Using data from Michigan, the authors identify the effects of charter schools on special education students by comparing special education students who enroll in charter schools early with those who enroll in charter schools late. This research design addresses a common concern in charter school research: students who choose to enroll in charter schools may differ from those who remain in traditional public schools in unobservable ways. Simple comparisons between charter and traditional public school students can therefore be misleading.

To overcome this challenge, Imberman and Johnson compare early charter entrants to late entrants. Because both groups eventually attend charter schools, they are more comparable to one another than to students who never enroll. The effect of charter school attendance is identified by examining differences in outcomes before the late entrants make the switch.

In my view, the study’s two most important findings are:

• Charter schools use special education programs and service assignments that are less intensive and expen­sive than in traditional public schools.
• Charter schools improve special education students’ academic achievement and attendance.

The authors also conduct a parallel analysis of general education students. They show that the positive effects of charter schools on special education students are similar to the positive effects on general education students.

This study complements recent work by Elizabeth Setren, who examines special education students in Boston who randomly win or lose lotteries to attend charter schools. Because lottery outcomes are random, this design provides especially strong causal evidence that factors other than charter school attendance are highly unlikely to drive the results. Setren likewise finds that charter schools improve test scores for special education students.

Special education students are an important subpopulation. They account for nearly 15 percent of K-12 enrollment in the United States and receive disproportionate funding. Both of these studies find charter schools serve special education students more effectively, and contribute to the large and growing body of evidence showing that charter schools outperform traditional public schools.

The post Charter Schools Do Special Education Better appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Learn more about the book here: www.cato.org/books/fighting-freedom-learn

Susan Pendergrass speaks with James Shuls, fellow at the Show-Me Institute and head of the Education Liberty Branch at Florida State University, and Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute about their new book, Fighting for the Freedom to Learn: Examining America’s Centuries-Old School Choice Movement. They discuss how the fight for educational freedom long predates modern debates over public schooling, why early advocates viewed schooling as a family and community responsibility, and how today’s school choice expansion connects to America’s founding principles. The conversation covers the history of the common school movement, the roots of residential school assignment, and why educational freedom has always been central to the American story, and more.

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction

02:33 The Genesis of ‘Fighting for the Freedom to Learn’
05:41 Historical Perspectives on School Choice
08:04 The Evolution of Common Schools and Their Impact
10:59 The Role of Religion in Early Education
14:01 The Shift Towards Standardization in Education
16:43 The Need for School Choice in Disadvantaged Areas
19:29 The Historical Context of Property Taxes and School Assignment
22:17 The Recent Surge in School Choice Movements

Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00)
Certainly looking forward to this conversation with two very, very smart people: Dr. Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute and Dr. James Shuls of Florida State University. James, can you first tell us about this new center that you are in charge of at Florida State University? I think it’s innovative and really cool, and I’d like to hear a little bit more about it before we talk about your book.

James Shuls (00:21)
Absolutely. So I’m with the Institute for Governance and Civics, and it was created by the legislature a couple years ago. And while I would like to take credit and say I’m in charge of it, as you sort of said there, Susan, I’m not in charge of the Institute, but I’m one of the branch heads. So the IGC, as we call it, has four branches. We focus on economic liberty, constitutional liberty, conscience liberty, and education liberty. I’m the head of the education liberty branch.
And so part of what we’re doing is outreach to K–12 schools, helping to focus on civics instruction, improving knowledge and preparation for teachers as it relates to civics and governance and those sorts of things. At the same time, we’re writing about issues of educational liberty from a school choice perspective, which is exactly the topic we’re talking about today.

Susan Pendergrass (01:12)
Yeah, so you guys have a book that you just co-edited, Fighting for the Freedom to Learn: Examining America’s Centuries-Old School Choice Movement. How did you come up with this idea, and why did you decide to put this book together?

Neal McCluskey (01:27)
Sure, I’ll go with that. The idea behind the book stems from just about everything I ever do, which is I got angry about something, and I was like, well, somebody ought to do something about this. If you work in school choice advocacy for more than a day or so, you’ll quickly hear that school choice started by people trying to avoid desegregation in the South. And that’s always given as the origin. And even if somebody wants to say, well, you know, Milton Friedman wrote this essay in 1955—and he really wrote it before 1955—we know that that was really just taking advantage, at the very least, of this backlash against desegregation.
And it just drives me nuts. There is a very long, rich history of the idea and practice of school choice. So I thought, you know, somebody ought to do a book on that, and we can hit, sort of semi-chronologically, all the different eras in which this happened and the ebbs and flows. The Cato Institute and the Center for Educational Freedom, which I direct, also had something called the School Choice Timeline—this interactive online timeline that I put together also because I was angry. In particular, I wrote a chapter about the gap where not much was going on in school choice, and I wanted to explain the gap.
But we have lots of chapters—one on how progressives were really into school choice for a while, and how schooling worked before the common-schooling movement, and all sorts of stuff like that. The genesis was aggravation on my part, at least, about always hearing this narrative that school choice stems from efforts to avoid desegregation. And then I said, you know, James Shuls—there’s a guy who probably is angry a lot, too. Maybe he’d like to get in on this.

