The four-day school week (4DSW) has become increasingly popular in Missouri in recent years. As of fall 2023, 33 percent of all Missouri traditional public school districts have adopted this schedule. But how much do we know about its impact on student achievement, district finances, teacher recruitment and retention, or parental satisfaction? The short answer is: not as much as you might expect.

Learn more about what the available literature says about the impact of the switch to the 4DSW and what Missouri parents think about the four-day schedule.

The post Watch: The Rise of the Four-day School Week in Missouri 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.

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The problem is that allowing retired teachers to come back to the classroom does nothing to address the problem. Let me be clear on what I mean by “the problem.” I am not talking about the problem of teacher recruitment and the number of people entering the profession. I’m talking about the teacher pipeline problem caused by the retirement system itself. It is a system that pushes people out. It incentivizes teachers, principals, and superintendents to retire in their mid-50s. This new provision does not address that issue; instead, it makes it worse.

Researchers have long known that defined-benefit pensions, such as those used in the Missouri teaching profession, have two key effects on the labor market. They provide a pull for workers to stay until the peak benefit period, then they push workers out. If a teacher begins working in Missouri right out of college around the age of 22, they will likely hit their peak benefit period around the age of 53.

If lawmakers truly want to keep great late-career teachers in the profession, they should revise the system that pushes them out in the first place. The best way to do this would be to move to a new type of pension system where teachers’ retirement plans would continue to accrue wealth as they continue to work through their 50s.

If we view Senate Bill 75 as a temporary fix (it does have a sunset built in) to address an immediate issue of teacher shortages, then the bill is fine. It is not, however, a fix to a teacher pension system that pushes out individuals who have so much more to give.

The post A Bandage Approach: Teaching after Retirement appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

One glaring problem I see in the report is a complete lack of thought to almost anything besides compensation. Don’t get me wrong, compensation matters, and the commission is absolutely right to consider compensation. But if you are going to examine why there are reported teacher shortages, you ought to do a better job looking for causes or kinks in the teacher pipeline. Simply surveying existing teachers about whether they’d like more money (they would) will not help us answer the most pressing questions.

What are the causes of our current teacher shortage? They are certainly varied. But one thing the commission never seemed to consider was the current hiring practices of school districts.

From 2011 to 2021, enrollment in Missouri public schools dropped by nearly 30,000 students. The largest drop was post-COVID, with the state losing over 20,000 students in that year alone. Nevertheless, the trend is clearly downward.

It would make sense, given that total enrollment in the state has been decreasing, to see a similar decline in the number of teachers. Fewer students, fewer teachers needed. But instead, we see the opposite happening. As enrollment drops, the state continues to add to the number of teachers. In the table below, I present the number of full-time equivalent teachers (FTE). From 2011 to 2021—the same period that the state lost 30,000 students—the state added 2,475 FTE teachers. As the state dropped 20,000 students from the rolls, it only lost 10 FTE teachers. This brings the ratio down from 13.2 students per FTE teacher in 2011 to 12.3 in 2021.

If we looked at non-teaching staff and administration, we’d likely see similar trends. Indeed, Economist Ben Scafidi found exactly this when he looked at the data from 1992 to 2015. During that time period, Missouri student enrollment increased 9% while teachers increased 28% and all other staff increased 24%. Hiring seems to be uncorrelated with trends in student enrollment.

Why didn’t the commission consider this? Why wasn’t someone willing to ask the question, “Why are we increasing the number of teachers when the number of students is dropping?”

If you want to understand the teacher shortage, this is pretty important information.

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I was, after all, a male entering elementary school teaching. There was a chance that I’d give a child a hug or have them sit on my lap and someone would leap to the wrong conclusion. Before I knew it, I’d be falsely charged with some crime. Or, heaven forbid, a student would get hurt while under my supervision and I’d be sued for negligence. Still more likely was that I could be discriminated against, harassed, or targeted by a reckless administrator. Whatever the situation, the message was clear—I needed to join a union for the protection it offered. A union, I was told, would watch out for my interests; it would have my back.

My professors, whom I believe were well intentioned and likely just following the advice they had received, prodded and pushed me to join a student chapter. So, I did. Having spoken with many teachers over the years, I’m fairly confident this is the number one recruitment strategy of teachers’ unions in the state. If I was ever told that a union would help me grow professionally or become a better teacher, it was only an afterthought.

