school board of this district that approved a resolution last month expressing its “complete discontentment” with the Missouri Charter School Commission’s process of soliciting and developing a charter school in the district, as the board wanted to be included more in the process. Why on earth should a district that has manifestly failed to educate its students or even keep its financial house in order have any say on a new school that is coming in to try and do better? Lunacy.

And it is the civic leaders quoted in the story who believe that this district should have a monopoly on education provision within the boundaries of the Normandy School District. Also lunacy.

The question has to be asked of these leaders: How can you, in good conscience, look into the eyes of the children of Normandy and tell them that they don’t deserve a different option? Why must they stay tethered to a district that has been foundering for longer than they have been alive? Would you accept this for your own children?

The post A Charter School for Normandy? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Jones is part of a student transfer program that was created when the Normandy schools were so low performing that an emergency exit was created that allowed students to enroll in other districts. Now, the “system” that the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) uses to rate the performance of school districts has somehow declared that Normandy, a district in which just three percent of 7^th graders were proficient in math last year, is good enough. The transfer program is over, and the exit has been closed.

But let’s look at the bigger picture. Parents (and I can’t believe how often I have to say this) want to have choices when it comes to their child’s education. Of course parents in one of the lowest-performing districts in the state jumped at the chance to leave when it was offered. But guess who else chooses something other than their neighborhood school? Parents of bullied students, parents of students who are assigned to a big school but would do better in a small school, parents of students who want or need a particular curriculum such as fine arts or the classics and parents of students with disabilities who find a program that connects to their child’s needs. This list could go on and on.

So now the media is highlighting the tragedy of Tyler Ratlif Woods, who was on the path to college. Woods just found that he will not be attending high school in Ladue, where he went to elementary and middle schools. Instead he must return to his low-performing and potentially dangerous neighborhood high school in Normandy. One article quotes a transfer student’s father, Paul Davis, who called the transfer program a “gift from God.”

These stories are upsetting. It seems unfair. Forcing these children to return to their crumbling district isn’t going to help that district much, but it is going to hurt those children. In this case it’s obvious. But let’s not forget the less obvious—school-aged children are not the property of a school district by virtue of their address. They are individuals with individual needs who should have options when it comes to their education.

The post Getting Sent Back to School appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

When a school district in Missouri loses accreditation, students are allowed to transfer to a higher-performing school district. In recent years, thousands of students from the Normandy and Riverview Gardens School Districts used this provision in state statute to transfer to some of the highest-performing school districts in the state. But students lost the right to transfer when the state board of education voted to give the school districts provisional accreditation, based in part on improvements in student achievement-test scores. Based on the Education Next study, we have to wonder whether those learning gains were just an illusion caused by the state making the test easier.

It is important to understand this analysis is not comparing the rigor of the learning standards in each state. Standards say what students should learn in each grade. The relevant measure here is what students must score to be considered proficient by the state assessment. While the tests are developed based on the standards, setting the cut-score is a subjective process.  The lower the cut-score, the higher the percentage of students who will score proficient.

In 2009, Missouri had among the most rigorous assessments in the nation. The two images below come from a report from the U.S. Department of Education, “Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto the NAEP Scales.” Look far to the right and you will notice that Missouri led the nation in rigor on the 8^th grade reading assessment and had the third most rigorous state assessment in 8^th grade mathematics.

What followed 2009 was chaos. Missouri adopted the Common Core standards and ditched our rigorous state assessment. The state then went through turmoil as citizens pushed back against the Common Core, the legislature called for new standards to be written, and the state shuffled through four different state assessment systems. In the end, we wound up with an assessment that was easier than the one we had before.

Forget for a moment the overall message that lowering standards sends and the potential it has to impact all students. In the cases of Normandy and Riverview Gardens, lowering standards may have had a direct and detrimental impact on students. The year Normandy lost its accreditation, just 22 percent of the district’s students scored proficient or advanced in communication arts and 23 percent did so in math, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In 2017, the district regained provisional accreditation even though the performance of students in the district was not substantially better. That year, 34 percent of students scored proficient or advanced in communication arts and only 19 percent did so in math. Keep in mind these scores were with the easier tests.