James Shuls (03:17)
Yeah, that’s right. Susan, I’ve been on the podcast before talking about some of my scholarship related to Virgil Blum. He was a real strong school choice advocate starting in the ’50s, did a ton of work, and gets absolutely no credit. I was angry that Friedman gets all the credit—he wrote this paper in 1955, yada, yada, yada—and then in the 1990s we get school choice programs. It’s like, well, a lot happened in that yada, yada, yada period that we’re not covering.
I had been writing about that when Neal came along with the idea to do the book. Part of what we’re doing as we frame this is saying: looking at school choice today through the current lens we have is the wrong way to do it. We think of school choice today as opting out of the public school system—but that only works to frame it that way if there is a public school system. Before common schools were around, people were still advocating for their kids, still trying to get schools created. So there was lots of stuff that wouldn’t fit the framework we have today.
What we’re saying in this book is these impulses for educational freedom have always existed, and we’re essentially tracing them from colonial times to today.

Neal McCluskey (04:36)
James’s stuff on Blum was also a major reason I thought, here’s a guy who could really contribute to this. I just stumbled on Blum in large part because of what James wrote. I was like, why do people not know about this guy?

Susan Pendergrass (04:41)
We did a whole podcast on it. I’ll tell you what makes me mad is that in the last month or two, tops, there have been articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post talking about low-income families—both in Florida and Arizona—generally Black and brown parents, who are participating in this right-wing conservative movement to kill the public school system because they think they deserve to be able to choose where their kid goes to school.
Even locally in political groups, people say, well, that’s a MAGA person, which means they support charter schools. When those two things get put into a sentence, it really makes my blood boil because I’ve been working in this space a long time. As we’re going to find out more, school choice is not a new thing at all. The latest iteration of it is not a MAGA thing or five years old or a COVID thing. Since at least 1990—at least 35 years—parents and activists like Howard Fuller were saying, hey, this isn’t right. We’re literally assigning kids to the worst schools and not letting them out. We ought to let them out.
Somehow this has become the Republican agenda to kill teacher unions and break up the public school system. Nothing could be further from the truth. That makes me mad. That’s why I’m really glad you guys put this book together. Let’s go back—not to the very beginning of the country—but pre–industrial revolution, pre–John Dewey, before standardized schools, attendance zones, and district lines. What did it look like, say 150 years ago? Did parents decide where their kids went to school, or did you have to go to a certain school because that was the one you helped pay to create? How did it work back in the day?

James Shuls (06:50)
I’ll jump in here because I’m awfully angry about this. Before common schools, there was a wide mixture of different types of schools. You had dame schools, private schools, public schools, and publicly funded private schools.
What you get in Charles Glenn’s chapter, “Emergence of the Common School Ideology,” is an understanding of the movement towards common schools. The impetus behind them was really to separate schooling from the family and the community and to use schools for social change. That’s the difference that comes in here—schooling would be used for social change.

Susan Pendergrass (07:29)
Mm-hmm.

James Shuls (07:35)
—to create and form Americans. Some people look at that and say it’s a good thing, but there are certainly negative side effects as well when you separate the impact of community and families. An interesting element that comes out in this book is that the common school ideology and the public school system that has come in its wake was created to form a certain kind of American citizen.
Then we get into Neal’s chapter, where Neal talks about the sort of gap where things aren’t happening. It’s because these systems were under attack. You see a reemergence in the 1950s—not just because of Brown and segregation—but because you start to have a return to some of these values and a return to trying to connect schooling and the family and the church.
When you look at school choice with this longer arc, rather than looking at the ’50s as your starting point, you see the various impulses that were leading pre–common schools, how common schools helped to squash some of those things, and how we’re starting to come back to a decentralized and pluralistic system.

Susan Pendergrass (08:50)
Certainly the common schools—also called public schools before 1900—were Protestant. They absolutely taught religion. They didn’t stop teaching religion until the Catholics started showing up. Then it was, yeah, maybe we get religion out of schools, right? Because we don’t want Catholicism in a public school. Public schools taught Protestantism; they just didn’t want to teach Catholicism. People think there’s always been separation—no religion in public schools—and that’s not true.

