Interestingly, the bottom ten spenders had a higher average academic letter grade than those in the top ten. However, many of the top spenders in the state are tiny rural districts with fewer than 50 students. That raised an important question: Would this pattern hold when comparing districts of a similar type?

Table 1 begins to answer that question by focusing specifically on suburban and city districts—schools that are far more comparable in size and structure, but still vary widely in student demographics. It should be noted that Table 1 includes non-current spending items like interest and capital outlay (such as constructing a new gym, renovations, etc.).

For reference, in the 2023-24 school year, the average expenditure per student was around $19,500. Of that, about $15,900 were current expenditures and $3,600 were non-current expenditures.

Source: MOSchoolRankings.org

Interestingly, the five highest-performing school districts in the state are split between the highest and lowest total spenders. Table 1 suggests that it is overly simplistic to assume that more money per student automatically leads to better academic outcomes.

Consider Valley Park and Park Hill as examples. Both spend relatively high amounts per student (including non-current expenditures) and serve comparatively lower shares of low-income students, yet neither achieves top-tier academic results. Meanwhile, several lower-spending districts of similar demographics earn strong academic grades.

This does not mean funding is irrelevant, but rather that the process of producing strong academic outcomes is complex and money isn’t everything.

The post The Wide Difference in Spending Per Student in Missouri’s Suburban Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

These are all relevant questions, and at the Show-Me Institute, we’ve created a resource to answer such questions: MOSchoolRankings.org

As an example of what these data can be used for, Figure 1 shows how Missouri school districts are distributed across different levels of spending per student. It should be noted that these statistics include non-current spending items like interest and capital outlay (such as constructing a new gym, renovations, etc.).

For reference, in the 2023–24 school year, the average expenditure per student was around $19,500. Of that, about $15,900 were current expenditures and $3,600 were non-current expenditures.

Figure 1: Number of School Districts and Charter Schools Grouped By Average Expenditures Per Student, 2024–25

Source: MOSchoolRankings.org

Most Missouri school districts and charter schools spent between $13,000 and $22,000 per student in the 2024–25 school year, but there are numerous outliers in the data, as shown below.

Table 1: Public School Districts and Charter Schools with the Highest and Lowest Average Expenditures Per Student, 2024–25

Source: MOSchoolRankings.org

In Table 1, many of the highest-spending school districts in Missouri are rural, including several extremely small districts, such as Missouri City 56, which enrolls just 14 students. By contrast, many of the lowest-spending districts are also rural, though they tend to be larger and vary more in size.

Missouri’s mean total expenditure per student (weighting each district equally and including non-current expenditures) is $20,406, while the median is $18,934. Even so, there is a surprisingly wide spending range across the state, from roughly $12,000 per student to more than $60,000 per student.

These kinds of statistics are important when evaluating potential changes to the funding formula. To take one small example, Spickard R-II saw enrollment decline from 54 students in 2005–06 to 21 students in 2024–25: a 61% decrease. For state funding, Missouri’s hold-harmless policy guarantees that Spickard R-II receives no less than the state funding it received in 2005–06, even though the district has far fewer students. This likely contributes to why Spickard spent $41,224 per student in 2024–25.

Clear, accessible data are important. And of course, spending is only one aspect of this. MOSchoolRankings.org allows users to go further by comparing districts on academic performance, student demographics, growth, and much more.

The post Which School Districts Spent the Most Per Student? Which Spent the Least? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Governor Kehoe has appointed four new members to the Missouri State Board of Education, including two who will, if confirmed, replace the president and vice-president. Given that the current president, Charlie Shields, has held the position for a decade and his term expired five years ago, I would say it’s about time. Hopefully these new members will bring new energy and fortitude as they tackle a challenging to-do list.