Missouri’s state board of education voted to give provisional accreditation to the Riverview Gardens School District in 2016 and the Normandy Schools Collaborative in 2017. It seems those decisions may have been based on the faulty assumption that the student achievement in the districts was improving, when it seems the state was just giving easier tests. At the very least, we owe it to the students of these districts to investigate this further.

The post Like a Sore Thumb: Missouri’s Testing Standards Buck National Trend appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A recent study in Education Next by Daniel Hamlin and Paul Peterson of Harvard University shows that Missouri’s state assessments have gotten easier. In fact, Missouri was the only state in the nation to decrease the difficulty of state assessments from 2009 to 2017. As recently as 2009, Missouri’s state tests were given a grade of “A” by the publication and were ranked second in the nation, behind only Massachusetts. This meant we set a high bar for achieving proficiency. Since then, we’ve dramatically lowered our standards. Missouri’s assessments now receive a letter grade of “C” and rank us 48^th in the nation.

 Keep in mind that test scores are a significant component of the score a school district receives on the state’s Annual Performance Report (APR). Normandy has made substantial improvement on the APR. The district scored just 7.1% in 2014. When the state board voted to reaccredit the district, the APR score was 62.5%. That score was just barely above the 60% threshold for provisional accreditation and was the district’s first year scoring in that range. At the time, 8.7 percent of the district’s 8th-graders scored proficient or advanced on the state’s easier assessment.

We shouldn’t dismiss the progress the Normandy Schools Collaborative has made. Under the steady leadership of Superintendent Charles Pearson and the oversight of the state, the district is clearly heading in the right direction. The question is whether the state’s easier assessments may have given the school district the extra 2.5 percentage points on the APR that put the district into the provisional accreditation range. More importantly, would the state board of education still have voted to reaccredit the school district if the members had known some portion of the district’s academic gains were illusory?

We won’t know the answer to that question for some time. Right now, the state board does not have a quorum as the five members who voted to fire the commissioner have been withdrawn. This means the board can take no action on this or any other issue. It also means that students in Normandy and other provisionally accredited school districts will be required to return to their home school districts next year. Students who transferred to Clayton, Kirkwood, and other high-performing school districts will be forced to go back to the schools they sought to escape. 

When the vacant state board seats are finally filled and the board reconvenes, they will have a lot of work to catch up on—including hiring a new education commissioner—so it will be easy for the members to overlook the situation in Normandy. That would be an injustice to the students there. At the very least, the board should thoroughly investigate the extent to which easier tests cost them the opportunity for a better education.

The post Did Easier Tests Cost Normandy Students the Right to Transfer? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In statewide testing, less than half of the students in the district scored proficient or advanced in English and only about a third scored proficient or advanced in math. The latest average ACT score was 16.5, nearly five points below the national average of 21. Has the Hayti School District sufficiently prepared the class of 2019 to succeed after graduation?

Hayti has been provisionally accredited for over a decade, but that does not necessarily mean the state has taken adequate steps to make sure the district improves. The state monitors provisionally accredited districts, but there are few real consequences if their performance stagnates—and the SBE has been quick to upgrade districts even before sustained progress has been made. Unfortunately, the Missouri School Improvement Program is a series of graduated but mostly meaningless interventions.

My recent essay for the Show-Me Institute, “Accountability in Missouri’s Public School System,” goes into greater detail about our state’s struggling districts and argues that if accountability is defined as tangible consequences for district and school personnel, the state has been at best inconsistent in holding districts responsible for poor performance.

Some examples: Jennings and Caruthersville, both formerly provisionally accredited, were reclassified as fully accredited by the SBE even though they failed to meet the academic goals the districts set themselves. Not far behind Hayti, Calhoun R-VIII, and Hickman Mills have been provisionally accredited for 5 or more years.