James Shuls (09:16)
That’s a key point in Matthew Lee’s chapter: Catholics turned to private schools. He would say it’s not necessarily school choice because the Catholics were saying you had to go to the Catholic schools—so no choice among Catholic schools. Nevertheless, the Catholic schools came up because the public schools were Protestant. Protestants went in—though not all in. There were some segments, which Neal could talk about, with the Lutherans.
By and large, Protestants supported the common school movement. Then there was a movement to secularize public schools. Again, that’s part of what happens in the 1950s with the return of Protestants starting to support school choice—because their capture of the public school system had been weakened and there were no longer Protestant schools.

Neal McCluskey (10:10)
Just as a pitch for the book: there’s so much good history in here that we won’t be able to talk about. You definitely want to get the book. It’s worth noting that for much of our early history—colonial period, early republican period, even into the common-schooling period—there wasn’t a separation people would recognize if you say, well, this is a public school and this is a private school. There were schools. There was education.
Government was sometimes involved in assisting private schools. Going back to British traditions, someone would provide—usually from the proceeds of owning land—funds to help maintain a school. In America, land was the one thing in superabundance, so that wasn’t as profitable. Governments would sometimes say, look, you’re running a school here; we’ll give you a little money to do it. There was often cooperation between government and schools.
The first voucher program that we’ve at least been able to catalog was in 1802 in Pennsylvania—specifically in Philadelphia. So this is not new. Go back more than two centuries and you had people like Paine and John Stuart Mill talking about helping people to consume education by funding parents so they can choose, not by funding schools.
Even as we have common schools, they were extremely localized. Think of the one-room schoolhouse—it was also the meeting house and often the church—serving pretty homogeneous communities. Even within what eventually became common schooling, there was a lot of differentiation where people could get the schooling they wanted. It’s only as progressives consolidate control that we move far away from that community-level, very small schooling.

Susan Pendergrass (12:13)
I thought it was so odd that Maine and Vermont have had town tuitioning of high schools for a couple hundred years. Where the town didn’t want to build a high school, they just paid tuition for their high school students to go to a different school the student picked. In some cases it’s a boarding school, even overseas. They were challenged in the Supreme Court within the last couple of years, even though those programs have existed for hundreds of years.
All of a sudden, people who don’t like the voucher idea went after Maine for town tuitioning, even though that program has been in place for so long.

James Shuls (12:53)
That radical right-wing bastion in Maine.

Susan Pendergrass (12:55)
—decided at a town meeting to do it. I think as you get into the earlier or middle part of the last century, you start building up this industrial education complex: we’re going to be the great equalizer; everyone’s going to have the same kind of school; 20 kids and a chalkboard and teacher; separate kids by age, not ability; common standards; and we’re going to be in charge of it.
Anyone who disagrees with what’s being taught there is seen as a radical who wants to break the system and doesn’t understand the importance of it. That’s what I feel has been happening lately, where any parent—my own experience: I homeschooled one of my kids and was considered a radical because why wouldn’t I accept that the public school to which he was assigned would be best for him? The idea that uniformity is what we need.
I still think there are a lot of people within the public education establishment who say uniformity is the key. We are clearly seeing a backlash, but the uniformity principle—maybe 75 years, maybe the 1950s—would you say?

Neal McCluskey (14:15)
It depends. In the early republican period, people like Benjamin Rush said we need schooling for everybody to make them into good citizens—into “republican machines,” his term. Horace Mann certainly wants to standardize people. Not because of Catholics at the beginning—they hadn’t come in at great numbers—but because he saw people coming in from the countryside.
New England industrialized first—relatively poor farming area, but lots of rivers to run factories. These early factories with big water wheels. Mann saw parents coming from the countryside and thought they were all idiots. He thought we needed to take their kids away from them and standardize them. So we started it even at the very beginning.
It gets even more standardized as more immigrants arrive and people get scared of them. One overarching theme of the history of school choice: it’s about people who do not fit into whatever mold the elites decide. Catholics didn’t fit the Protestant mold. In my research, Germans were most disturbing for people because they spoke German—people said, they really need to speak English. We have a thread of fear of Germans going back to colonial Pennsylvania.
The chapter on African Americans is particularly powerful: it talks about a system that never wanted to incorporate them. They needed freedom to get the education people were denying them. That’s the big theme—people who don’t want to be standardized or who are refused help need school choice to get something out of education.

Susan Pendergrass (16:13)
I’ll only say that’s true today. It’s ironic that the kids with the least options—the most disadvantaged kids in the worst schools—are the ones people openly talk about denying options to. Even in Missouri, when public school choice is considered, some of the lowest-performing districts say, okay, but not us. We can’t let kids out of our district because we’re one of the worst in the state and everyone will leave and take money.
They want to draw a line and say, whatever unfortunate child got assigned to this school, we cannot let them leave. That’s flipped on its head. That child needs choices as much as every other kid. They say, no, we have to lock those kids in and strap them to the deck of a Titanic. Why do you think that is, James?

