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.

Over the past few years, Missourians have gotten a better understanding of the term “shortage.” Whether it was soup or toilet paper, we can all remember those empty shelves at the grocery store at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Maybe that’s why the term “teacher shortage” has many policymakers on edge these days. There’s just one problem: in education, the term “shortage” doesn’t mean what you think it means.

Take the “shortage” of elementary school teachers in Missouri for example. In 2021, the Springfield School District wanted to hire 55 elementary school teachers. They received 2,155 applications from individuals with the appropriate certification. Yet, for one reason or another, they left six positions vacant. This is a teacher shortage.

The problem is the misleading way in which the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education presents the data. In the “Teacher Shortage Report for Missouri,” released in December 2022, DESE defines shortage areas as “those content areas within the state for which positions were filled with inappropriately certified teachers(s) or left vacant due to the absence of certified candidates.”

This is possibly the broadest definition of what it means to have a shortage. If a school district hires a private school teacher with 10 years of experience and a bachelor’s degree in elementary education? Shortage. They hire an individual with an MBA to teach high school business, but he does not have certification? Shortage. Let’s say they hire someone with a high school mathematics certification to teach elementary or middle school mathematics. Shortage. Keep in mind, the state has dozens of teacher certification areas, and being certified in one does not qualify you to teach another. With this broad definition, DESE suggests Missouri was short 532 elementary school teachers (Grades 1–6) in 2022, making this the highest shortage area.

Let’s put that into perspective using raw, unweighted data provided by request from DESE. In 2022, there were 2,015 job openings for elementary school teaching positions. Districts received over 21,000 applications, more than 18,000 of which had the appropriate certification. Of course, teachers may apply for more than one job.  In all, 32 elementary positions were left vacant. Thirteen of those vacancies were in the Riverview Gardens School District alone.

There is a teacher shortage—it’s just not as widespread as most believe. In total, across all certification areas, Missouri had 258 positions left vacant in 2022. These vacancies were spread across 74 of the state’s 550+ school districts, but nearly half of all vacancies were in just five school districts: Hickman Mills (17), Kansas City (17), St. Louis Special School District (19), Hazelwood (27), and Riverview Gardens (47).

Aside from the Special School District, which is a unique district that serves special-needs students in St. Louis County, the other four districts have a lot in common. They tend to serve students who come from low-income families who are black. For example, more than 97 percent of Riverview Gardens students are black.

The shortage narrative has been used to push for an increase to the starting teacher salary in Missouri. According to data obtained from the Missouri State Teachers Association, the average starting salary in these four districts is $40,075. That is well above the current state minimum of $25,000 and even above the proposed minimum of $38,000 that is currently before the Missouri legislature. Estimates suggest this increase would cost the state $21 million.

Such an increase could actually exacerbate the problems facing high-poverty, majority-minority school districts. If all the districts that currently pay less are forced to offer higher wages, Riverview Gardens, Hickman Mills, and other districts that struggle with teacher recruitment will lose the competitive advantage of higher salaries. Imagine: the state could spend $21 million and fail to even address the real shortage problem in Missouri’s most disadvantaged school districts.

Missouri’s teacher shortage is not equally felt throughout the state; it is most pronounced in high-poverty, majority-minority school districts. Accordingly, strategies to address the shortage should provide targeted support for the affected districts. This could include salary supplements for teachers in hard-to-staff schools, or it could mean intense marketing, recruitment, and human-resource support for these schools. An across-the-board increase in minimum teacher salary is not what Missouri needs, and it could very well do more harm than good.

The post What Does Missouri’s Teacher Shortage Really Look Like 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.

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.

While the State Board of Education did not upgrade the district this year, it does not seem there will be a full review of Riverview Gardens’ records by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE). The Post-Dispatch’s latest article quotes Sarah Potter, DESE spokesperson, who states that DESE “informally reviewed Riverview Gardens’ attendance data after hearing of the allegations, but didn’t find anything to investigate further.” Based on emails from a records request by the Post-Dispatch, the situation seems to merit a more thorough investigation.

