Paying teachers to get master’s degrees that do not make them more effective is inefficient. Most obviously, it misdirects school district resources—why privilege teachers who get a credential that does not make them better at their jobs when we could use metrics tied to actual performance, or just pay all teachers more? The master’s pay premium also incentivizes teachers to invest tuition money, time, and energy in degrees with no measurable value. And the artificial demand fueled by these policies encourages universities to expand the degree programs themselves. All around, it is a tremendous waste of resources.

A new report released by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) describes the current national policy landscape with respect to the master’s degree premium. The report identifies Missouri as one of just 15 states that require districts to pay a master’s degree premium. In fact, we just re-upped the policy in 2024 with Senate Bill 727, which raised minimum teacher pay and maintained a new, higher minimum pay standard for teachers with master’s degrees (and at least 10 years of experience).

The NCTQ report also looked at salary schedules in 140 large districts in the United States, including three in Missouri: Kansas City, Springfield, and St. Louis. All three have large pay premiums for teachers with master’s degrees, especially highly experienced teachers. For example, with 20 or more years of experience the premium exceeds $10,000 annually in all three districts, and it gets as high as $18,600 in Kansas City.

This is a steep price to pay for a credential that has been demonstrated repeatedly to have no connection to classroom effectiveness. It’s time to end this practice.

The post We Shouldn’t Pay Teachers for Master’s Degrees appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Teachers in nearly every school district are paid by what is called a “single salary schedule.” This is a system that pays all teachers, regardless of subject matter expertise or teacher demand in that district, the same amount. These schedules generally provide raises based on years of experience and graduate degrees.

When I spoke with that group of doctoral students, I presented a hypothetical situation of a local business. When the business attempted to hire, they received numerous applications for one type of position and very few for another. I asked them what they might do to attract and retain people in that harder-to-staff position. The answer was clear—pay them more.

This is the very situation we have in public schools. Some positions may get few, if any, applications. These include subjects such as physics or, in some instances, special education. Nevertheless, school districts fail to use one of the key levers they have to attract and retain these teachers—pay. Instead, everyone is on the same salary schedule.

In that 2012 report, I argued that school districts could place teachers in hard-to-staff subjects at a higher level on the salary schedule. SB 727 followed that recommendation completely. The bill states: “The board of education of a school district may include differentiated placement of teachers on the salary schedule to increase compensation in order to recruit and retain teachers in hard-to-staff subject areas or hard-to-staff schools.”

When I joined the Show-Me Institute’s Director of Education Policy Susan Pendergrass on a recent podcast to discuss SB 727, I said there were things in the bill that people would like and other things they would not like. Allowing districts to differentiate pay for hard-to-staff subjects is a sensible policy that everyone should like. Of course, it would be even better if we could pay teachers based on everything they bring to the table, including their performance, but this is a step in the right direction.

The post Differentiated Teacher Pay in Senate Bill 727 appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

For students, this bill expands access to Missouri’s education savings account (ESA) program, provides a new pathway to creating a charter school in Columbia, and creates a new evidence-based home reading program.

SB 727 provides students increased access to schools that better suit their needs. We tell children all the time to dream big, and this will give many students additional opportunities to attend a school of their dreams—not just of their address.

Parents also receive an additional benefit from this bill. In larger communities (of more than 30,000 or in/partially in a charter county), districts now must win parental approval by vote in order to move to a four-day school week.

For teachers, increased salaries and scholarships are on the way. Minimum starting salaries will be raised from $25,000 to $40,000. Additionally, salaries for teachers with a master’s degree and ten years of experience will be raised from $33,000 to $46,000 (and then to $48,000 by 2027–2028).

For teachers in hard-to-staff subjects, districts will have the option to provide them differentiated compensation through higher placement on the teacher salary schedule. Additionally, teachers who work in hard-to-staff schools can be granted differentiated pay from the district. A scholarship program will also be created for individuals who agree to teach in hard-to-staff subject areas and schools in Missouri following their graduation. For a state that does not have a general shortage of teachers, but a shortage in specific areas, this is a step toward retaining and recruiting these high-need teachers.

While there are other policies that I hope can be implemented to strengthen SB 727, such as open enrollment for all, I will save those discussions for another day. Today, I am just glad for the progress that has been made.