First, there is the glaring issue of (a lack of) accountability. Currently, Missouri school districts are held accountable through the Missouri School Improvement Plan (MSIP) 6. According to the standards set by this plan, like those in versions 1 through 5 before it, all but six of Missouri’s 520 school districts receive the state’s seal of approval, also known as full accreditation. It defies logic that a district like St. Louis Public Schools, with its numerous academic and financial problems, could be fully accredited. Part of the reason is that when the board switched from using MSIP 5 to MSIP 6 in 2024, it determined that the MSIP 6 results for a single school year were not reliable enough to justify changing any district’s accreditation status. Rather, the board decided to use a three-year rolling average to make that determination, meaning that accreditation decisions will need to wait until 2027. The new Board needs to recognize this for the nonsense that it is, and it needs to create a meaningful accountability system.

Second, the new Board should get fully behind the governor’s effort to revise the Foundation Formula, which distributes most state education dollars to districts. The existing formula is over 20 years old, and at least one-third of our districts don’t even use it. Instead, those districts are “held harmless” and given the amount they received in 2005, regardless of any changes in enrollment or property values. The board, as stewards of billions of dollars in public funding, should insist on a new formula that is highly targeted to student need, is transparent, and allows funding to follow a student to the school of their choice. Ironically, the same MSIP 6 that can’t be trusted to measure student achievement has been deemed perfectly reliable when the board requests that the legislature raise the formula’s base funding amount per student. Which is it?

Third, the Board’s job is to hold schools and districts accountable for their performance, not to hide or apologize for failure. Currently, students who have mastered grade-level content and are ready for the next grade are classified as “Proficient.” In other words, they’re where they should be. But a bill currently under consideration in the Missouri Legislature would add a classification called “Grade Level.” If you didn’t know better, you might think that meant something very similar to “proficient,” but it would actually describe students who may be on grade level. What purpose could this new classification have, other than to provide false reassurance to parents whose children are falling behind? The Board should resist any attempts to water down results.

Finally, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) has a website that is notoriously difficult to use. One of DESE’s main jobs is to disseminate information and data on our 2,500 schools and the 850,000 students who attend them. If Missouri were to allow students to choose a public school other than their assigned one, DESE would need a functioning website to track those students. If the Foundation Formula is revised, taxpayers deserve to be able to easily track public funds as they follow students. The Board should prioritize the building of a user-friendly and comprehensive website with easy-to-find, accessible, and transparent data.

Last year, four in ten Missouri 4th-graders tested in English/Language Arts couldn’t read. This fall they will move to middle school, and one can only imagine the difficulty they’ll be having when they can’t read their textbooks. DESE used to publish the percentage of high school graduates who were deemed either college- or career-ready by DESE standards. The percentage for the last year I could find (2017) was 42 percent. My own calculations from last year put the number at around 62 percent. When fewer than half of our young students can read on grade level and only about half of our graduating seniors are prepared for what’s next, we are in an educational crisis.

Being appointed to the State Board of Education is an honor, but it comes with responsibilities. We want board members to know the truth about how Missouri schools and students are faring, and we want them to tell us the truth about it. We want them to have a plan to fix what’s broken. That may include a performance audit of DESE to make sure the agency is functioning at the highest possible level. It may include working to expand rather than restrict parents’ choices for the education of their children. It also should include requesting the appropriate amount of state funds for their budget, rather than reflexively asking for more money each year. Time will tell which direction this new board takes, but one thing is crystal clear: It can’t be business as usual.

The post New State Board of Education Has a Long To-Do List appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Dr. Cory Koedel, the Show-Me Institute’s new director of education policy, joins Susan Pendergrass to discuss the biggest challenges facing Missouri’s public education system. They cover declining student outcomes, the role of accountability and testing, and the promise of school choice. Koedel shares insights from his research on school funding models—highlighting Tennessee’s student-centered formula—and breaks down what Missouri can learn from states that are improving early literacy. They also examine controversial policies like early grade retention and open enrollment, and Koedel outlines his priorities for education research in Missouri.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcasts 

Listen on SoundCloud

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction to Education Policy Challenges in Missouri
03:10 The Role of School Choice in Improving Outcomes
05:48 Funding Formulas and Their Implications
08:52 Early Literacy and Reading Instruction
12:05 Retention Policies and Their Effectiveness
15:04 Open Enrollment and Its Impact on Rural Schools
17:58 Future Directions for Education Policy in Missouri