When I began teaching first grade in southwest Missouri, I went from student membership to a full-fledged membership. Over the next two years, however, I began to realize that my beliefs were not in line with the union’s agenda. I supported limited government, individual responsibility, and free-markets. The union, I discovered, did not.

At the same time, I also began to realize that the fear that led me to join a union was based on erroneous information. Lawsuits against teachers are not that common. In a 2009 article in the Journal of School Leadership, Diane Holben, Perry Zirkel, and Grace Caskie noted, “Empirical research on school litigation frequency suggests a decreasing, rather than increasing, basis for fear of litigation, contrary to the common conception.” The likelihood of a teacher getting sued independent of the school is miniscule, and the school district wins these cases nearly 90 percent of the time. Even if I was worried about lawsuits, I found I could get liability insurance through other means. The union wasn’t the only option for watching my back.

Fortunately, I was a public-school teacher in Missouri, where I had the right to work without joining a union. This meant I could not be compelled to join the union or forced to pay dues to support collective bargaining. It also meant that I did not have to financially support causes that violated my conscience. All workers should be so lucky.

The post Teachers’ Union Recruitment Thrives on Fear appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Roza points out that rewarding teachers in this manner has serious implications for teacher recruitment and retention, fiscal sustainability, and pension obligations. High-quality college graduates with high-paying alternatives may steer clear of education. Similarly, young teachers may be more inclined to leave the profession because of low salaries.

Teachers are primarily paid via a salary schedule, which gives standardized raises to teachers for each additional year of service and each additional postgraduate degree earned. The problem is that a salary schedule often gives teachers a raise that is set as a percentage of what they make, not a predetermined dollar amount. This leads to larger end-of-career increases, because the raises compound over time. For a teacher who starts at $40,000 per year, a 3% raise at the end of the first year will mean a $1200 increase. But their second-year raise will come to 3% of $41,200, which works out to $1,236. Keep projecting the numbers out and each year’s raise just gets bigger and bigger.

In addition, school districts often give cost-of-living (COLA) raises. These too are often awarded on a percentage basis, further widening the pay gap between veteran and novice teachers.

I highlighted this in a post a couple years ago. In which I wrote:

Take, for example, the salary schedule for a teacher with a master’s degree in the Parkway School District. In his or her first 10 years, a teacher in Parkway only receives a 17 percent pay raise. Between their 11th and 20th years, they receive a 51 percent pay raise. The difference is $20,000. It is no wonder we have difficulty retaining new teachers. The system is designed by veteran teachers for veteran teachers. After all, veteran teachers are usually the ones who serve on salary bargaining committees.

Teachers are unique among professionals in this regard. Using U.S. Census Bureau data, Roza calculated the earnings trends for teachers, lawyers, doctors, accountants, and computer programmers. Compared to these other professions, teacher pay is significantly back-loaded.

I have written a number of times about the need to revamp how we pay teachers (see here and here). In this report, Roza doesn’t go that far. Rather, she offers a simple solution to slow down the growth in inequity between junior and senior teachers—a fixed-dollar pay raise. Instead of awarding COLA’s on a percentage term, districts should award the same dollar amount to teachers at every step of the pay schedule.

Regardless of your preferred method of reform, Missouri will struggle to attract and retain great young teachers until we stop back-loading teacher salaries.

The post How to Prevent Teacher Pay Inequity from Worsening appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Is such an out-migration happening? Let’s dig into the numbers.

One frequently hyperlinked story comes from Sam Zeff of KCUR.  (A transcript can be found here.)  Unfortunately, it only offers two real data points. First:

“With just six weeks to go before classes begin, there are about 700 open jobs in Kansas, double, Wilson says, the number they usually have this close to school.”

The problem with this statistic? It has no context. On Monday, The New York Times dedicated its front page  to a story on states all across the country struggling to recruit and retain teachers. As author Motoko Rich points out:

“In California, the number of people entering teacher preparation programs dropped by more than 55 percent from 2008 to 2012, according to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. Nationally, the drop was 30 percent from 2010 to 2014, according to federal data. Alternative programs like Teach for America, which will place about 4,000 teachers in schools across the country this fall, have also experienced recruitment problems.”