Here are some of the findings from the Post article:

• The district’s overall attendance rate was 78.8 percent on May 30 after the school year ended, but the district submitted an 81.5 percent attendance rate to DESE. (FYI, the attendance rate is the percentage of students who attend school at least 90 percent of the time.)
• Riverview Gardens received 10 out of 10 attendance points on the APR for its 81.5 percent attendance rate. If its attendance rate was actually 78.8 percent, it would have received only 6 out of 10 points and the district would have scored 67.9 percent overall on the APR instead of 70.7 percent.
• Superintendent Scott Spurgeon has denied any wrongdoing and said the district does attendance data clean-ups to ensure the data are accurate. Other Saint Louis area districts, however, say they rarely go back to fix their attendance records but make sure throughout the school year that their records are accurate.

It is possible that the numbers Riverview Gardens submitted to DESE are accurate, and that the district just manages its data differently than other districts. Nevertheless, these emails raise some red flags about its attendance numbers, and they also call into question the accuracy of other records it has submitted to the state.

As I explained in an earlier post, accurate attendance data matters quite a bit. In addition to affecting how much funding the district receives from the state, these numbers also affect the district’s accreditation classification—and consequently, whether students are allowed to transfer to better-performing districts. We must be sure students were not short-changed when Riverview Gardens was upgraded last year from unaccredited to provisionally accredited.

At the very least, shouldn’t DESE do a full audit of the district? Putting aside other issues with the accountability system, we must be confident that the numbers are accurate for the system to have a chance at being effective. Otherwise, failing schools will be let off the hook, ultimately hurting the students who live in those districts. 

The post Attendance Matters: Following Up with Riverview Gardens appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

At this point, nothing has been established—all we know is that an accusation has been made and denied. But in any case, attendance numbers are more important than many people realize. Not only do attendance data affect how much funding the district receives from the state, but they also factor in the Annual Performance Review and the district’s accreditation classification.

Last December, the State Board of Education voted unanimously to reclassify Riverview Gardens as provisionally accredited. According to state law, because the district was no longer unaccredited, students from Riverview Gardens lost the right to transfer to better-performing districts. If the accreditation of the district was based on incorrect attendance information, then students may have been unfairly deprived of better educational opportunities.

I do not doubt that there has been real progress in the district in the past few years, but the integrity of the attendance numbers is vital so that the district can be evaluated according to its true performance. We will continue to watch this story closely as it develops. 

The post Attendance Matters appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

 This may be good news for the school district, but it could be bad news for students who have transferred out of the district over the past several years. According to Missouri law, unaccredited districts must pay for students’ tuition and transportation costs if they choose to transfer to a neighboring school district or charter school. Currently, 436 students from the Riverview Gardens district attend school outside of it. Now that the district is accredited, those students have lost the right to transfer at taxpayers’ expense to another public school district.

 Participating school districts are working on an agreement to allow students to continue in their current schools after parents voiced concerns about disrupting their children’s education. According to assistant education commissioner Chris Neale, transferring students will be allowed to finish out at least this school year in their current school. Some students may be allowed to stay in their current schools until a “natural stopping point”—at the end of elementary or middle school for example—but no new students will be allowed to participate and Riverview Gardens will not provide transportation after June 2017.

 Based on the scores below, it is easy to see why parents do not want to put their children back in the Riverview Gardens school system:

While test performance is not the only factor in the APR score—graduation rate, attendance rate, and college and career readiness are other factors—it is troublesome that a district with such low scores could become fully accredited as early as next year if they keep their APR score above 70%. To the school district’s credit, Riverview Gardens is working diligently to improve performance after years of academic and fiscal mismanagement. While these gains represent progress, the district still has fewer than 15% of students scoring proficient in Math and Science for the 2016 school year. Is it in the best interest of any child to be forced to attend a school with this kind of track record?

With such a low performance threshold, Missouri’s accreditation system and transfer law create a trap for students in districts just barely performing above the threshold—the schools perform too well for the students to be allowed to leave, but not well enough to prepare the students for work or college.

Missouri families deserve to make their own educational choices and shouldn’t be bound by fluctuating quality measures of the districts where they live. For the students in Riverview Gardens, continuing the current transfer program would help them in the short term. In addition, revising Missouri charter school laws and establishing tax credit scholarship programs or education savings accounts that are available to all students would help every child get the education that best fits their needs.