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post A New Voice for Accountability, and School Choice in Missouri with Cory Koedel appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Timestamps:

The post Declining Enrollment, Rising Budgets with Ben Scafidi appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Dedicated funding for specific purposes creates an incentive for inefficient spending. We can think of a multitude of programs and pet projects for which policymakers might want to dedicate funds, but doing so creates restricted pots of funds that often get spent on unneeded items. For example, if funds are dedicated to technology, a school district may continually spend those funds to purchase gadgets and upgraded devices that are not really needed. Similarly, if funds are dedicated to a bullying prevention program schools will have to spend those funds on those programs. For some schools, this could be dollars well spent. In other places, this might mean hiring unneeded staff or purchasing useless curriculum.

The problem with dedicated funding for these kinds of programs is that the needs for all schools are not the same. Earmarking funds for a program will lead to useful programs in some districts and pointless spending in others.

A better policy is to provide a clear, transparent funding system that properly incentivizes school leaders to make wise decisions with their dollars. School leaders need more discretion over their spending, not less. They need the ability to shift more dollars toward curriculum when resources are needed to support instruction, or to spend more on after-school tutoring when remediation is required. Instead of telling districts how they have to spend their money, we could just let bullied students choose a school where they feel safe, like Florida has.

We can all agree that we want to see less bullying in schools, but we also want to see our tax dollars used wisely and effectively. Carving out dedicated funds for specific purposes is not the way to accomplish those goals.

The post Bullying and Public School Funding appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This paper presents a systematic look at research on the four-day school week, focusing specifically on studies that met a clearly defined set of search criteria. Click here to read the full report.

The post A Systematic Literature Review of the Four-day School Week appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

DESE and the state board of education would have you believe that the pandemic has led Missouri families to simply keep their kids at home—just like the parents who are working remotely. That, they say, is the culprit. Incorrect. I have been making this point routinely over the past year. Missouri, as a state, has declining enrollment. Actually, K-12 enrollment is declining at the national level as well.

If you look at the following graph of the number of Missouri public school kindergartners each year, you can see that, after growing for a decade or so, enrollment peaked in 2013. Since then, pandemics notwithstanding, cohorts have been getting smaller and smaller. That peak is now in high school. Within a few years, the number of our high school graduates will begin a steady decline.

Missouri kindergarten enrollment: 2002–2022

If we take the position that this is a temporary problem and we manipulate the formula to make sure that overall funding stays the same (DESE actually asked for a $100M increase), we will be misappropriating taxpayer dollars. We need to fund the schools and students we have, not the schools and students we used to have.

The post Stop Blaming Homeschoolers appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Total expenditures include everything it costs to run a school district, from books and salaries to buildings and debt. It is exactly what it sounds like—total expenditures. Try to find this figure for the state on DESE’s website; I doubt you’ll have much luck.

DESE and the newspaper reporters regularly cite Missouri’s or an individual school district’s current expenditures per pupil. Current expenditures are operating expenses that do not include costs for facilities or debt. DESE readily displays these figures on its website and they are the figures you will see repeated in the media. (While you won’t find the total expenditure per pupil figure on DESE’s website, you can calculate  it yourself using DESE data—for 2022 it was $18,683.)

There are good reasons to report current expenditures. For starters, they tell you how much it costs to run the day-to-day business of educating kids in a school district. Moreover, they are more or less consistent over time. Total expenditures may fluctuate when a school district makes a big debt payment or decides to build a new building. Nevertheless, this does not make the total expenditure figure pointless.

Current and total expenditures are each relevant, but they answer different questions. Think of it like this. Can you tell the difference between these two questions:

-How much are your housing costs?

-How much does it cost to run your house?

The first question asks how much you are paying for your mortgage or rent and all of your utilities and incidental costs. The second drops the cost of the housing payment. If I want to know how efficient your home is, I might ask that second question. If you are on a budget and I’m trying to help you make sound financial decisions, I’m going to ask the first question.

In the public discussion about school spending, we are only told by DESE, public school officials, and the media about operating expenditures. Taxpayers care about this, but they want to know where all their dollars are going.