This is a macro-trend in education right now, not just an issue for Kansas. To wit, the Times story focuses on California, where voters dramatically raised taxes via Prop 30 at roughly the same time Kansas was cutting them. They’re struggling just as much, if not more.

The second bit of hard evidence from the KCUR story is even more underwhelming:

“Data from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education suggest there is indeed a migration of teachers from Kansas to Missouri. In 2011 before huge tax cuts were enacted, only 85 applications for Missouri teaching licenses were filed with a Kansas address. In the next three years, as school budgets were slashed, applications doubled.”

That would be around 170 teachers total, and only 85 more than normal.  For a little perspective, Kansas has 41,243 teachers, so those 85 teachers represent 0.2% of Kansas’s teaching force. I’m not sure “migration” is the right word for that.

Probably the second most cited resource is this AP report that found 3,720 Kansas teachers leaving either Kansas or the profession entirely last school year, compared to an unnamed date in the recent past when only 2,150 left.  

Again, context: Using the numbers above, 3,720 teachers make up roughly 9 percent of Kansas’s teaching force. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 8 percent of teachers leave the profession nationally every year, and an additional 8 percent move to different schools.  That means Kansas’s numbers are right in line with, or possibly even better than, national averages.

Kansas has not been immune to national trends affecting the number of people becoming or remaining teachers, but I see little justification for Kansas-specific alarm. I know it doesn’t fit the preferred narrative, but the truth often doesn’t.

The post Is there evidence of a “teacher exodus” from Kansas? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Last November, the Cooperating School Districts of Greater St. Louis pitched the idea of providing high-quality teachers as instructional coaches in struggling schools. A similar idea was raised by CEE-Trust, the consulting firm that the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education hired to address problems in the Kansas City School District. The CEE-Trust proposal called on accredited school districts “to play a significant role in helping [unaccredited] systems improve.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch heaped praise on this idea, calling it among the “more promising ideas.”

However, there is one easily overlooked obstacle standing in the way of turning this localized version of a teacher peace corps into a reality in our two biggest cities: the incompatibility of different pension systems.

The suburban districts are a part of the Public School Retirement System (PSRS), as are all other school districts throughout Missouri – with the exception of Saint Louis and Kansas City, which have autonomous pension systems. If a teacher moves from PSRS to one of the city plans, he or she will incur a significant loss in pension wealth.

This is not a new problem, but a longstanding one. Saint Louis and Kansas City have been struggling with this for years. Research by University of Missouri economists has demonstrated that the separate pension systems create a barrier to recruiting school leaders into the two urban school districts. The separate pension systems also limit the pool of teachers who are willing to work in the cities. Jeffrey Kuntze, chief operating officer of the Confluence Charter Schools in Saint Louis, says “the separate pension systems make it extremely difficult for us to recruit veteran teachers from the county. We can get them when they retire, but not mid-career.”

These pension boundaries are not a problem for Normandy and Riverview Gardens, which are in PSRS, but they would make it practically impossible for high-performing school districts to operate a program, run a school, or loan teachers within the Saint Louis or Kansas City boundaries. They simply could not move teachers or school leaders across pension boundaries without making them suffer great financial penalties.

There is no easy way to solve this problem. Some have suggested we move Saint Louis and Kansas City into PSRS. This sounds like a good idea but is practically impossible because of Social Security. City teachers pay into it while PSRS teachers do not. Schools in Saint Louis and Kansas City cannot withdraw from Social Security. In effect, we have a Hotel California problem — urban schools can check out any time they like, but they can never leave Social Security.

The only real solution is to close the current systems to new entrants and place them in a new, statewide system that participates in Social Security. Before this idea causes mass hysteria, let me stress that this would not affect current employees’ or retirees’ pensions. They would remain secure in their current system. It would, however, remove the artificial pension boundaries and allow us to create a better pension system for teachers and students.

Opponents of this idea claim that closing the current defined benefit systems would be financially unsound, as it would lead to considerable “transition costs” that would far outstrip any benefits that we may receive. This is the very issue tackled in a recent Show-Me Institute policy study by Andrew Biggs, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Biggs examines the evidence for “transition costs” and concludes that the concerns are “largely mistaken and should not stand in the way of public employee pension reforms.”