The post Missouri Sparks a Brighter Future for Students, Parents, and Teachers appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Charter schools could be coming to Boone County. If a group of teachers, parents, or citizens wants to open a charter school and has a solid application, it can now apply to a university or the state charter school board for sponsorship. The group does not need the approval of a local school board.

Eligibility for the MOScholars scholarship program for low-income students and students with disabilities has been greatly expanded. There are no longer geographic restrictions for who is eligible. The income limits for eligibility have been raised. The total amount of tax credits that can be dedicated to the program was increased from $50 million to $75 million. And the dollar amount of the scholarship was raised to bring the number in line with the Foundation Formula amounts for similar types of students.

Districts in the state’s largest communities must now put a potential switch to a four-day school week to a vote. There is also a financial incentive that will be remitted to any district that remains open five days per week.

There is also an important change to the state’s foundation formula. Previously, students were counted purely based on attendance. Now, the formula will be 50 percent based on attendance and 50 percent based on enrollment.

The minimum teacher salary was raised from $25,000 to $40,000 for all teachers and from $33,000 to $46,000 for teachers with master’s degrees.

Districts will be able to attempt to fill teaching positions in “hard-to-staff” schools by placing teachers higher on the salary schedule than they normally would be.

There are many more provisions to SB 727. It represents a defensible trade-off between increasing options for Missouri students who need them and investing in the system. I look forward to the governor signing it.

The post A Win for Education in Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

My colleagues and I will delve into the various reforms in the days and weeks ahead, but here the focus will be on the new procedures and requirements relating to the four-day school week (4dsw).

First, this bill would establish a new voting procedure for larger districts that want to use a 4dsw schedule.

Under the new procedures in the bill, the district school board must pass the measure to implement a 4dsw. Then, the school board–approved proposal will go to a vote by the public. The vote would take place at the next date available for public elections. If a majority of votes are in favor, the 4dsw will be established.

However, this provision is limited, as this requirement only applies to school districts located wholly or partially in a county with a charter form of government, or located wholly or partially in a city with more than 30,000 inhabitants.

Essentially, this provision would be limited to school districts in or partially in St. Louis, Kansas City, Jefferson County, Clay County, St. Charles County, St. Joseph, Springfield, Columbia, Joplin, Jefferson City, and Cape Girardeau. According to my analysis of the bill language, only around 100 school districts and charter schools (about 20% of districts and charters) will be subject to this voting provision.

This voting measure would likely better represent parental preferences, but why are smaller communities excluded from this new policy? Additionally, without open enrollment or greater educational choice policies in Missouri, there will still be numerous families trapped in a 4dsw district despite preferring a different schedule.

This bill also includes reforms regarding the minimum number of school days for districts. Back in 2018, SB 743 changed instructional time requirements in Missouri. At that time, public schools were required to be in session a minimum of 174 days and 1,044 hours a year—but with SB 743, the requirement became only 1,044 hours with no required number of days. Following this change (which took effect in the 2019–20 school year), the number of 4dsw districts in Missouri shot up from 34 to 62, and has since increased to 173 in 2023–2024, according to my own calculations.

SB 727 would re-establish a minimum number of required days in a school year (the 1,044 hour minimum will also remain in place):

• 169 days for five-day school week districts
• 142 days for four-day school week districts

This provision is also limited. The minimum number of days requirement, as with the voting provision, will only apply to school districts in the larger cities and counties mentioned above. Of those roughly 100 districts, only five use a 4dsw, and all already meet the 142-day minimum requirement. In fact, around 87% of all 4dsw districts in 2022–2023 had 142 or more instructional days. (It should be noted that the 169-day limit for 5dsw districts is still rather low—over 30 states have a minimum of 180 days or more. Not a single district or charter school in Missouri reached 180 instructional days in 2022–2023, outside of two charter Pre-K programs.)

While smaller districts may not be subject to the minimum day requirement, SB 727 has a separate provision that incentivizes creating more school days in a different way.

The bill states that any district that provided 169 school days or more will be remitted an amount equal to 1% of its annual state aid entitlement for fiscal years 2026 and 2027, and 2% for 2028 and onward. All monies from this additional aid must be used exclusively to increase teacher salaries. If a district does not meet the 169-day minimum, it is not punished, but it does not receive the extra money. This provision appears to be an attempt to incentivize a five-day school week schedule.