It is time to drop the Bruno Principle. It is time to tell Missourians exactly how much their school districts spend (in total) per pupil.

In the interest of promoting transparency, the Show-Me Institute has created a useful data tool: moschoolrankings.org. The site allows you to compare school districts academically. You can also toggle to look at school district finances. Here, you can see how each school district spends your taxpayer dollars.

The post The “Bruno Principle” of School Finance—Don’t Talk About Total Expenditures appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

These questions and others are addressed in this report, which also presents a program-by-program account of how education dollars are spent in the state. To read the full report, click here.

The post State and Federal Funding for Public Education in Missouri: 2023 appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

For decades, the state and the federal government have poured billions into the system to try to balance the disconnect between students living in wealthy neighborhoods and students living in poor neighborhoods. The wealth gap between neighborhoods was referred to as the “big white elephant” by the board member who provided the first quote. As it turns out, monopolistic bureaucracies are reliably terrible at solving this problem. Complicated funding formulas try to take into account how much residents of local districts could contribute to public education based on the value of all property in the district in an attempt to redistribute funds from wealthy districts to poor districts. The result is that some districts, such as Brentwood and Ladue, receive about $600 per student from the state, and others—mostly small rural districts—receive as much as $16,000 per student. The federal formula to redistribute resources to low-income districts, also known as Title I, is ridiculously Byzantine and political.

Here’s the problem with “resource deployment.” It hasn’t worked. The achievement gaps between low-income and non-low-income students in Missouri have only gotten wider. In 2019, 45 percent of non-low-income 8th graders scored Proficient or higher in reading on the Nation’s Report Card, compared to just 21 percent of low-income 8th graders. The gap in math was even larger–27 percentage points. In 2003, the gap in reading was 19 percentage points and the gap in math was 22.

We cannot equalize opportunity using a top-down approach. Resources should be deployed to families to spend at the school of their choice. I continue to assert that if low-income families were given the responsibility for choosing which schools received their children’s public education funding, four out of five families would not accept below grade level results.

The post Resource Deployment Isn’t the Solution appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Charter school funding – Current Missouri law requires districts to share their state aid with the public charter schools within their borders, based on the number of public school students who choose to attend charter schools. However, lawmakers didn’t anticipate what would happen if the number of public school students in charter schools was so high that a district’s state aid wasn’t enough to cover the charter school students, as is currently the case in Kansas City Public Schools (KCPS). Over half of the public school students in Kansas City have chosen charter schools, and the funding for those students equals the entirety of KCPS’ state aid and more. If more public school students choose charter schools, the pie will not get bigger. Rather, each public charter school student will receive a smaller slice of state aid from the district.

Secondly, under current law, public charter school students do not have access to the same sources of local funding as their counterparts attending a district public school. Local aid for non-charter public school students includes property taxes, merchants’ and manufacturers’ taxes, financial institution tax revenues, all city sales tax revenue, payments in lieu of taxes, and revenues from state-assessed railroad and utility taxes. HB 1552 would correct these imbalances by requiring that the state provide the difference between the amount available through a district’s funding and the amount charter school students are guaranteed to receive The state would make up the difference in funding.

MOCAP access – The Missouri Course Access Program, or MOCAP, became accessible to all Missouri public school students at no charge beginning in fall 2018. However, the legislation that made MOCAP available to Missouri families has several shortcomings. The first is that students must receive permission to attend MOCAP from their local superintendent. In far too many cases districts have refused, and students have had to sue to enroll in MOCAP. Second, funding for MOCAP students flows from the state, through the student’s local district (or charter school), and out to MOCAP. This establishes a slight financial disincentive to allow students to enroll, because it creates the perception that the district has to “pay” for the student’s virtual education. Finally, the state assessment scores of MOCAP students are incorporated into their local district’s (or charter school’s) test scores, which are used for accountability purposes and, in the case of charter schools, count toward charter renewal.