Whether you believe busing teachers into failing schools is a viable solution or just another feel-good proposition, fixing this pension problem should be a top priority. Missouri should not have a system that puts our neediest communities at a disadvantage when it comes to recruiting talented teachers.

James V. Shuls, Ph.D., is the director of education policy at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.

The post Want Better Teachers In High-Need Schools? Fix Pensions appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

When my wife and I entered college and both majored in education, the furthest thing from our minds was our pensions. When we accepted teaching positions, she in the Spokane School District and I in the Republic School District, we did not care about pensions. When I entered graduate school and we moved out of state, I lost half of my pension contributions; we started to care.

As public school teachers in southwest Missouri, we were part of the Public School Retirement System (PSRS). Currently, teachers in PSRS contribute 14.5 percent of their salary to the defined benefit pension system. The school district matches that amount. The funds are not very portable. If you leave before vesting at five years, you lose your employer contributions. If you leave prior to retirement age, you lose much of your pension wealth.

This is a problem in Missouri because Kansas City and Saint Louis are on completely different pension systems. As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported, “Switching between these retirement systems can be costly for teachers.” For instance, if a teacher works for 15 years in a PSRS district and then 15 years in the St. Louis Public School District, she would have about half as much pension wealth as if she stays in one system for the entire 30 years.

Jonathan Shorman’s recent piece in the Springfield News-Leader reported that the Show-Me Institute requested funds to conduct research on these pension systems, “but has already determined the conclusions it plans to reach.” But that is not the case.

Research shows that there are problems with having three separate pension systems. Mobile teachers lose pension wealth and this hurts teacher recruitment in both Saint Louis and Kansas City. That fact has been well-documented in newspaper accounts and in the academic literature.

Everyone can agree that Missouri teachers should have a secure retirement. But a secure retirement can be achieved while allowing individuals to move without being penalized and to leave the profession without losing half of their contributions.

What we do not know, and hope to find out, is what type of compensation arrangements would help schools improve teacher recruitment efforts and would be appealing to teachers. Fewer than 20 percent of teachers in the two cities will make it to full retirement. This means the current system will penalize the majority of those teachers. Would these teachers rather have higher salaries now and less contributed to their pensions? Would they prefer portability over larger payouts?

We will continue to explore these questions and will continue to seek funding for our research. Those who disagree with us may think there is something nefarious about this, but perhaps they have determined their conclusions about us before fully examining our ideas.

Teacher pensions are worth caring about and they deserve an honest discussion about what is best for all teachers, even the mobile ones.

James V. Shuls, Ph.D., earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in elementary education and taught for four years in the Republic School District. Currently, he is an education policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy. His wife is currently vested in PSRS.

The post Show-Me Institute Supports Strong Pensions For All Teachers appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Like Chicago, the difficulty of attracting high-quality individuals into the classroom is a problem we face here in Missouri. Teachers score lower than average on a number of standardized tests, includingthe SAT, the GRE, and the Armed Forces Qualification Test (see here). A study using Missouri data found that 20 percent of teachers scored a 19 or lower on the ACT and 69.6 percent scored a 24 or lower.

There are number of issues that perpetuate this problem of below average individuals entering the classroom. For starters, schools seemingly do a poor job of seeking out high-performing individuals.

In a recent study I co-authored for the Office for Education Policy at the University of Arkansas, we examined the application documents of 50 randomly selected Arkansas school districts. What we found was pretty alarming. More schools asked teachers what high school they attended (67 percent) than how they did on the teacher licensure exams (13 percent). Approximately half asked for the applicant’s GPA and none asked for ACT or SAT scores. Certainly scoring higher on a test does not necessarily make you a better teacher, but there is ample evidence to suggest higher-scoring individuals are higher-performing teachers.

Even if schools did request academic information from applicants, they would have little leverage to attract high-performing individuals. The single-salary schedule, which is in place in almost all public schools in Missouri, does not allow administrators to pay individuals more for their aptitude or their potential for being a great teacher. In essence, we get below-average teachers because we treat all the above-average ones like they are . . . average.

The post Help Wanted: High-Performing Teachers Need Not Apply appeared first on Show-Me Institute.