The post Riverview Gardens Students Lose the Right to Transfer appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Charter schools could open in these districts, but the low district enrollments ( 3,481 in Normandy and 5,143 in Riverview Gardens) make it unlikely. That could change if charter schools were allowed to enroll students across district boundaries.  It would also enable these disadvantaged students to access the existing charter schools in St. Louis—schools like North Side Community School. 

Show-Me’s Brittany Wagner has written about the school before, noting that it is only a five-minute drive from the struggling Normandy Schools Collaborative. Recently, the St. Louis American had some nice things to say about the school:

About 10 percent of the families are homeless, and many of the heads of households are struggling young parents or grandparents, said Muriel Smith, the school’s director of development. Despite all these factors that could be seen as setbacks, she said students are performing higher than many other schools in the city – especially those with similar demographics.

Sixty-five percent of children at North Side scored proficient or better in both English and math on state standardized tests in 2015, according to results released in August.

“A lot schools think that kids in these neighborhoods can’t really learn because they have so much going on at home,” Smith said. “But our scores and kids prove that that’s possible. We set expectations for our students and our parents to make sure that they are going to be successful.”

Those scores obviously don’t come easy. The second through fifth graders arrive at school at 8:15 a.m. and leave at 4:45 p.m. – an eight-hour day, and the school schedule is year round. Pre-K through first-grade students have a seven-hour day.

The newspaper chalked a lot of the school’s success up to the “tough love” system implemented by the charter school’s principal.  Allowing students to cross district boundaries to attend charter schools would enable more students to share in the success of North Side, and it would provide options for students who currently have none. With the Normandy Schools Collaborative continuing to struggle, now certainly seems like a good time for some tough love. 

The post Open Boundaries Would Allow More Students to Receive “Tough Love” at North Side appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Earlier, I wrote about Mehlville School District’s proposed property tax increase. Voters in both Melville and Kirkwood must decide whether they think additional funds will improve the quality of the districts. To make this decision, they should consider how the school districts are currently spending tax dollars.

A group called Tax Fairly opposes the tax hike. Information about their reasons for opposing the tax increase may be found here.

Tax Fairly points out that Kirkwood has the highest-paid superintendent in the state and the second highest-paid teachers in the state (only the Clayton School District pays more). Kirkwood School Board President E. J. Miller told the Post-Dispatch, “We want the best of the best. We think that to hire them and retain them, we want to pay them well.”

Proponents of Prop A believe the property tax increase is necessary due to increasing enrollment. A district-hired demographer estimated an enrollment increase of between 10 and 11 percent by 2019. To keep up with the rate of enrollment, the district would have to hire new teachers to keep class sizes down.

Tax Fairly disagrees with the district’s enrollment estimates. The group questions the methods used to determine 2019 enrollment. They point out that at least some of the rising enrollment the district has experienced has been due to transfer students from the Normandy and Riverview Gardens districts. They also call attention to the fact that Kirkwood allows children of teachers in the district to attend the school tuition-free.

I want to add one wrinkle to this debate. The chart above provides teacher–student ratios for Kirkwood and the surrounding school districts (using Department of Elementary and Secondary Education Data). Kirkwood classrooms average 14 students per teacher, which is lower than most other school districts in the area. Perhaps it’s not Kirkwood’s teacher salaries that are driving costs, but the number of teachers they need.

Research shows that teacher quality is more important than class size, that is, class sizes could increase slightly and still maintain the same level of quality. In fact, according to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the desirable standard for student enrollment in classrooms is between 17 and 25 students, depending on the grade level, well above Kirkwood’s average.  Is the district operating as efficiently as it could? Arguably not.

Although many agree the district is performing well, a major concern for taxpayers is how the district will spend $10.4 million in additional revenue annually. The 2015–2016 operating revenue budget is $62 million. Is all of that new money necessary?

The post Property Tax Increase on Ballot in Kirkwood School District appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The governor foreshadowed this move on Tuesday when he announced a new plan for the state’s two unaccredited districts. Twenty-two higher-performing districts will commit to offering a lower tuition rate for students transferring from Riverview Gardens and Normandy and will provide instructional support for the unaccredited districts. Apparently for him, that is enough for the students in Riverview Gardens and Normandy for at least another year.

