While the Missouri Legislature continues to debate A–F school report cards, the Show-Me Institute recently released our annual report card update on MOSchoolRankings.org.

Our rankings are built on a model that incorporates 10 academic indicators of student success. All data are sourced from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), and all English/language arts (ELA) and math scores are based on the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP). Each component is weighted equally, and a full explanation of the methodology is available online.

Table 1 shows all 24 public school districts and charter schools that received an “A” in the 2024–2025 school year.

Suburban and rural districts dominate the top rankings, with numerous districts from St. Louis County (Ladue, Brentwood, Clayton). Many of the rural school districts are exceptionally small: Skyline has 81 students and Thornfield has 48. The largest school district on the list is Nixa Public Schools (near Springfield) with 6,518 students.

The suburban districts have relatively low rates of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (FRPL)—a common proxy for school poverty rate. Fewer than 10 percent of Ladue and Clayton students were eligible for FRPL, with Brentwood at 18 percent, Nixa at 26 percent, Festus at 28 percent, and Ozark at 35 percent. However, some rural “A” districts have a sizeable number of lower-income students.

Mansfield R-IV, which had 60 percent of its 622 students qualify for FRPL, performed above average in almost every single category (except in ELA growth). Richwoods R-VII, a small rural district about an hour from St. Louis, had 100 percent of its 125 students qualify for FRPL and had particularly impressive scores in math. These examples demonstrate that low-income schools can achieve academic success.

There is a lot more to delve into for academic performance. Table 1 is just one snapshot of what is available on MOSchoolRankings.org. Accountability tools like these can help highlight success stories, identify areas for improvement, and provide a clearer picture of how schools across Missouri are performing.

The post Looking at Missouri’s “A” Districts appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This year with declining enrollment, Brentwood did not have enough participation to field a football team on their own, meaning that would-be players and their supporters would miss out on a beloved experience. When I saw Brentwood and Clayton were going to merge their football teams, I was excited that these students would be able to play this great sport.

Missouri is seeing population and enrollment declines, which can mean fewer sports teams, fewer elective classes, and other missed opportunities. What Brentwood and Clayton did is admirable. Clayton did not have to share its resources, and Brentwood could have just told everyone there would be no football team this year. However, these two districts came together with the interests of the students in mind, and hopefully more useful collaborations like this will take root in our state.

Building on this example, here are some ways districts can share with each other:

• Sharing facilities and/or fields
• Sharing individual classes
  • For example, a district with a physics department could offer spots for students who may not have that option in their home districts.
  • Even further, if two districts are tight on resources, one could agree to hire a chemistry teacher, while another could hire a physics teacher—pooling and sharing resources to create a stronger science program for the region.
• Merging sports teams/clubs like Clayton and Brentwood
  • Sometimes a district’s constraints aren’t financial, but rather have to do with the actual number of students who want to participate in a team or activity.
  • If a district does not have enough participation in a football team, robotics team, band, debate club, etc.; forming a shared program can provide an opportunity for students to make new friends and do something they love in their formative years.
• Sharing students through open enrollment
  • Perhaps a student wants to transfer to a smaller school to receive more one-on-one time with his teachers, or more playing time on the football field.
  • Or perhaps a student wants to learn from a state-renowned coach, or he or she is drawn to more bustling school environments.

A happier student body can build a stronger community. All students deserve the chance to thrive, and parents should have the choice to send their children to the school which will best serve their needs.

The Clayton-Brentwood football team is inspiring. The team made a solid run into the playoffs, winning two games before falling to Lutheran North in the third round. Two programs that were struggling in different ways put their reservations aside and came together for the betterment of their students. Clayton coach Doug Verby put it like this, “We joked that as long as the adults don’t mess it up, the kids will do just fine. That’s pretty much the way it’s gone. The players just want to play football.”

As adults, we must always remember that education policy should revolve around the betterment of our students. A Clayton student summed up his new experience nicely, “We didn’t know each other, and we’d never played together before. It took a while, but we’ve formed a brotherhood and we’re starting to play like a real football team.”