Unaccredited districts also have been let off the hook despite a lack of significant progress. The SBE voted unanimously to classify Kansas City as provisionally accredited even though the former Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) Commissioner said the district had not established a “consistent trend of improvement.”

Two other once-unaccredited districts—Riverview Gardens and Normandy—failed to meet most performance targets set by the state before the SBE granted them provisional accreditation. In the case of the St. Louis City School District, its scores in all performance areas had not improved significantly . . . but it was unanimously approved for full accreditation.

These examples call into question the commonly held assumption that the state holds traditional public schools accountable. One could argue that the 1993 transfer law—although separate from DESE’s Missouri School Improvement Program—is the best form of accountability for districts. When students have the right to leave for a better school, unaccredited districts must improve to avoid having to pay other districts to educate their students.

Now that there are no unaccredited districts in Missouri, however, students in districts like Riverview Gardens and Normandy no longer have the right to transfer. Before thinking of this as a cause for celebration, we should recognize that this creates a trap for students whose districts are performing just well enough to prevent triggering the transfer law, but not well enough to provide a genuinely good education.

Families should not be waiting years or even decades for schools to make small gains or else become unaccredited so that students can transfer out. Under the current accountability system, the kids are the ones who face the consequences—whether they have to take remedial classes in college or cannot get a well-paying job—not the district or school leaders. Our accountability system is failing, and students deserve better than being forced to stay put in poorly performing schools.

The post Without Consequences for Failing Schools, Students Lose appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

On average, charter schools improve test scores in English Language Arts and Mathematics at a higher rate than comparable traditional public schools. There is variation, though. Notably, the authors of the report found charter schools that belong to a network, (known as a charter management organization, or CMO), tend to perform higher than independent charter schools.  Missouri’s charter schools didn’t fit this trend, as non-CMO schools performed relatively well. Nevertheless, the findings of this report have some important implications for Missouri.

Currently, there are relatively few large, successful charter management organizations operating in our state. There are a few reasons why this is so: 

Limited Locations

For many years, charter schools could only open in Saint Louis and Kansas City.  For a network of schools to thrive, it needs to be able to enroll a large number of students. The limited markets of Saint Louis and Kansas City make it difficult for this to happen.

Limited Enrollments

Charter schools can now operate in unaccredited school districts, but they still face problems with enrollment. Missouri’s charter school law does not allow students to enroll in charter schools across district boundaries, and Missouri has relatively small school districts. A charter must attract a large percentage of students in a small school district in order to be viable. This has prevented charters from opening in the perennially struggling school districts of Normandy and Riverview Gardens, as well as other places. 

Making it easier for charters to open statewide and allowing them to recruit students from across district boundaries might entice more charter operators to open schools in other districts or on the borders of Saint Louis and Kansas City. Current law makes it difficult for charters to operate outside of the two cities.

Pension Barriers

An added difficulty is Missouri’s teacher pension system. Currently, there are three separate systems which do not have reciprocity between them, meaning that years of service do not carry from one system to another. Charter networks may wish to move teachers or administrators between schools, but if this means moving between pension systems, those individuals would lose money.

Funding Parity

Charters in Missouri do not receive local tax support for facilities and debt. An analysis by researchers at the University of Arkansas shows that charters in Missouri receive approximately 26 percent less funding that their district counterparts. This is a difference of more than $4,600 per pupil. Many states are trying to attract high quality CMOs and can offer them more support than Missouri can.

If Missouri wants to improve educational outcomes for students, the legislature should enact polices that make the Show-Me State more attractive to CMOs. For starters, the legislature could address the problems listed here by removing geographic limitations, opening enrollment policies, reforming pension policy, and improving funding parity. 

The post We Need to Make Missouri More Attractive to Charter Management Organizations appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The only problem with that interpretation is that it isn’t true.

So says a new report from the Brookings Institution that analyzes the percentage of students in each state who might reasonably benefit from a school choice program. For their analysis, the authors of the study map out where students live relative to schools and report the percentage of students with one or more school options (traditional public, public charter, or private school) within a five-mile and ten-mile radius.  