In a recently published literature review that I authored with James Shuls, we noted that districts justify their move to a 4dsw based on district finances or teacher retention and recruitment. Using numbers from the 2022–2023 school year and assumptions based on what the SB 727 fiscal note includes, I found that a 1% aid bonus would equate to an average of around $24,000 for districts that used a 4dsw in the 2022–2023 school year and a 2% aid bonus would equate to an average of around $48,000. On average, a 2% aid bonus for 4dsw districts would be equivalent to around 0.6% of a 4dsw district’s total expenses—not a huge sum to incentivize a major schedule change.

(For 5dsw districts, the average 2% aid bonus is around $173,000—equating to an average 0.5% of their expenses. It should also be noted that these calculations are based on 532 of the 553 districts and charters).

In 2022–2023, around 466 school districts and charters did not have 169 instructional days or more. About 30 districts and charters had 168 days of instruction, and about 110 districts and charters had 164 to 167 days of instruction. SB 727 will most likely move all of these districts to 169 days and incentivize other 5dsw districts to increase instructional days. If the goal of this part of the bill is to increase the number of days most Missouri students are in school, SB 727 could accomplish this.

However, if the goal of this part of the bill is to begin moving the 173 4dsw districts back to a 5dsw, this provision will probably be ineffective. It is too little money for too big a change, and many districts may argue that the savings they receive from using a 4dsw is higher than the aid they could receive. The fiscal note for this bill estimates that the state could end up paying districts $75 million via these bonuses. If there’s extra money lying around, wouldn’t it be better to spend it on something else, such as increasing funding for the ESA program?

With talks of more districts potentially moving to a 4dsw in the 2024–2025 school year, it will be interesting to see if the 4dsw will continue to rapidly grow in Missouri. For now, it does not appear that SB 727 creates any significant incentive to buck that trend.

The post How Will the Four-day School Week Progress in Light of SB 727? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Elsewhere, Tennessee has been lauded for completely overhauling its funding formula so that it is responsive, accountable, and student centered. Public funding is sent to where students attend school and not to where they attended school three years ago, as in Missouri. In the process of this redesign, Tennessee also raised teacher salaries and encouraged flexibility in teacher pay over the old step-and-ladder systems. Again, there’s nothing wrong with raising teacher salaries in the process of crafting good policy.

Currently, the Missouri Legislature is considering a bill that addresses a range of education issue, perhaps with the idea that if some groups like one part and others like another part, it may pass. That makes sense. The legislative sausage machine requires negotiation. But let’s look at this bill closely to see how much Missouri families might actually benefit.

The bill greatly expands eligibility for the existing MO Scholars education savings account (ESA) program. That could be a win for families. Almost every student in the state would qualify to receive a scholarship, because the income limit would be raised to four times the federal poverty line, or $120,000 for a family of four. The bill also eliminates the current geographic restriction on which students are eligible to receive scholarships—a much-needed change.

There’s just one problem with the ESA expansion proposed in this bill. Unlike Arkansas (or Iowa, Arizona, Utah, West Virginia, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Florida), Missouri isn’t willing to provide the scholarships. Sure, Missouri is willing raise the cap on the amount of money that the existing six approved scholarship organizations can fundraise in order to pass out scholarships. But that’s as far as the bill goes—no public funding at all.

There is a distinct possibility that, to get this passed, Senate Bill (SB) 727 (or actually its committee substitute) will be amended to provide state funds to raise minimum teacher pay in the state from $25,000 to $38,000 with a provision that school districts can request reimbursement for any mandatory salary increases from a new Teacher Salary Baseline Grant Fund.

A gap seems to exist between those who believe in school choice and those who support public education. I’m for both, but I’m just one voice. I think it’s fine to try to bridge that gap by offering concessions to both sides. But let’s make sure they carry equal weight. If one comes with public funding and the other comes with “good luck getting the money together,” then they’re not really equal. Maybe it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

The post This Is a Compromise? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Well, it does. Stick with me on this.