HB1552 addresses these shortcomings, but only for students who choose to be full-time virtual students, not students who just take a virtual class or two. Under HB1552, parents and students would be able to apply directly to full-time virtual providers, the test scores for full-time virtual providers would be considered as a separate school, and funding for full-time virtual providers would come directly from the state.

Students choosing to attend charter schools or enroll in MOCAP are public school students and should not be treated differently than their peers who attend their assigned public school. HB1552 would correct several shortcomings in the laws governing how these important educational options.

The post Shoring Up School Choice Laws appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Anyway, when the average person reads that headline, what do you think they see? It is most likely that they would think that Missouri is second to last of all the 50 states in what it spends on education. That would be a perfectly reasonable reading of that particular arrangement of words. It would also be wrong.

The article covers a report released by the Missouri Auditor’s office that examined spending trends in Missouri and compared them to other states around the country. Did that report find that Missouri was second to last in the amount of money that it spends? It did not.

In fact, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2020 Missouri was 27th in school spending in the United States, with $11,249 in current spending per pupil per year. Importantly, this is not adjusted for cost of living. Even without that, Missouri is right in the middle of the pack.

No, what the auditor’s report did was look at the percentage of student funding that comes from the state and then compared that to the percentage of funding that comes from the state in other systems around the country, using data from a report by the National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest teachers union.

Now, we can set aside for a moment relying on the NEA, which has an obvious vested interest in increasing school spending. But we can still ask what, if anything, we should do with this information. Show-Me Institute analysts have been arguing that Missouri’s funding formula is broken for years. Reforming the funding formula is part of the 2022 Missouri Blueprint. Updating the formula to accurately measure local property tax wealth and thus local effort would be a huge improvement, as would treating charter schools better and providing more flexibility to parents as to where their children can take their funding. That said, using contrived statistics packaged deceptively to make that point isn’t right.

How much we should spend on schools has become a terribly muddled question. When polled, 58 percent of Missourians say that we should be spending more on education. That is, until they are told how much we actually spend. Then it drops to 32 percent. (Interestingly, it drops to 31 percent among school parents.)

Reports like the one from the auditor’s office do not help educate Missourians as to how much we actually spend and how that money is being put to use. It makes the worthy cause of funding formula reform more difficult. And that is a shame.

The post Missouri Is 49th in a Meaningless Statistic! appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As part of the Every Student Succeeds Act, passed by Congress in 2015, districts are now required to report spending at the school level. Unfortunately, those data can be hard to find, and aren’t available in an easy-to-access, user-friendly way. That is, until now.

Project Nickel has created a searchable database of school-level spending. You simply type the name of your local public school into the search bar, and you can find out how much it spends.

What you find might surprise you. Border Star Elementary, a beloved Kansas City public school, spends $21,982 per student per year. Sumner High in St. Louis spends $17,580. I could go on, but I recommend checking it out yourself.

To answer the question that will inevitably arise: The primary reason that different schools, even within the same district, spend different amounts of money is teachers. More senior teachers make more money than more junior teachers, so schools with higher concentrations of veteran teachers will spend more per student, on average. It is worth thinking about why some schools seem to collect large numbers of veteran teachers while others do not, but perhaps that is a topic for another day.

The post How Much Does Your Local Public School Spend? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

That is essentially how funding for charter school students differs from funding for other public school students. Public school districts can fund buildings, buses, maintenance, and other long-term costs by issuing bonds. Capital projects are funded with dollars outside of the stream of revenue that is received from federal, state, and local sources each year to educate students. Charter schools, however, have to fund everything—buildings, new roofs, HVAC systems, buses, gyms, libraries—using the same annual funding that traditional public schools can dedicate to the classroom. It’s very difficult.

Finally, some Missouri charter schools will have access to state funds for capital improvements. The recently passed education budget bill, House Bill 2, includes $5 million from the General Revenue Fund “for deferred maintenance grants for charter school facilities, provided that the charter school has been operating, with students enrolled, for at least ten years, further provided the charter school maintains twenty percent (20 percent) reserves, further provided that the charter school not be a part of a for-profit charter management organization’s network, and further provided the charter school owns or is purchasing the building or is occupying a building owned by the local school district.”