James Shuls (17:07)
I’d say Ron Matus’s chapter on the progressive movement toward school choice is terrific for the points you’re making. There was a tremendous progressive move for school choice in the ’70s and ’80s that culminated in the early voucher programs.
They were making exactly the cases you’re making: we should not assign students to failing schools; school choice was progressive in that it allowed disadvantaged students to opt out and get the type of school that would meet their needs, and to bring competition into the marketplace. The progressives were making the case for school choice exactly because the most disadvantaged students needed it the most.
That’s why the recent idea that school choice is a MAGA movement is off. The progressives got there first, as Ron and others explain.

Susan Pendergrass (18:12)
One last thing. I have a hard time articulating to folks who believe there’s an ironclad connection between property taxes and school assignment that goes back to the beginning of time and must continue until the end of time: if you pay property taxes here, your kid goes to school here; if you don’t, your child doesn’t get to go to school there. I don’t want any kids coming into my kid’s school if their parents didn’t pay property taxes.
I think that is particularly strong in Missouri. In St. Louis County we have dozens of school districts within one county. People feel very strongly—even supporters of school choice—about this property tax/school assignment idea. They can’t get past it. What would you say to that? You lived in St. Louis, James; what do you say?

James Shuls (19:13)
We didn’t write the book through this specific lens, but if you read closely you see this: the system evolved over time. You had a radically decentralized system. Horace Mann and the common school movement advocated for state structures and more organization. Over time it evolved to the system we have today.
From the founding, the idea of residential assignment where local property taxes only follow the kids—and the high level of state and federal regulation—was not anyone’s early vision. It’s not the system most people would advocate if they could design it from scratch. We get wedded to the structures we have.
What we have to do is step back and ask, is this the way it should be? I think the answer is no. We shouldn’t have systems that restrict resources to small local communities and assign students, because we get the problems we all see: high-poverty districts with struggling schools and students assigned to terrible schools with little opportunity for the types of coursework and experiences that lead to success. The system we have isn’t inherently good just because it’s the system we have.

Neal McCluskey (20:57)
We probably needed a chapter on the history of taxation to answer this directly. My suspicion is that for a lot of our history we didn’t have a lot of income tax or other taxes, and drawing on the English tradition, we probably funded things at the community level with property taxes—very local and democratically controlled.
It’s not until the industrial era, with consolidation, that communities stopped running their own schools. My guess is that’s the history of a lot of this property-tax and local-tax funding. But things have obviously changed.
My colleague Colleen Hroncich always points out: it might have made sense to have local public schools when nobody had a car and most people walked places. You couldn’t travel 10 or 20 miles every morning to drop your kid off. That doesn’t make sense now—we have modern transportation—so we don’t have to be shackled to the school a mile or two away.

Susan Pendergrass (22:04)
See you next time. I also think that starting in the 1950s—partly because of Brown v. Board—states and then the federal government started tinkering with the distribution of tax dollars to districts to give more money to poorer districts and less to wealthier districts. That’s been going on with funding formulas. I’m not sure any of them have had an impact on poor kids or reducing achievement gaps, but they thought that moving levers at the state and federal level would get a different outcome.
In my opinion, wealthier districts with higher property tax bases and more local funding aren’t really impacted by those. Now they say, you can move kids around—but not from us—because we’re not part of that system where you move money around. We’re happy with what we’ve got. If you can afford to live here, fine; but they want to be left out of it.

James Shuls (23:10)
Sorry to interrupt you. I wanted to weigh in on that last point, because—reason to listen to the podcast and get the book—this is not in the book, but Virgil Blum had some correspondence with Milton Friedman back in the ’50s and ’60s. They weren’t closely associated; they were operating in different circles. But Blum sent Friedman something he had written and asked for feedback. Friedman responded.
One thing he said was, when it comes to the voucher idea, he thought it should start at the higher education level, not K–12. Then he said it should be at the level where the taxation or the money is supplied. So in K–12, that probably means vouchers should come from the local community, not from the state or the federal government.
So to your point: we had a system that relied more on local tax dollars, and Friedman was saying the vouchers should be local. But we’ve shifted over time to a system that provides a lot more money from the state and federal government than it used to. If you look across the country, every school choice program is a state system—very rarely do you have a district creating a voucher system. It almost always comes at the state level. Even Friedman was wrong from time to time.

Susan Pendergrass (24:44)
On that note, I know you have a chapter on this, but what about this explosion of school choice? Now it feels unstoppable. We have more than a dozen states with universal-ish programs. At least five states have truly universal school choice systems. Why now? Why has it picked up steam so fast after barely making progress through the ’90s and early 2000s?