Last year, Missouri’s budget included an appropriation increasing the minimum Missouri starting teacher salary to $38,000, funded primarily by state tax dollars and not local school taxes. This year, officials are proposing legislation to raise it even higher, with the same primary funding from the state. Where do you think those state tax dollars are going to come from, and where is this new fund to increase starting teacher salaries going to be spent?

It is more difficult for rural school districts to fund themselves with property taxes because of the high percentage of agricultural property in those areas. (I’m not saying it’s impossible, just more difficult.) Whether you like it or not, farmland is underassessed in Missouri(most farmers presumably like it). It is hard to raise the revenue necessary for a small school district with a tax base starting out so low. Since tax rates are the same for various classes of property (except in St. Louis County), setting a rate high enough to raise enough funds from farmland would mean incredibly high taxes on the more accurately assessed homes and businesses in those communities.

Urban and suburban school districts, for the most part, aren’t starting their teachers out at $25,000. At Indeed.com, every job opening I saw for City of St. Louis public schools started at $46,000. In this blog post, James Shuls goes into more detail on this discrepancy. (James goes into even further detail on the problems of funding rural school districts here.)

Where do the taxes that fund much of Missouri government and, by obvious extension, this new state teacher fund, come from? As this map shows, our larger urban counties produce an outsized percentage of Missouri’s economic activities. St. Louis County alone produces over 25% of the state’s GDP. State income and sales tax collections are going to largely align with those totals.

If you were a voter in rural Missouri, and you were told that you could vote for a local tax increase or have the state pay for salary increases for your school district, what would you pick? We would all pick the latter.

This issue will play out similarly to the sheriff salary issue of about 15 years ago. There, the state decided to increase sheriff’s deputy salaries by adding a fee to process service around the state. The problem was that St. Louis County, which has a county police department and a sheriff’s department that is not a law enforcement agency (trust me on this, I used to be a county sheriff), was ineligible for the funds even though it generated more fees from process service than any other county in the state. Yes, lawsuits were filed over it, but they failed (unfortunately).

I like low taxes. If rural Missourians want low taxes, I’m all for it. But we should not establish a system where rural teacher salaries are paid for (mostly) by taxpayers in urban and suburban areas. The combination of low assessed farm values and a desire for low tax rates in rural areas should not be addressed by taking money from urban areas. I recall signs along I-70 years ago on farm fences objecting to using state funds for sports stadiums in St. Louis. Those signs were correct then, and they still are now, but it works both ways.

The post The Connection Between Farmland Assessment and Teacher Pay Increases appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics (Table 211.50 and Table 236.55), I calculated how many students it took to pay for the average teacher’s salary. I calculated this by dividing the average salary by per–pupil operating expenditures. In 1960, it took 13.3 students to generate the equivalent amount of money as a teacher’s salary. That number dropped steadily over time. By 2000, it was 5.7, and in 2020 it was just 4.4 students.

You read that right: fewer than five students in a class is enough to cover a teacher’s salary today.

So where does all that money go? Ben Scafidi, an economist at Kennesaw State University, has some ideas. He noted that from 1950 to 2015, the number of administrators and other staff has increased by 709% nationally. In that same time period, the number of students went up 100% and the number of teachers went up 243%.

In more recent years, the number of students in Missouri has been declining. Yet the number of teachers is going up.

There is a very simple way to increase teacher pay, and it does not require any legislation. School districts can make different staffing decisions—hire fewer administrators and free up dollars to pay teachers more.

The post Education Spending: Where Does the Money Go? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The policy conversation around this question typically assumes a state solution. Read the newspapers or listen to testimony before the state legislature and you will hear a clear narrative—it is the state’s responsibility to raise salaries. This ignores the fact that local school districts set the starting salary. Assuming the state is responsible also ignores the important role of local school districts in raising funds for schools.

The Missouri funding formula is a complex partnership of state and local effort. When the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) determines how much aid each school will receive, the state calculates how much money the district can raise locally. In doing so, the state assumes a tax rate, or performance levy, of $3.43 per $100 of assessed valuation.

Yet more than 30% of all school districts in Missouri do not even tax themselves at the rate DESE assumes in funding formula calculations. In 2022, 162 school districts taxed themselves at rates lower than $3.43.