The authors found that 73 percent of Missouri students have one or more private schools within five miles of where they live. The authors argue that these students could potentially benefit from a private school choice program. By contrast, only 65 percent of students have multiple options operated by their district within five miles (and thus could benefit from an intra-district choice program) and only 54 percent of students have non-district options within that radius (and could thus benefit from an inter-district program.)

As we think about the students in Normandy and Riverview Gardens who ride buses more than 30 miles as part of the inter-district transfer program, it is easy to see how a private option would allow these students to remain closer to home during the school day.

But it’s not just there that school choice can help. As the cold hard numbers tell us, there are many more students within reasonable reach of private schools than most people think. These options should not be dismissed out of hand.

Private school choice programs may not provide choices to all students, but they will expand options for a great many. From a policy standpoint and from a moral standpoint, they are worth exploring. 

The post Private School Choice Provides More Options Close to Home appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Unfortunately, this situation faces 17 school districts in Missouri. According to state accreditation standards, not every school in a district has to perform above 70 percent on the annual performance review to keep accreditation—just the district as a whole. This system has left kids in failing schools while keeping alternatives like charter schools out of the area. Recent proposals in the Missouri legislature could help solve this problem.

A few weeks ago, the Missouri House of Representatives passed HB634. A similar bill is now in the Senate. While HB634 does not allow charter schools to open everywhere in the state, it would increase the number of districts where charter schools could open. One section of the law targets districts with underperforming schools, and would allow charter schools:

In any school district in which at least one school building has received a score of sixty percent or less on its annual performance report for two of the three most recent annual performance reports available as of the date on which a charter school applies to open a charter school in the district under this subdivision.

Based on the 2014, 2015, and 2016 Annual Performance Reports, 97 schools in 29 school districts would fit this criterion, including Kansas City and Saint Louis (where charter schools already operate) and the Normandy Schools Collaborative (which is unaccredited but does not have a charter school yet). Thus, this rule would add 26 new school districts to those where charter schools can operate currently:

Certainly, it is a cause for concern that Missouri has so many districts with chronically underperforming schools. There is another problem, however, with failing schools being the only option in some of these districts.

Out of these 29 districts, 17 have “chokepoints”—schools that every student in the district will have to attend—that have been rated as failing in two of the last three years. Normandy is one such district; the others are the districts in bold in the table above. Most of the chokepoint schools are middle schools and junior high schools.

Children in these communities have no choice but to spend some part of their education career in a school that the state deems failing. Families in these districts and across Missouri deserve better options for their kids. 

The post “Chokepoints” Demonstrate Need for New Charter Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Many public schools are unable to do all of this. To meet the needs of students, they often—to borrow a word from the business world—“outsource” jobs. Just like your paycheck gets printed by an outside company or your office is cleaned by an independent janitorial service, schools often hire a private company to manage the district’s bus services, to provide before- and after-school care, to cook children’s meals at lunch time, and to clean the buildings. Schools contract with outside healthcare professionals or private schools to meet the needs of students with special needs. A district can even contract with an outside management firm to run the school if they want. Some schools are even outsourcing who teaches your children, at least when they have a substitute teacher.

Filling all of the vacant classrooms when teachers are absent can be a challenge for school district officials. Some districts hire full-time aides who act as floating subs, filling in here and there as needed. Others employ a cadre of retired teachers, individuals looking to gain experience in the profession, or others simply looking for part-time work. The process of recruiting, hiring, and placing substitute teachers can be cumbersome. Rather than hire an assistant superintendent or other central office staff member to take on this responsibility, some schools have begun outsourcing this job to a private company.

In Saint Louis, for example, Kelly Educational Staffing provides this much-needed service to several school districts. As Dale Singer of St. Louis Public Radio reports, the privatization of substitute teachers has been a success. In Normandy, a district that has had many struggles in the past few years, “the rate of filling classrooms with substitutes had been in the 55–60 percent range”; with Kelly, “that figure rose to around 90 percent.”