Neal McCluskey (25:17)
Jason Bedrick has a particular take on it—which I think is probably right—but I think it has deeper roots. Generally, the idea is people are unhappy and increasingly unhappy with how they’re being served by public schools.
My theory—and I think a lot of people hold this—is that COVID made people realize that in a public school system, if a powerful minority or majority wants X and you want Y, someone loses. Many parents who wanted in-person school—generally well-heeled and used to getting what they want—suddenly couldn’t get it. They realized the system didn’t work for them even if they liked it in theory.
Anecdotally, in rich places like Montclair, New Jersey, people were at each other’s throats because many wanted mutually exclusive things. Then you had ideological battles over vaccination and mask requirements. Many say that virtual school let parents see what their kids were learning, and they didn’t like it—books like Gender Queer, how African American history is taught, etc. We haven’t shown concretely that anger was because of peeking into the classroom via Zoom, but it certainly coincided. People were angry.
Jason argues that, yes, people were unhappy, but it wasn’t really COVID; it was the strategy of reaching out to red-state parents in environments where you could get school choice, saying: public schools are teaching stuff you don’t like; you don’t want your kids trapped in that. All the big school-choice gains were in red states—the red-state strategy worked. Now the future is moving into purple and blue states. I think that’s right too, but the underlying driver is people realizing one system can’t fit everyone.

James Shuls (28:32)
I’ll weigh in here too. Friedman made the free-market case for school choice in the ’50s, and that case continued to today—choice, competition, rising tides lift boats. You also had the progressive case in the ’70s and ’80s—students shouldn’t be trapped in failing schools; create programs to help the most disadvantaged. Those arguments kept creating small, targeted programs, but not a wider audience.
A third element—cultural, right-leaning values—added a new coalition. It layered on top of the free-market and progressive cases. I wouldn’t say the movement is completely going to the right; it’s making arguments that appeal to those individuals.
If you go to a rural Missouri voter and say “choice and competition,” with one local public high school and one elementary school, that doesn’t land. If you say the most disadvantaged students in St. Louis and Kansas City need choice, the rural voter may not care. But if you weigh in on some conservative values, you reach a new audience. Maybe that’s part of what’s happened.

Susan Pendergrass (30:24)
Just a bigger tent. It’s clear we’ve only scratched the surface of your book—this is only a 30-minute podcast and there’s so much more in there. A lot of it is so intriguing—going back to the history of this country and realizing the system we have now is relatively new compared to the various systems we’ve had.
Parents don’t really care what the name is on the outside of the school. They care about how their kids come home at the end of the day—how much they appear to be learning. They want them challenged; they want them safe. That’s universal. Whatever system gets them there, they don’t care what it’s called or what it looks like. If they thought they’d get it out of a uniform system and now they don’t…
There’s so much in this book. You picked a lot of great authors—12 leading education scholars. When will folks be able to buy this book and read it themselves, and where?

Neal McCluskey (31:37)
It comes out November 11th. I think it’s available online—online bookstores everywhere—as well as the Cato website, Cato.org.

Susan Pendergrass (31:43)
And can folks reach out to you guys if they have any comments or questions?

Neal McCluskey (31:53)
As long as it’s nice stuff, they can reach out to me.

Susan Pendergrass (31:55)
I can’t promise them.

James Shuls (31:55)
The nice stuff can reach out to me; the negative comments go to Neal.

Susan Pendergrass (32:00)
Well, it’s great. Thank you so much for coming on and talking about it. It’s a fantastic book, and I highly recommend folks get it and read it themselves.

James Shuls (32:09)
Thank you.

Neal McCluskey (32:09)
Great, thanks.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post The Long Fight for Educational Freedom with Neal McCluskey and James Shuls appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Visit MoSchoolRankings.org

About the Project

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

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

Why School-level Data Matters

Parents Need Information to Choose

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

Comparison Reveals Problems and Solutions 

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

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

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

Spending Data

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

The Rankings

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

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

These metrics are:

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

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

Key Terms

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

Some key terms to understand while exploring the portal are:

Achievement Levels

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

Academic Growth

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

Adjusted Achievement 

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

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

Schools with these designations are low-performing schools. 

Additional Information About Districts and Schools Includes:

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

About the Research

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

Contact Us about the Project 

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Building on the success of his coding club, he decided to start a micro-school in his own home in Mesa, Arizona. He wanted students as engaged in their normal schoolwork as they were in his coding club. He convinced six of his friends to “enroll” their children and used online resources and a pedagogical model that focused on student engagement and project-based learning to create a nurturing school environment. He loved it. The kids loved it. Their parents loved it. And he realized he was on to something.