Policies like open enrollment, sharing classes/programs, or merging teams are needed—especially in a time where enrollment and participation is shrinking, and families want more opportunities. There may even be times when districts should merge and share a superintendent. Let Clayton and Brentwood’s football team serve as an example of what putting students first can do in a community.

The post Looking at the Tape on the Clayton/Brentwood Football Merger appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Sure, enrollment in many of our already small rural districts has declined so much that it raises the question of how the districts can continue to exist. But that’s not the whole story. Some of the “best” districts in St. Louis County have been experiencing steady enrollment declines. In 2017–18, the Clayton School District had almost 2,800 students. Last year, it had fewer than 2,400. A loss of four hundred students in a district of that size is significant. Similarly, Parkway C-2 has lost 1,000 students in the past few years, going from nearly 18,000 students in 2018–19 to fewer than 17,000. Rockwood, which had nearly 23,000 students a decade ago, now has just under 21,000, having lost 1,900 students from its high-water mark.

In fact, every district other than Ladue and Lindbergh has seen enrollment losses since 2010. But their gains of approximately 2,300 students don’t come close to offsetting the countywide loss of over 11,000. St. Louis County’s neighbor, St. Charles County, shows similar trends. The biggest districts are down by thousands of students.

So what does this mean? Even with no boundary changes, we will have excess capacity and too many teachers in most districts unless we make the region and the state more attractive to families. Districts can no longer rest on their laurels and assume their classrooms will be filled. Programs that allow parents to choose a school for each of their children and that allow districts to specialize in what they offer should be welcomed. Those hard district lines meant to keep students out may need to become more porous.

Public education in Missouri is no longer a system of more—more students, more teachers, more school buildings, more money. It’s a shrinking system, and that will bring difficult decisions. It’s time to start thinking about how we can design a smarter system to better serve our region.

The post The System We Have Is Not the System We’ve Had 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.

According to data from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), the Saint Louis Public School District spent $14,779 per pupil in 2015 in operating expenses and $18,476 per pupil when you include the cost of debt and capital projects. The table below (which uses DESE numbers) gathers the spending figures for all of the districts in the region. It shows that in real dollars the gap between the highest and lowest spending districts in the Saint Louis area was less than $9,000.

So how did Saint Louis Public Radio get such different numbers? It’s difficult to say. They state that their

analysis uses a cost of living index to calculate to calculate a national per student spending of almost $12,000 in 2013. The analysis applies that same formula to measure what individual districts are spending in relative dollars.

While adjustments like these could be helpful, especially if they have to account for differences in cost of living, it is important to realize just that—these figures are adjusted.

Unfortunately, this isn’t clear to the average reader. For example, St. Louis Public Radio states:

There are some obvious high points, the Clayton School District is [sic] spent $19,681 per student, according the analysis. That’s compared to Clayton’s neighbor, St. Louis Public Schools, which spent $9,826 per student.

The publication could have easily tacked on, “in cost-adjusted dollars” to the end of the last sentence. More importantly, they also could have explained how they adjusted the spending numbers, figures that vary so wildly from those reported by DESE deserves some serious scrutiny. As it is, readers and listeners have no way of evaluating for themselves the methods that were used to adjust the spending numbers.

We can and should have productive dialogue about school spending and inequities in education. But we can’t have fruitful conversations without a mutual understanding of the statistics that are being used.

The post How Much Do Saint Louis Area Schools Really Spend? 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.

 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.

On Tuesday morning, the Show-Me Institute was pleased to host “Solutions: A Panel Discussion on the School Transfer Law.” Joining me on the panel were the superintendents of three area school districts that the school transfer law has greatly affected: Tyrone McNichols, Ed.D., of Normandy, Thomas Williams, Ph.D., of Kirkwood, and Eric Knost, Ed.D., of Mehlville. We all agreed that the current situation is untenable. In fact, there was quite a bit of agreement on what needs to be done going forward, with one major exception.