But it is not enough for them. Students in these districts should be able to attend the school that best fits their needs, be that a charter school, a virtual school, or a private school. Even one year within a failing school can cause irreparable damage in the life of a student. Students shouldn’t have to wait for support from other districts or their own district to get its act together.

Last year, the governor vetoed the transfer bill because it allowed for the creation of a tiny school voucher program. Legislators cut that provision this year, and still the bill was vetoed.

The post Nixon Vetoes Transfer Bill . . . Again appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

 A significant number” of districts have agreed to reduce the tuition costs for transfer students to about $7,250, said Don Senti, executive director of EducationPlus, an organization of area school districts that has coordinated the transfer process for the past two years. That is the same amount most districts charge St. Louis Public Schools for transfer students under the voluntary desegregation program. In the past, tuition rates have ranged from $20,768 in Clayton to a low of $7,927 in Mehlville.

I am very pleased that the school districts have decided to take this step. Actually, I’ve been saying this action was possible all along. Back in January 2014 I wrote:

 Many have lamented that the inter-district transfer law, which allows students to transfer from unaccredited public school districts to nearby accredited districts, may bankrupt failing districts. Normandy and Riverview Gardens, the two unaccredited districts currently allowing students to transfer, are already seeing financial hardship, and reports indicate that Normandy could be bankrupt by the end of the school year. This has occurred because the districts are paying tuition rates that are often in excess of what the districts spend on their own students. This has led some to clamor for a set tuition rate. In a recent position paper by the Cooperating School Districts of Greater St. Louis, area school superintendents stated, “If transfers are made between school districts then a regional tuition rate should be determined.” The interesting thing is that nothing is stopping area school districts from charging a lower tuition rate now. Each district, with a vote of its school board, could decide to set a lower, consistent tuition rate. To date, none of them have. Instead, school leaders are asking for more state government action. This is the very problem that plagues our society in so many regards; instead of taking initiative and fixing a problem ourselves, we allow or we seek greater government involvement. The next time you hear a school leader complain about the transfer situation and how it may bankrupt unaccredited schools, ask him or her what his or her district is doing to help. Are these leaders taking action locally, or are they requesting a solution from Jefferson City?

Eighteen months ago school leaders scoffed at my idea. They wanted a legislative fix. They wanted to stop the transfer program. What changed? Now, area school leaders are acting to stop a legislative fix. The current bill sitting before the governor would improve Missouri’s charter public school law and allow for broader establishment of virtual schools. Eighteen months ago, the education establishment rejected the idea of lowering tuition because they wanted the legislature to maintain the status quo. Today, the education establishment welcomes the idea of lowering the tuition because they want to avoid the legislative fix and maintain the status quo.

The post Maintaining the Education Status Quo appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

At the very least, it was poorly designed.

Many look at Missouri’s interdistrict transfer program, which has allowed more than 2,000 students from the Normandy and Riverview Gardens school districts to transfer to higher performing suburban districts, as if it were a Pinto. It has forced the two unaccredited districts to hemorrhage and rest on the verge of bankruptcy.

Is it ugly? Yes. Is it poorly designed? It depends.

In 2013, the year before students transferred, fewer than 20 percent of students in the two unaccredited school districts were proficient in reading or math. Dropout rates were abysmal, and the prospects were slim for graduates of either district.

Now, let’s imagine that the transfer law was not in place. What would be different today? Chances are, the school districts would not be performing significantly better. What’s more, few outside of the school districts would have taken any note of the quality of education being delivered in these two north Saint Louis County districts.

Since nearly a quarter of the students walked out of these flailing districts, much has changed. No, the districts have not gotten significantly better; nor have they gotten significantly worse. The transfer program, however, has allowed 2,000-plus students to have the opportunity for a better education. Moreover, it has launched a robust conversation around the state about how to turn around struggling school districts.

But to understand if the program was “poorly designed,” we have to determine what it was designed to do.

Was it designed to be a school reform model for unaccredited school districts? If so, it failed, since it has drained these districts of necessary financial resources and could bankrupt both of them.

Was it designed as a long-term fix, a permanent interdistrict program? Again, if this is the case, it failed, since the program lacks a feasible tuition system. Currently, tuition ranges from roughly $10,000 to $20,000, depending on where a student transferred.

Is it possible, however, that the transfer program was designed for another purpose, like to create controversy or to spark change?