That small group of families in his home became the basis for the Prenda Microschools (if you want the whole story, I spoke with Smith on my podcast Cool Schools earlier this summer). There are now more than 400 such schools, each enrolling between 5 and 10 students in someone’s home, in a public library, or a host of other spaces. Prenda was already growing before the pandemic, but social distancing requirements and lackluster responses by local school districts drove up demand.

This growth put Prenda in the crosshairs of the educational establishment. In a bombshell report in the Wall Street Journal, leaked documents show the opposition research that the National Education Association (NEA) has completed on Prenda and Smith himself, and it is wild. The NEA admits that micro-schools are popular, that kids learn well in them, that they solve some of the problems that homeschoolers face, and that some of Arizona’s school choice programs “alleviate some equity issues” as lower-income families can participate.

Perhaps more troubling, the dossier also features Mr. Kelly’s address and a picture of his home.

Let’s be clear. While Prenda is growing, and exciting, it still only enrolls around 3,000 students. In Arizona alone, there are almost 1.1 million public school students. That means that the NEA created opposition research on a school network that enrolls less than one third of one percent of Arizona’s students. Its enrollment is a rounding error in the education system, and yet the NEA went through all of this effort to develop a plan to snuff Prenda out, admitting in the process that it is popular because it is good.

I would love to say that I’m surprised by this development, but I’m not. This has been the standard operating procedure for teachers unions for decades. They brook no dissent. They fight hammer and tongs against every potential option that they do not control. And good people like Kelly Smith get caught in the crossfire.

More to the point, does the NEA in Missouri keep dossiers on private school leaders? On charter school educators? Does the union keep pictures of their houses on file?  Might be worth asking sometime.

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Berner goes on to offer examples from the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada, and many other countries that support a broad variety of schools. In a pluralistic system, students or their parents are allowed to choose the type of school that their child will attend. The school may be religious, it may have a specific pedagogical practice, or may have various other defining features, but it will still receive public funds.

Berner suggests that the key to a pluralistic education system is that there must be some form of accountability for all schools, even private ones.

While I may not completely agree with Berner on the extent to which the government should regulate private schools, her paper offers an excellent overview of what educational pluralism is, the perceived obstacles to pluralism in the United States, and an overview of compelling educational research.

To learn more, give her paper a read or check out her recent op-ed on the matter here.

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Local education gadfly Rebecca Haessig recently broke down the 2018-19 enrollment figures for public schools in Kansas City on her blog Set The Schools Free. According to her number crunching, 12,475 Kansas City students attend charter schools, 3,705 students attend Kansas City Public Schools Signature schools, and 10,582 attend traditional neighborhood schools. That means that 16,180 students out of 26,762 total students attend a school that requires an active choice. That is 60% of all Kansas City students in public schools.

What’s more, this does not even count the thousands of children who attend private schools or the families that move to other school districts in the Kansas City area for better schools. It simply states that within the boundaries of the Kansas City Public Schools, the majority of families actively choose their schools.

This is important for three reasons.

First, school choice is not some fringe movement. Marginalization is a classic political tactic, and one that is frequently used to try and slow down the expansion of school choice. But the numbers don’t lie. School choice is the norm, not the exception.

Second, we need to be all-inclusive when we talk about school choice. Many of the loudest anti-charter school or private school choice voices in Kansas City send their children to schools of choice. These schools often have screening mechanisms that weed out lower performing students, students with discipline problems, or students with uninvolved parents. If these critics are going to complain about various types of school choice, they should be transparent about the fact that they’re using some form of school choice for their own kids.

Third, we have to square these figures with the continued argument that the Kansas City Public Schools are improving. Now, I totally agree with my friend Susan Pendergrass that Missouri is grading schools on a pretty generous curve,  but simply taking the district’s own rhetoric at face value, school choice is obviously not hurting  KCPS given its much touted improvement in APR (Annual Progress Report) scores. They can’t have it both ways. If the school district is improving, like they are arguing, school choice can’t be that big of a problem, because 60% of kids are taking advantage of it!

It was Daniel Patrick Moynihan who famously said, “everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.” The facts on school choice in Kansas City are clear and deserve to be acknowledged.

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When you vote to raise your local property tax for schools, you are essentially voting to raise the district’s property tax ceiling. This is the maximum rate the district can use to collect local revenue for schools.  The district may be forced, however, to lower the rate during times of economic growth thanks to the Hancock Amendment in Missouri’s Constitution.  Basically, school district revenues collected from existing real property cannot increase beyond the rate of inflation.  If an increase in taxable property values outstrips the pace of inflation, the district rolls back the property tax rate.