Time and again we see benefits from outsourcing public services to private companies. Yet, many fail to see how private school choice programs, such as vouchers or tax credit scholarships, could yield the same benefits. Indeed, the same principles apply to both situations.

When a public school chooses to outsource services, they make a voluntary decision. Companies compete for their business and district administrators choose the company that they believe will best meet their specific needs. If the company fails to perform, the representatives of the school district can choose to take their business elsewhere. The same can be said for school choice. When parents have options, they are able to choose the school that will meet their needs. That’s the beautiful thing about a market—it allows people to voluntarily get the services they need.

We should celebrate when public schools find a way to better deliver public education by collaborating with the private sector. Similarly, we should celebrate when parents are given the ability to choose their child’s school.

While Missouri currently allows public schools to outsource just about everything, it does not extend that opportunity to parents. It is time for that to change. Parents should be given the opportunity, through vouchers or tax credit scholarships, to enter into the educational marketplace and contract with the school that is going to best meet their child’s needs. 

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Nixa Public Schools outsourced maintenance to Sodexo, based out of Paris, France. St. Louis Public Schools contract with First Student, “the largest bus company in North America,” for transportation services. More than 100 public school districts contract with Chesterfield, Mo.-based Opaa! to provide food service for public school students.

I was reminded of this piece last week when I read an interesting story by Dale Singer of St. Louis Public Radio, “Outsourcing substitute teachers deemed a success.” Singer shares how several Saint Louis area school districts, including Parkway, Normandy, and Maplewood Richmond Heights, now use Kelly Educational Staffing to find substitutes. 

This arrangement of privatized substitute services has been beneficial for everyone. In Normandy, for example, a district that has had its fair share of trouble over the past few years, the district has struggled to fill classrooms when the teacher is absent. According to Singer, “the rate of filling classrooms with substitutes had been in the 55-60 percent range; that figure rose to around 90 percent” with Kelly Educational Staffing.  The arrangement also means school districts can cut down on administrative costs in the central office.

The system is even great for retired public school teachers who wish to teach. In Missouri, a retired teacher can only work 550 hours for a school district while collecting their pension benefits. When substitute teachers are outsourced to Kelly, they no longer work for the school district. They work for Kelly Educational Staffing. This means they can work more and still draw their pension.

This is just another example of how privatization can be a good thing. As I wrote in my piece two years ago,

Opponents of school choice like to throw out the word privatization as if it was a bad thing. Yet, public schools contract with private providers in nearly every aspect of our K-12 education system.

If the goal is to provide a world-class education to students, policymakers need to avoid the knee-jerk reaction against school choice and recognize that the private sector can help deliver on the promise that every child should have access to great schools.

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While it is easy to focus on the obvious story about race here, there may be another equally important story that we are missing—some students want to transfer back into Saint Louis. Black students in Saint Louis have regularly used the transfer to attend county schools. According to the Voluntary Inter-District Choice Corporation, which oversees the transfer program, more than 4,700 city students did so in 2013. Few white county students, however—just 121—chose to transfer into the city. Typically, these students choose to go to high-performing magnet schools such as Metro High School.

Edmund’s desire to attend Gateway Science Academy tells us something amazing. His parents would rather send him to a city charter school than enroll him in the Pattonville School District, a respectable district.

This is good news for the city!

We want schools in the city that attract families. That is what we hoped charter schools would do, and that is indeed what Gateway and many fine charter schools are doing. 

Now it is time to for policies to catch up.  As I’ve written previously on the Show-Me Daily blog, Missouri should allow charter schools to enroll students across district boundaries.  This would open up numerous high-quality educational opportunities for students in Saint Louis County. It would also make it more feasible for charter schools to operate in relatively small county school districts, such as Normandy and Riverview Gardens.

Edmund Lee is caught in an unfair situation that should lead us to question the transfer rules that are currently in place. But hidden in the story is a sign of hope—that charter schools will attract more students to the city. 

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