School property tax rates are set locally. Changes to tax rates are proposed by local boards of education and local taxpayers vote on those changes. Though Missouri allows for tax rates to vary among school districts, the state has instituted a required minimum rate of $2.75 per $100 of assessed valuation.

In 2022, 55 school districts taxed themselves at the state minimum rate. On average, these districts raised just 38.4% of their funding from local sources.

Missouri could go a long way in raising teacher salaries if these low-tax school districts would simply tax themselves at the state’s assumed performance levy. That, of course, has rarely been mentioned in serious policy conversations.

The post Want Higher Teacher Salaries? Raise Property Taxes appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post What Does Missouri’s Teacher Shortage Really Look Like appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In that post where I corrected the record on Missouri’s actual starting teacher salary, I noted some additional facts related to Missouri’s staffing policies:

Missouri ranks 43rd in average salaries for instructional staff. Meanwhile, Missouri ranks 48th in student-to-teacher ratio, with 11.3 students per teacher. In comparison, Illinois’s ratio is 14.3 to 1, ranking the state 28th. In 2021, revenues for Missouri’s public schools were $15,809 per student, which is 31st overall nationwide. These data suggest that part of the reason Missouri’s teacher salaries are relatively low is due to staffing choices made by school districts themselves. It is funny when you question the narrative with facts how some people like to twist what you are saying. On Twitter, for example, one person responded by asking, “Are you upset the teacher/student ratio is so low, too?” That’s a strange interpretation. I’m just offering an explanation. It’s simple math really.

Missouri school districts could choose to hire fewer teachers and pay them more or hire more teachers and pay them less. They choose the latter.

Let’s work this out a bit more. Let’s assume everything remains constant (the number of students and the state’s payroll for teachers), but we change the student-to-teacher ratio. If Missouri were to match Illinois’ ratio of 14.3, Missouri teachers could realize a 26.5% increase in their salaries.

By choosing to hire fewer teachers, Missouri schools could choose to raise average teacher salaries from $51,557 to $65,244. This would push the Show-Me State’s ranking in average teacher salary up to 16^th in the nation.

If we moved the students enrolled per teacher figure up to match Florida’s 19.6 to 1 ratio, it would result in a 73.4% increase in teachers’ salaries. This would raise Missouri’s average teacher salary up to $89,426 and would put  Missouri second only behind New York.

All of the policy attention has been on Missouri’s minimum teacher salary of $25,000. According to the Missouri State Teacher’s Association, only one district in the entire state starts teachers at that rate (the Middle Grove School District, with 35 students).

Of course, raising a student-to-teacher ratio is not as simple as the mathematical exercise I’ve done here. Nevertheless, the point remains. School districts make staffing decisions and those decisions impact salaries as much, if not more, than the state-mandated minimum salary.

Note on the calculations used:

average salary = P/T = P/S x S/T, where S= students, P=payroll, T=teachers.

So if spending per student (P/S) is constant, salary varies proportionately with S/T. If MO had the same S/T ratio as Illinois then average teacher pay in Missouri could rise by 26.5% (100 x 14.3/11.3) with no change in spending.

The post Raising the Student/Teacher Ratio Would Increase Teacher Salaries appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

• Tax cuts at the local level
• Transparency for stimulus funds
• How federal spending affects Missouri’s budget
• Missouri students falling behind
• Teacher salaries in Missouri

Click here to find the newsletter.

The post Show-Me Institute’s December 2022 Newsletter appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

 Show-Me Institute writers have discussed this report in greater detail in previous posts, but here I want to draw attention to comments made by the Commissioner of Education.

In response to the release of these aforementioned test scores, the commissioner released two quotes:

1. “The results serve as another indicator that high-quality instruction matters.”
2. “It’s clear that the pandemic had an impact on student learning and that there is work to do. We must use this information, alongside state and local metrics, to continue accelerating post-pandemic learning with improved systems and processes to meet the needs of each student.”

I don’t disagree with the first statement, but what does it say about the quality of Missouri’s teachers? Is the commissioner suggesting that the teachers are to blame for the drop in test scores? And if so, what exactly does the commissioner propose to do about it?

How about this for starters: If high-quality instruction matters so much (and it does), maybe Missouri’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) should reconsider its policy of tying teacher salaries solely to experience and degree acquisition rather than student performance.