Rollbacks create a gap between the tax rate ceiling and the tax rate used by the school district. Thus when districts have space under the cap and their property values are flat, the school board can choose to raise the rate without voter approval because the voters have previously given approval.

Despite the tax rate increases this year in Eldon and School of the Osage, each district will remain under its tax rate ceiling.  Moreover, each school district’s tax rate will remain below the state average. In Eldon, the rate was $3.54 per $100 of assessed valuation in 2015; it was $2.849 for the School of the Osage.  The state average tax rate for operating and capital expenses was over $4.

School funding is complicated, but we are here to help. If you want to know more about how schools are funded in Missouri, check out our Funding Formula Primer. And, if you have questions don’t hesitate to contact us.

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When I asked students at Confluence Academy, a charter school in Saint Louis City, the age-old question, “What are you doing this summer?” most responded with, “Chillin’.”

On the makeshift survey I had passed out to students on the last day of school, they scribbled answers such as “nothing” or “hanging out” in the blank spaces. Where I had asked, “How many hours do you plan to read this summer?” most didn’t bother, not even to write a zero. One student read the question out loud and laughed to herself. Another crinkled the paper into a ball.

“We’re in the neighborhood. We’re seeing them out unsupervised, not really having a whole lot to do,” said Beyond School Director Erin Malone.

Beyond School is one division of Mission: St. Louis, a local nonprofit in the Grove neighborhood. The organization provides fourth to eighth graders with year-round expanded learning opportunities, one of which is an eight-week summer program created to combat summer learning loss. Summer learning loss, or the “summer slide,” occurs when students from low-income communities experience little to no learning outside the academic year.

One study showed that more than half of the achievement gap between low-income and high-income students can be explained by unequal access to summer learning opportunities. Partnering with Adams Elementary, Beyond School provides low-income students with math and reading instruction, as well as access to activities such as cross-fit, improv, and musical lessons. In the fall, Beyond School will begin a new partnership with the charter school South City Prep.

While Mission: St. Louis does not charge Adams Elementary and South City Prep for its services, the partnerships serve as an example of how organizations in the public and private sector can work together to fulfill educational needs in a low-income community.

Rising seventh-grader Christian is one of 22 students currently benefiting from the summer program. I had the opportunity to listen to her read If I Grow Up, a story about the challenges a young man faces as he grows up in the projects.

“The first year I tested our students, every single one of them was behind,” said Malone, a former teacher and reading specialist. “The kids literally just need to read. They need to read books they can understand and that they can have conversations about. That’s kind of just what we do.”

On average, students gain about five months in reading proficiency during their time in the program. This means the student will advance more than 60 percent of a school year within eight weeks. Compared to no gain or sliding backward, this is quite an accomplishment.

College students, retired community members, and even off-duty teachers volunteer as tutors. “It’s a community mentality. It’s not their kids, but our kids,” said Malone, who hopes to eventually expand the program into other schools.

“If you really want to eradicate poverty, this is one of the ways,” she said.

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I wonder how the counties will use the grant to change residents’ behavior. They have ample public funding, but many of the behaviors they want to alter fall squarely in the private sector. For example, one of the stated goals is reducing the time people spend watching television. Do the counties plan to purchase a set of TV-B-Gone devices and manually turn off televisions? Presumably not, but how else can they get people to change?

Here are a few more things the counties want to accomplish:

Rauter said further efforts will be directed toward providing nutritional information for school lunches and restaurants, and making healthy choices more affordable in grocery stores. The program will promote community gardens, including implementing a Farm-to-School program, encouraging breast-feeding-friendly work sites and promoting overall good nutrition and physical activity.

Again, I’m curious how the counties will go about this. Changing workers’ attitudes toward breastfeeding is going to be harder than writing a check. And to make healthy groceries more affordable, the counties would have to either start their own grocery stores, or go into private grocery stores and tell them what products to carry and how much to charge.

If Missouri has to choose between the two approaches, I would prefer a campaign like Oklahoma City’s that’s financed by voluntary donations. But my first choice would be no campaign at all.

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Field will never get the proof it wants. To show that single-sex schooling improves student achievement, you would have to randomly assign some students to single-sex classes and others to coed classes. Otherwise, you can’t tell whether the students in the single-sex track are comparable to their peers in the coed track. Perhaps students who struggle are more likely to look for a change and to opt in to the single-sex classes. Or, it could be that the most involved parents seek out single-sex education, and that parental involvement gave those students an advantage. It’s impossible to sort out these factors as long as the program remains voluntary.

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Those people would probably prefer that the district divide up expenditures, improving each building a little bit at a time. But that’s not always practical. It can be more cost-effective to build a new structure than to continually patch up an old one. And seldom (if ever) does any district have the opportunity to build new schools for all students simultaneously.