It’s not a ton of money, considering that there are more than 70 charter schools in the state, but it’s a start. It’s good to see the Missouri Legislature begin to chip away at the systems that work against families and their educational needs.

The post Charter School Students Are Public School Students appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

School choice legislation is under consideration in the Missouri legislature, which means it is time for the same misleading argument against the effort to be trotted out—school choice programs “defund” public education.  If the voices of the educational establishment are to be believed, allowing even a small number of students to find an educational option other than the traditional public school that they are residentially assigned to will lead to larger class sizes, decreased offerings for students, and lower teacher pay.

None of that is true. In fact, it is a veritable pinata of falsehood and unclear thinking that can be whacked from many different angles. Here are four ways in which this argument is wrongheaded.

First, it is important to think about how schools are funded. A large portion of funding comes via local property taxes. This funding stream flows into schools regardless of the number of students that attend them. A levy is instituted against the value of homes and property in an area and sent to local school districts. If 10 or 100 or 1,000 students leave, local funding is untouched. Don’t believe us? Check your property tax bill.

Schools also receive funding from the state on a weighted, per-student basis. This is where the second bit of slippery thinking comes in. Rather than being punished for students leaving, there are multiple provisions in both the current formula and in several of the proposed pieces of school choice legislation that hold districts harmless. This means school districts may continue receiving funding for students they are no longer educating. For instance, if 100 students decided to move from the Rockwood School District to the Wentzville School District, the state would still send funding to Rockwood for those students for two years while also sending money to Wentzville. That’s under normal circumstances in the current state law. The school choice bill that passed through the Missouri House of Representatives goes even further, allowing school districts to receive funding for five years after a student leaves one of its schools.

But beyond that, the third bit of slippery thinking is based on the premise that students leaving schools is akin to “defunding” them. This way of looking at the issue ignores several key facts. When students leave, yes, some portion of the money allocated for them leaves as well (after a period of time), but the district no longer has the obligation to educate them. Both the revenue and the expense leaves. Critics are only looking at one side of the ledger. By this logic, parents choosing to homeschool their own children “defunds” education; so does the student who moves. Do we think that a student “defunds” the Blue Springs school district when they move to Lee’s Summit? Should we bar families from moving? Taking that logic to its conclusion leads to absurdity.

Some people will acknowledge all that we have pointed out and yet still claim tax credit scholarships “defund” public education by reducing the amount of general revenue. This brings us to our fourth point. And we have to be clear here: the state does not spend any state tax money on a tax credit scholarship program. These programs are funded by charitable donations which receive tax credits. Tax credits, whether for development or for charitable endeavors, can lead to a reduction in general revenue for the state. That part is true, but when is the last time you’ve heard the complaints that low-income housing tax credits “defund” public education? This argument suggests that any program which could potentially impact education funding is actually “defunding” education. Money that goes to roads could instead be going to schools. Was the expansion of Medicaid a massive $9 billion effort to defund public education? Again, this is absurd.

Particularly in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, there are important debates to be had about the shape and nature of our public school system in Missouri. These debates will benefit from clear thinking and facts, not misleading and tired rhetoric.

The post No, School Choice Does Not Defund Public Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

While much of the conversation about pandemic pods has been about their effects on parents and children, the Journal article looks at them from the perspective of the teacher. The author argues that pods can be great for teachers.

Think about it. Let’s say that each of the families of a pod agrees to pay $5 per hour, per child to the teacher. Seems like a pretty good deal for them. That means a teacher with a pod of eight students will make $40 per hour. If they follow a typical 180 school year at eight hours a day, that means they will make $57,600 per year, just shy of the $62,304 the article reports the average teacher in America earns. Now, it is true that they might not receive the same benefits, and longer or shorter schedules could alter their total compensation, but they would be teaching a class half the size of their typical class, with none of the bureaucracy, red tape, faculty meanings, or pointless professional development sessions for close to their typical salary. Sounds like a pretty good deal for the teacher, too.