As to the second point: yes, the pandemic, or at least the response to the pandemic, did have an impact. Closing schools for months at a time does tend to impair the progress of our students. And yes, there is more work to do . . . but is there nothing more concrete to suggest than “improved systems and processes”? How about turning a critical eye toward DESE’s policy of blanket accreditation and the restrictions on open enrollment and school choice?

The response of our Department of Education to these test results tells us everything we need to know about why Missouri students are lagging behind their peers. Leadership is about a lot more than stating the obvious and then offering anodyne generalities as an excuse for doing nothing. Leadership is about taking real action, even if it means ruffling the feathers of entrenched interests.

What’s really horrifying about the NAEP results is that DESE clearly has no plans to do anything about them.

If Missouri education were a horror movie, we’d say that it’s time for the hero to stop looking outside for monsters to slay.

The calls are coming from inside the house.

The post Fright Night in Missouri Comes Early appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Well, I wish twelve-year-old me could show him the Missouri Teacher Recruitment and Retention Blue Ribbon Commission’s report on what needs to be done in order to solve Missouri’s “teaching shortage,” because apparently, a money tree has bloomed and is ripe for the picking.

The report recommended increasing the minimum starting salary for teachers to $38,000, funding the Career Ladder Program (which rewards teachers for extra work that contributes to students’ academic outcomes), establishing a fund to help local school districts pay for the recommended salary increase, adding more paid wellness days (which means hiring more substitute teachers), funding a tuition assistance program for teachers, and providing salary supplements for teachers with National Board Certification.

Funding the starting salary, Career Ladder, and tuition assistance alone would cost an additional $91.5 million—and that is not including the costs for raising other teachers’ salaries who reside above the new $38,000 floor.

While those on the commission were feeling generous endorsing the handout of government funds, similar to Jimmy Conway in Goodfellas (who would give $100 to the bartender just for keeping the ice cubes cold), they did recommend an additional salary supplement for teachers in “high-need” areas.

Show-Me Institute researchers have previously discussed how pay differentiation for teachers could help fix the shortage of specific teachers in the state. Missouri utilizes a “single salary schedule,” which sets a salary floor for teachers who are new and those with 10 years of experience and a master’s degree. The remainder of the salaries in the schedule are calculated by pay increases relating directly to experience and degree acquisition.

This type of schedule rewards teachers solely based on experience and college degrees while ignoring teacher quality, relative teacher supply, and alternative market options. A potential mathematics teacher, who would be in low supply, is therefore not offered her market equivalent wage, and may choose a higher paying vocation. If schools truly want to be competitive and recruit teachers in low-supply fields, then they must respond to competitive market forces.

Almost fifty percent of teachers said they would quit their job if differentiated pay or pay for performance was implemented. Mark Walker, the commission’s chairman, critiqued this stance, stating: “The biggest surprise to us businesspeople serving on the Blue Ribbon Commission is the lack of flexibility you all [the board] has for meeting high-need positions, it’s unbelievably inappropriate in today’s highly competitive market.”

The commission has been tasked with finding solutions to the teaching crisis, and this report could possibly be an impetus to put pay differentiation into practice. I’m glad that leaders of the commission acknowledged that the hostility to pay differentiation is fundamentally unreasonable, but I wish it had been the primary focus of a much less expensive report.

The post The Silver Lining on the Blue Ribbon Commission Report appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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The reason that the president of a teachers union is joining forces with the bipartisan SALT caucus is that taxpayers are more willing to raise state tax rates if they can at least deduct what they pay to the state from their federal taxes. If they can’t deduct state taxes, then they prefer to keep them at a minimum, thank you very much. Same goes for local property taxes. And why does the teachers union want higher state and local taxes? So that more resources can be directed at teacher pay and teacher pensions. The education establishment is taking time to throw support at having everyone pay more out of their pockets to support and grow the education establishment.

Teacher pay, teacher recruitment, and teacher retention are also on the list of legislative priorities for the Missouri State Board of Education. The board would like to see legislatively mandated minimum starting salaries of $35,000 for teachers by 2024. In addition, $50 million in federal stimulus funds have been directed at recruitment and retention.