Some children in Columbia Public Schools enjoy nicer buildings than others, and some districts have more expensive auditoriums and science labs than Columbia Public Schools. However, that’s not the main cause of educational inequity. Much more important than the appearance of buildings is what children learn inside of them. A school that looks drab on the outside may have excellent teachers and a great curriculum. On the other hand, a new building is no proof that classroom materials or teaching practices have been improved.

No matter how good your building is, you’ll always be able to find a school out there that’s physically superior in some way. (For example, although the Ladue School District has many new classrooms, it recently sent out a newsletter stating that various cafeteria and library spaces fall short of Missouri School Improvement Guidelines.) The quest for perfect buildings could be unending, but it would be better to pursue perfect academics instead.

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Unveiled last week, the greenhouse adds to the school’s already impressive list of features — among them, a $1 million kitchen and a science lab where students can clone plants. These facilities are designed to give students hands-on experience in preparation for specific careers.

As is often the case, it’s a charter rather than a traditional public school that’s providing students with cutting-edge career training. Charter schools have an advantage in this regard. I don’t mean this in the sense charter school critics do — that charters take the best students, or whatever. No, the charter advantage is that students choose to enroll or to leave, so charters are free to specialize. A traditional public school couldn’t afford to invest in a new greenhouse, an accompanying lab, and teachers with agricultural experience if only a few students in the school took career-focused courses.

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Districts have been understandably frustrated when students shrug off state assessments. To a district, low MAP scores can mean anything from a bad reputation to lost accreditation; to students, they meant nothing — until now.

There are potential drawbacks to a system in which students from many different schools take the same final. On the other hand, seniors taking the same Advanced Placement course are evaluated by the same test. And AP courses are usually considered the most rigorous high school courses, so I don’t follow this logic:

“There is that pitfall of ‘I’m only going to teach to this level of the test’ rather than ‘let’s make this a rigorous course,'” said Sara Torres, a supervisory director with the Science Teachers of Missouri.

If the state exam assumes a low level of knowledge, that shouldn’t prevent teachers from going beyond that level and adding detail when they teach.

Still, this move is not necessarily reason to celebrate, because it could take away from schools’ initiative in developing their own assessment methods.

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Bridgeforth, 28, said he reached a low point at age 22, two or three months into the job at Parkway North High School, when he realized: "Wow, this isn’t for me. I’m not getting paid a whole lot. I’m working 60 hours a week, I have a college degree. I could probably be enjoying something else a lot more."

Bridgeforth has a lot of company. As many as half of new teachers in public schools leave before they hit the five-year mark.

I can think of a few policy changes that could help rectify this situation. First, merit pay would reward new teachers who put in the extra effort and get results. The current pay scale privileges veteran teachers, even when they’re ineffective — or, in the words of an administrator quoted in the article, "complacent and bitter."

Second, some form of school choice, be it vouchers, tuition tax credits, or another program, would spur competition for the best teachers of any age. As schools work to attract and retain students, they’ll bid the better teachers away from employers who aren’t on their toes.

Other competitive industries can lure teachers out of teaching. Schools should be allowed to compete for them too.

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Figlio and Kenny find that teacher salary incentives are associated with higher levels of student performance. They cannot be certain whether the test score improvement is driven by teacher incentives or whether the incentives are proxy variables for unobserved school quality. In general, they find, teacher salary incentives are associated with a 1.3 to 2.1 point rise in test scores, about the same increase associated with increasing maternal education by three years. The correlation exists in schools with predominantly low- and middle-income students.

Figlio and Kenny note that one case in which merit pay systems don’t work is when most of the teachers get merit pay. If everybody’s a winner, there’s no incentive to improve.

In Missouri, the Ladue School District has used merit pay for over 50 years. However, Ladue does suffer from the merit-pay-for-everyone problem. A report by Ladue’s Compensation Systems Task Force notes that 70 percent of the district’s staff received 12 or 13 out of 13 possible merit points for the 2004-2005 school year. Ladue should reconsider the way it awards points if it wants to encourage excellence in teaching.

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Can! Academy, which operates public charter high schools throughout the country, offers small class sizes and intensive counseling and job training to its students. According to post-graduation surveys of its students, three-quarters of its graduates go on to college or vocational schools, company officials say.

Superintendent Diana Bourisaw is opposed; she argues that the district is already dealing with the drop-out problem by opening three alternative programs this year.

The Post-Dispatch offers some vacuous commentary:

Can! Academy, Big Picture Company, Alternatives Unlimited and ACE Learning Center all may have something to offer, but the state must be sure to look objectively at their results as well as their methodologies.

and some words of wisdom:

Given the complexity of the dropout problem, it is unlikely that one approach will solve it.

Hear, hear.

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