Areas of Agreement

Tuition Payments:

All four of us agreed that the tuition payment system must be fixed. Currently, the unaccredited districts must pay tuition rates that sometimes exceed what they spend on their own students. For instance, McNichols stated that his district spends approximately $12,000 per pupil, but tuition in the Clayton School District is more than $19,000. Clayton is an outlier; several districts spend less than Normandy. Still, it is unreasonable to expect Normandy and Riverview Gardens to shell out more in tuition than they receive to educate their students.

Enrollment Caps:

Williams noted that his district has participated in a voluntary transfer program for years. In that program, the tuition amount was set at about $7,000. Participating districts could decide how many spaces they had and they could accept students to fill those spaces. The Kirkwood superintendent noted that a class with 19 students could add one more at no additional expense to the district and would actually benefit from the transferring students. He meant that the marginal cost of one additional student is very low. Most superintendents recognize that their districts benefit from tuition-paying students. They are concerned, however, when they have no reasonable control on the number of students that will be admitted to their district. This is a concern I share.

Area of Disagreement

At one point, Knost stated that the Missouri Legislature should address the issue and leave aside unrelated pieces of legislation. Some might think that a private school choice program is unrelated to the issue of school transfers. However, I don’t see a tax credit scholarship program as unrelated. Rather, I think it is a particularly relevant solution to the problem we are facing in Saint Louis.

A tax credit scholarship program would:

1. Lessen the financial strain on the unaccredited school districts;
2. Ease the burden on accredited districts; and
3. Give families more options.

Though we may have had some disagreement about a private school choice program, there was general agreement that students deserve to have quality options. In fact, I wish more school leaders would have the attitude that Williams expressed. He said if students are going to have options, he wants his district to be the best option. That is the type of thinking we need.

The post Three Public School Superintendents Walk Into A Free-Market Think Tank . . . No Joke appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Like the blind men, Desnoyer looks at one part of school finance and thinks he can explain the whole. This just isn’t so. For instance, he makes the claim that districts with high poverty rates receive less funding than districts with low poverty rates. Sure, if you look at the Clayton School District and the Riverview Gardens School District, this seems correct. However, it is not true when you look at the whole elephant.

Below, I present a table that plots each public school district in the state (charter schools not included). On the Y-axis is 2012 per-pupil expenditure. On the X-axis is percent of students in each district who are eligible for free or reduced price lunches (FRL), a proxy for poverty. As it turns out, school districts with higher poverty rates actually spend more, on average, than those with lower poverty rates. In fact, a 10 percentage point increase in FRL is associated with a $168 increase in per pupil expenditures.

The same is true when you plot the percentage of black students and per-pupil expenditures. Here, a-10 point increase in the percent of black students is associated with a $275 increase in per-pupil expenditures.

Desnoyer cites statistics that indicate we spend less on our impoverished schools. I’m not sure where he gets his statistics (he doesn’t say), but they don’t hold for Missouri. In 2012, we spent an average of $11,099 in the 17 districts with greater than 80 percent of their students receiving free or reduced price lunches (FRL). We spent just $10,179 on the 15 districts with less than 20 percent FRL.

He goes on to suggest we need a “mechanism that guarantees a minimum amount of funding for each district to stay accredited.” What he is suggesting is simply impossible. We do not know how much money it takes for a district to stay accredited. As we saw in Kansas City throughout the 1980s and 1990s, throwing massive amounts of money at a school system does not guarantee success. We do, however, have a mechanism that helps to level out funding and bring poor districts up to a reasonable level — our funding formula.

Either willfully or unknowingly, Desnoyer looks at a few facts and thinks he knows the whole; he does not. School finance is indeed a complicated endeavor and we can have a legitimate conversation about whether we should spend more money on disadvantaged students, but we should not start that conversation with a misstatement of the facts.

The post The Blind Men And School Funding appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I have two problems with this statement.