As I note in my latest paper, “Interdistrict Choice for Students in Failing Schools: Burden or Boon?” the transfer students were largely absorbed into 24 receiving districts with little disruption. In this regard, the transfer program functioned relatively well.

The program has told families in low-performing schools that their children do not have to be doomed to perpetual underperformance. These families took the right to an education guaranteed by our state’s constitution. Angel Matthews, for instance, experienced the benefits that come from choosing your own school. Angel was one of 175 students who initially transferred from Normandy and Riverview Gardens to the Kirkwood School District, and she has embraced the rigors and opportunities of her new school by taking AP honors classes, cheerleading, and running track.

The transfer program has caught our attention, but it is not a permanent fix. We must now develop new policies that establish quality schools in every neighborhood. These policies must include some form of school choice, lest we fall back into our old pattern of assigning students to chronically failing schools.

The post Was the Transfer Program Poorly Designed? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

State School Board very angry with HB42. “It is damning for schools in MO,” Peter H. pic.twitter.com/LXzOoE6qzW

— Missouri Principals (@MOASSP) May 19, 2015

So, why has fixing the transfer program become such a complicated mess? The problem is that we cannot agree on what problem needs fixing. Some want to end the transfer program altogether, some want to simply make the program sustainable, while others want to expand options for students. These three things are not all compatible, and they cannot all be accomplished. For example, Missouri’s commissioner of education wants to rein in tuition costs by instituting a cap. That would help make the program more sustainable.

HB42 does not place a tuition cap on #motransfers. @MOEducation advocated for a cap for unaccredited school districts. #MoSBOE — Missouri DESE (@MOEducation) May 19, 2015

That proposal is met with opposition from superintendents, such as David McGehee of Lee’s Summit School District. His argument is that it forces taxpayers in the receiving district to subsidize the education of the transfer students. (Never mind that the marginal cost of the additional students is extremely low, but I digress.)

Any cap simply moves the responsibility to tax payers in successful districts. Spreading wrong doesn’t = right! https://t.co/RU4IwTkYLj

— David McGehee (@DrDavidMcGehee) May 19, 2015

McGehee and many other public school officials would like the transfer program to end all together. They simply do not believe that allowing students to leave their district is the right answer. Of course, others believe that students should not be trapped in underperforming schools.

Lawmakers have had to navigate this field and try to come up with a bill that satisfies all. Once again they have failed, not for lack of effort, but because it is impossible to satisfy everyone. The question then is whether, on balance, the bill does more good than bad. Those who oppose school choice would say, “No.” Those who support choice would say, “Yes.”

For more on the transfer program, I suggest you read my latest paper, “Interdistrict Choice for Students in Failing Schools: Burden or Boon?”

The post House Bill 42, You Can’t Please Everyone appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

HB 42 also would create a new accreditation process, in which individual schools, not districts, are accredited, as is currently the procedure. This would allow students attending unaccredited schools to first transfer into an accredited school within their home district if there is space available. In short, school-level accreditation is going to affect more than just districts like Normandy and Riverview Gardens.

Stiepleman bases his concerns on the possible fate of a school in his district. Douglass High School is an alternative high school. Most alternative “schools” in Missouri are really programs carried out within a larger school, but Douglass is a stand-alone school. Under HB 42, the school would be accredited individually.

Stiepleman is worried that Douglass will not get a fair shake. As he put it, “Because of the population of fragile students at Douglass, the lack of Advanced Placement courses and other issues, it could become provisionally accredited. That designation is one step removed from being unaccredited, which could trigger student transfers.”

I recently reported on DeLaSalle Education Center, an alternative charter high school in Kansas City with similar fears. Like Douglass, DeLaSalle serves only at-risk students. As my video shows, students like senior K’ Von Williams are thriving at DeLaSalle.

Despite DeLaSalle’s low state standardized test scores, the charter school is delivering a quality service to both the community and students. If regulations are only based on test scores, they can miss the good things the school is doing.

Schools in Missouri should be held accountable for the quality of education that they provide for their students. But the mechanism by which those schools are held accountable has to be sensitive to different educational models (in the charter or traditional public sectors) and different populations of students across the state.