It’s true that having a high-quality teacher in every classroom is one of the few things that can have a positive impact on academic achievement. But do we get there by protesting for higher state taxes for everyone? Do we get there by paying every teacher more, regardless of their effectiveness? Do we get there by perpetuating a costly and outdated system of retirement that often pays teachers for more years of retirement than working years?

Stuck In the middle of all this are the 65 percent of Missouri students who were not at grade level on the state math assessment last year. Also in the middle are students with disabilities who did not receive any services when their schools shut down, along with the parents who desperately want tutoring for children who have fallen behind these last two years. It’s a sad state of affairs when public education starts to look like a battle between those who support teachers and those who support families.

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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.

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Advocates for Missouri’s current defined-benefit pension system argue that this type of system, where teachers are promised a generous and guaranteed pension once they retire, is needed because it increases teacher retention. Yet, there is little evidence that this type of system is a cost-effective method for increasing teacher retention. Rather, the example of these superintendents demonstrates how the system pushes out high-quality individuals. It does the same for teachers (teachers and superintendents are in the same pension system). When teachers hit 30 or 31 years, regardless of their quality or their desire to continue teaching, the financial incentive of the pension pushes them out.

Recently, Gov. Parson asked school superintendents to come up with a plan to increase teacher pay. One solution, which I have little hope will ever be recommended by the superintendents, is to change how we compensate teachers. A pension is basically a form of delayed compensation. We require teachers and their districts to contribute 14.5% of their salary to the pension system (the numbers are different in St. Louis City and Kanas City). That’s 29% of a teacher’s salary that is going into a pool that they may have access to if they make it to retirement.

We could give teachers in Missouri a 10% raise next year, with minimal cost to the state, if we just change this system.

Currently, teachers in the Public School Retirement System (PSRS) do not contribute to Social Security. The pension system is their only required retirement savings. In this proposed scenario, the teacher would receive a 10 percent raise on his or her salary. The teacher would begin contributing to Social Security (6.2 percent from the individual and the employer) and would be eligible for Social Security benefits. Additionally, the teacher and his or her employer could contribute a combined 5 percent of salary to a defined-contribution retirement account, such as a 401k or a cash balance plan. Of course, with a smaller raise the teacher could contribute more to retirement. 

There are numerous benefits to this proposal. First, teachers would own their retirement accounts. They would not lose any money if for some reason they do not vest at five years. They could also continue to work past 31 years and their accounts would not lose value. Teachers could also choose to invest more in their account, as many do now in 403b accounts.

The biggest benefit is that teachers would have higher salaries today. If we want to keep our best teachers and superintendents, higher salaries are a much more effective tool than outdated pension systems.

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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.

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It’s not hard to understand why teachers are angry. In Missouri, the average teacher salary in 2000 was $51,100 (in 2016 dollars) and in 2016 it was $48,300. But the question is: Who should they be mad at? Can the folks in Jefferson City give raises to all Missouri teachers? They cannot. In most Missouri districts, school boards negotiate with the local teachers’ union to determine salary schedules. So somewhere along the line, even as spending per student increased from $8,900 to $10,500 (both in 2016 dollars), higher teacher salaries have gotten lost.

One important factor has been the growth in staff since 2000. Since that time Missouri’s public school enrollment had a net increase of  4,250 students, but public school staffing increased by 5,500 individuals, about half of whom were teachers. That’s right—there have been more adults hired to teach and run schools than there have been new students. I’ve written quite a bit about legacy costs (pensions and buildings) consuming more and more education dollars, but staffing increases are a huge driver of lower teacher salaries—the payroll money is being spread among more and more employees.

In 2015, the average pupil/teacher ratio in Missouri was about 14:1, and the average spent per student was $10,500. This means that about $150K was spent to run the average classroom. If I were a teacher and only about 30 percent of what was spent in my classroom went to my salary, I’d want to know where the rest went, and why. I’d also like the option to bump my class size up to 15 or 16 students if I were able to keep the increased funding.

I’m not second-guessing staffing decisions, but school districts have to make tradeoffs between hiring more staff or paying teachers more—and they seem to have chosen the former. If teachers don’t like that, they need to go to the actual decision makers—school boards and superintendents, maybe even those who represent them at the table–and demand something different. And if they’re paying dues to their local union to do their negotiating for them, they may want to consider how that’s working out for them.

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