First, I am not sure Missouri students are “maintaining their overall level of achievement.” In both fourth and eighth grades, the average scale score for Missouri students declined from 2009 to 2012. The decline in fourth grade was a noticeable 3-point drop.

Secondly, we should not be pleased with maintaining our level of achievement; our goal is to improve. Moreover, we should not simply look at national rankings because our students will have to compete for jobs in a global economy.

The George W. Bush Institute has made it easy for us to compare the performance of our local school district with the performance of students around the world with its Global Report Card, which was recently updated. Here you can visit the website and see how the average student in your local school district compares to students across the globe. You may be surprised at what you find.

The average student in the Kansas City School District outperforms only 15 percent of students in other countries in math. In the Saint Louis Public School District, it is a paltry 12 percent. But do not make the mistake of thinking only students in the “big cities” are falling behind. Here is how the average student in a few other school districts compares:

Hume: 40 percent in reading, 26 percent in math

Cape Girardeau: 48 percent in reading, 29 percent in math

Springfield: 57 percent in reading, 48 percent in math

If students in Springfield were transported to Singapore, the district would only outperform 34 percent of Singapore students while students in the high-ranking Clayton School District would be at the 46th percentile.

It is time to stop celebrating mediocrity and expect more for our children.

The post Celebrating Mediocrity appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This is a tale of two neighborhoods. Both Saint Louis-area neighborhoods are impressive and outwardly they look like twins. Hampton Park and Lake Forest sit on opposite sides of Hanley Road between Clayton Road and Highway 40, and they both boast large, stately homes. They are equidistant from the region’s central business districts. With two exceptions, they have the same level and quality of public services and the same tax rates. With so many similarities, you might assume property values would be the same. But you would be wrong.

Hampton Park and Lake Forest illustrate how different people finding different solutions to their housing and educational needs can have a substantial impact on housing prices.

The two exceptions noted above are the neighborhood school districts and the differing tax rates they impose. Both neighborhoods are subdivisions of Richmond Heights, but Lake Forest — which is located west of Hanley — is part of Clayton School District. In 2010, Clayton was the highest performing district in Missouri according to MAP scores. Over the past 10 years, residents have paid an average tax rate of $3.44 per $100 of assessed valuation. East of Hanley, Hampton Park is part of Maplewood-Richmond Heights (MRH) school district. In 2010, the state ranked MRH’s performance 315th out of 556 districts, making it an average district. Over the past decade, residents paid an average tax rate of $4.48.

Homes in Lake Forest are located in a higher performing school district and have lower tax rates than those across the street in Hampton Park. Do homebuyers react accordingly, and by how much?

Of course homebuyers adjust. According to a study of assessed valuations in the two neighborhoods, the difference between the prices paid for a theoretical house of the same square footage and lot size in the two neighborhoods is $109,000, or a little more than 10 percent. Homebuyers in Lake Forest are willing to pay approximately $109,000 more to live in a higher-performing school district with lower tax rates. Conversely, homebuyers in Hampton Park are paying $109,000 less to live in a more average school district with higher tax rates. Economists refer to this kind of difference as capitalization. It is the process that incorporates tax rates and other variables into the value of a piece of property.

Capitalization is a complex process, especially in regions that have as many taxing districts as Saint Louis. Prospective homebuyers typically take the time to research local school quality and tax rates, but they usually stop short of researching fire districts. Although homebuyers may not investigate them, the insurance industry certainly has. A home located in an area with a poor quality fire district will have higher insurance rates, and those higher rates will be translated into lower home prices. The combined wisdom of thousands of individual decisions is sorted into a price that is readily understood by everyone.

Capitalization works in both directions, often simultaneously. A great school district will lead to higher property prices, while the high tax rates used to fund those good schools will lower the price. The low crime rates of the outer suburbs will increase prices, while the higher commuting costs will lower prices. As for Lake Forest, the lower tax rates leads to higher home prices, and this may result in the same final tax bill as higher rates on less valuable property.