If HB 42 become law, DESE and the legislature will need to reevaluate the metrics Missouri uses to determine if a school is accredited or not. If they’re not careful, they could risk harming schools that are doing right by kids.

The post Will HB 42 Hurt Alternative High Schools? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Listen now!

The post Podcast 1: Interdistrict Choice appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In June of 2013, the Missouri Supreme Court upheld a state law that allowed students in unaccredited school districts to transfer to nearby accredited districts. The student’s home district would be responsible for making tuition payments and providing transportation. Using data, firsthand accounts, and structured interviews with school district superintendents, this paper examines what happened in response to the transfer program. Specifically, it examines how the districts responded. In all, more than 2,000 students transferred from the unaccredited Normandy and Riverview Gardens school districts, roughly a quarter of the total student population. These students transferred to two dozen area school districts. Except in isolated cases, evidence suggests that these students were largely absorbed into receiving school districts without causing much disruption. For the unaccredited school districts, however, the transfer program had a profound impact on school finances.

Read James Shuls’s recent paper on this subject: 

The post Video: Interdistrict Choice for Students in Failing Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Read the full essay:

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In June of 2013, the Missouri Supreme Court upheld a state law that allowed students in unaccredited school districts to transfer to nearby accredited districts. The student’s home district would be responsible for making tuition payments and providing transportation. Using data, firsthand accounts, and structured interviews with school district superintendents, this paper examines what happened in response to the transfer program. Specifically, it examines how the districts responded. In all, more than 2,000 students transferred from the unaccredited Normandy and Riverview Gardens school districts, roughly a quarter of the total student population. These students transferred to two dozen area school districts. Except in isolated cases, evidence suggests that these students were largely absorbed into receiving school districts without causing much disruption. For the unaccredited school districts, however, the transfer program had a profound impact on school finances.

I invite you to check out the full paper by clicking here.

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Erondu is referring to the lack of educational opportunity in the lowest performing school district in the state, Normandy Schools Collaborative. “If the public schools aren’t working, get alternative educational systems . . . or let them come to schools like mine so that we can take care of them,” she said.

The failing district is only five minutes from North Side, which earned a perfect score on the state’s annual progress report. Charters like Erondu’s have increasingly shown improvement, outperforming some traditional public schools. Yet, only children within Saint Louis City and Kansas City are allowed to attend Missouri’s charter schools.

Students should be allowed to cross school district boundaries and attend charter schools. There are several reasons why.

First and foremost, they offer the chance at a superior education. This is certainly true for North Side students, who come from an almost identical neighborhood as Normandy. Abandoned properties and condemned buildings line the streets. There is poverty. There is crime. But, at North Side, students are succeeding.

“They don’t know the names of their letters. They don’t know the sounds of their letters. They don’t know their shapes,” said kindergarten teacher Sonya Taylor of what she encounters in North Side students when they are just entering grade school.

But North Side has a strategy. “We have to start over, we have to start from age six months old . . . reading to them as if they were being read to in their younger ages,” said Erondu. From there, the school focuses intensely on communication arts and math. In 2014, 46 percent of North Side students were proficient in math, while only 21.5 percent of students at Barack Obama Elementary in Normandy were proficient—same population, different outcomes.

What’s more, charter schools actually want to educate these students. Last June, the Francis Howell School District refused to accept 350 students. Parents have had to resort to lawsuits in order for their children to return.

While it is true charter schools are able to open in unaccredited school districts like Normandy and Riverview Gardens, the student populations are much smaller than the Saint Louis and Kansas City districts. If students were able to cross district boundaries, charter schools may be more likely to open within these failing districts, as they could attract students from a larger community base.

Missouri should pave the way for educational opportunity by allowing students to cross district boundaries and attend charter schools. American streets may never be paved with gold, but that doesn’t mean roadblocks should stand between a child and a path to a quality education.

Brittany Wagner is a research assistant at the Show-Me Institute.

The post Are Charter Schools the School Transfer Fix? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

We asked Shaunna Matthews that question and her answer was clear:

The opportunities that we are getting out of this program are awesome. We would be wrong to deny any kid this opportunity.

Last year, Shaunna’s daughter, Angel, transferred from the unaccredited Riverview Gardens School District, to the high performing Kirkwood School District.

Here is Angel’s Story.

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