This of course raises an important question: Why can’t traditional schools offer the same kind of learning environment? After all, the average public school student in America brings more than $14,700 per year into the classroom, meaning a classroom of only eight students would have $112,000 in revenue to pay a teacher. It is absolutely true that some students are more expensive to educate, buildings need to be maintained, and the like. But it is also true that lots of jurisdictions spend much more than $14,700 per student, and playing a bit with the numbers (by say allowing slightly larger classes for children with fewer needs and smaller classes for children with more) could free up large amounts of money to make sure every student is cared for.

More importantly, the average class size in America is not eight—it is twice that. I have to ask: Where the heck is all the money going?

I hope this pandemic pushes parents, teachers, and citizens to start asking questions about how school districts spend the large sums of money that they are given by taxpayers. Perhaps with more scrutiny, more students can get the individualized and rich learning environments that students in pandemic pods are slated to receive. That would be great for teachers too.

The post Pandemic Pods Raise Important Questions About School Funding appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Micro-schools have been around for a few years, but they served a very specific niche. Now, they’re emerging as another in-person option for those who can find and afford them. According to a recent article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, micro-schools are popping up in the St. Louis region. Unfortunately, the micro-schools highlighted are charging between $500–$1,000 per month per student. What about the parents who can’t afford that?

Public school districts could join the effort. They could make space and teachers available to serve pods of students. The state could also join the effort. It could allow parents to access a portion of their children’s state education funding to either pay for attendance at a micro-school or to pool with other parents to create one of their own. We are undoubtedly sending substantial sums of money to public school districts for students who have already left. Allowing the funding to follow the child would change that.

There is a significant risk that achievement gaps between wealthy and poor children will get wider this year. As cool as it is to see parents of means figure out how to get their children the education they need, it clearly creates unequal access. Being trapped in a failing school that can’t or won’t provide the services that students need comes with a higher level of risk this year. We are facing a national education crisis and we should be funding every option for every kid.

The post It’s Time to Fund Everything for Every Student appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

How complicated? Consider the following facts about the current funding formula:

• Students with disabilities may generate extra revenue for their school districts to reflect the additional expense their education requires—or then again, they may not.
• The property values in a school district used in the calculation to determine state aid may be current—or they may be from 15 years ago.
• If the public school you attend happens to be a public charter school, your school won’t receive the same funding as other schools for its building and facilities, and it will have to pay 1.5 percent of its state and local funding as an “administrative fee.”

This paper explains how some of these problems came about, and it also proposes some reforms that would promote fairness, transparency, and local autonomy in our public education system.

To read the entire report, click on the link below.

The post Opportunities to Improve Missouri’s Education Funding Formula appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Missouri’s education spending has continued its upward march. Current spending is up 2.7% from the year before, to $10,589 per student. This is roughly in line with previous year-over-year increases (which were 1.6%, 2.7%, 2.9%, and 1.7%, respectively).

When looking at the total revenue figure, which is a good way of looking at the total amount of money that schools spend (not just on current expenses), Missouri schools received $12,492 per student.

Every time I see spending figures like this, I have to ask myself, where does all of this money go? If you think of a class of 18 students, those children are generating over $190,000 in current revenue alone. How much is the teacher getting? Less than half?

The Kansas City Star’s Editorial Board took to its pages earlier this year to decry low teacher salaries that haven’t even kept pace with inflation. But no where in there did they try to square the circle that spending is actually up! Its just that the new money is not making it to teachers.

Looking at a slightly longer time horizon, Missouri per student spending is up 33% since 1992 while teacher salaries are down 4%. This is largely because both the number of teachers and the number of staff members in Missouri schools have grown substantially faster than the growth in students. While the student population is up 9% over that time period, the number of teachers grew 28% and the number of all other staff grew 24%.

These are policy decisions. We can make different ones.

Our education system has become bloated with bureaucrats, administrators, and non-teaching staff that are sucking up money that could be going to the people who are in the classroom every day doing the hard work of educating children. If you want to be outraged about something, be outraged about that.

Bottom line: we are spending enough money to adequately compensate teachers. We just aren’t spending it on them.

The post Missouri Education Spending Continues To Grow appeared first on Show-Me Institute.