The higher tax rates and lower ranking school district do not automatically do economic harm to the residents of Hampton Park. A Hampton Park purchaser may intend to send their children to private or parochial schools and might be using the $109,000 discount to do just that. This appears to be the case for many residents, as the MHR school district offers no school bus service within Hampton Park. In effect, the $109,000 price difference can be viewed as a voucher toward the cost of private education, the payment of future (higher) taxes, or both.

The larger point is that with the variety of different cities, school districts, etc. that we have in Saint Louis County, there is an abundance of choices, making it more likely that everyone can find a suitable combination of taxes and services. Homeowners vote with their feet — by leaving cities that increase taxes too much or fail to offer quality services. This pressures cities to be efficient. That pressure and competition is reflected in property values, and that benefits all of us.

Gaudiet emptor — Let the buyer rejoice!

The post A $ 109,000 School “Voucher”: A Story of Tax Rates and School Districts appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Society makes a promise to children that no matter their race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status, every child should have the education necessary to realize his potential. For many children in Saint Louis, however, that promise has been broken.

Saint Louis Public Schools maintains a handful of excellent institutions, but for three years now, the state has deemed the district as a whole to be unworthy of accreditation. State law requires that if a school district fails to maintain accreditation, the students living in that district must be given the opportunity to escape their troubled schools and attend accredited public schools in nearby districts. Just as SLPS was about to lose accreditation in May 2007, however, the elected school board formally urged county school districts to deny admission to any students seeking transfer under this law — and the county districts complied. For three years, many students from Saint Louis have been denied the educational lifeline provided by state law, trapped in failing schools for years they won’t get back.

Thanks to the Missouri Supreme Court, that now seems likely to change. With a 4-3 decision in Turner v. School District of Clayton, the judges ruled that the school districts in Saint Louis County cannot turn away Saint Louis residents seeking admission to their schools.

It also ruled that SLPS must bear the expense of their students’ education and provide transportation.

The court said that when a Missouri school district has clearly failed its students, that district is required to provide access to alternatives.

Many in the county will worry about the potential challenges of integrating kids from Saint Louis into their classrooms. Elected leaders and school officials in the city will complain about the expense of sending students to other school districts. SLPS will argue that without the money those students represent, the district cannot be expected to make the changes necessary to regain accreditation, and that this decision represents the death of public education in Saint Louis.

These arguments overlook what the law and the Missouri Supreme Court did not: Public schools exist to serve the children, not the other way around. Children in Saint Louis have already had their educational progress delayed for too long. Access to better schools cannot wait until the adults straighten out the mess they created. The welcome impact of the Turner decision is that after years of hollow promises that someday all of the students in Saint Louis would enjoy access to high-quality educational opportunities, someday has finally arrived.

Today, another letter to the Post-Dispatch (predictably) responded that the real problem with SLPS is a lack of funding — which the writer attributes to Missouri school districts’ failed attempts to persuade the courts that taxpayers should be spending billions more in school funding. There are, of course, two massive failures of logic in this letter. The first is the notion that students’ academic performance is linked to the amount of money spent by their school district, a point debunked not only by the research of Dr. Michael Podgursky (who happens to be a Show-Me Institute board member), but also by the fact that SLPS maintains some of the very best schools in the state with the same per-student funding it provides to some of the very worst schools in the state.

The second failure is linked to the first. The letter complains about school funding at the state level, but the question at issue is the failing of Saint Louis city’s unaccredited school district. Last year, SLPS spent more than $15,600 per student — far, far above the state average, and on par with the best-performing districts in Saint Louis County. SLPS also maintains a student-to-classroom-teacher ratio of 18 to 1. This means that SLPS has roughly $281,000 to spend for every active classroom in the district. That’s $281,000 per classroom! Even if, say, 40 percent of that money (more than $110,000 per classroom) went to administrative costs, that would leave nearly $170,000 to pay a teacher’s salary (let’s say $60,000) and to properly equip and maintain just that one classroom.

SLPS suffers from a number of ills, but lack of funding is not one of them.

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