I’ve argued for years that Kansas City’s lavish subsidies distort the market while failing to deliver on economic promises. New reporting from the Kansas City Business Journal suggests the process itself may be just as broken.

Reporter Thomas Friestad reconstructed negotiations among Kansas City Public Schools (KCPS), PortKC, and Gillon Property Group over incentives tied to Country Club Plaza. The emails, obtained through an open-records request, depict a rushed and opaque decision-making process worthy of public distrust.

The original proposal reportedly included roughly $309 million in incentives over 30 years. KCPS officials objected not only to the size of the package, but also to shifting valuation methods that obscured the true public cost. The district also sought protection for voter-approved bond revenues and more time to evaluate major revisions before approval by PortKC.

That timeline is the real story.

The emails show negotiations continuing until the night before a scheduled PortKC meeting. KCPS officials argued they were being asked to evaluate a substantially revised proposal in just two business days. One consultant for the district described the timeline as “concerning even with the highest level of independent analysis.”

This is a recurring problem in Kansas City’s incentive culture. Complex tax arrangements are negotiated behind closed doors and then presented to affected taxing jurisdictions with little time for meaningful scrutiny. The result is confusion over the true public cost and distrust among taxpayers expected to finance these deals.

Kansas City has seen this pattern before. Similar concerns surrounded the Power & Light District and continue to emerge in discussions over a proposed downtown ballpark. Political machinations routinely take precedence over transparency and accountability.

Notably, KCPS did not oppose subsidies outright. District officials simply asked for clear terms, accurate projections, and adequate time to evaluate a deal that could affect school finances for decades. The fact that negotiators appeared unwilling to provide sufficient time to evaluate the deal speaks volumes.

Kansas Citians have grown understandably skeptical of these taxpayer-funded deals. Too many projects promised economic transformation and delivered little beyond long-term public cost. The Country Club Plaza negotiations are, at best, an example of rushed incompetence. At worst, they suggest an effort to push a massive subsidy package through before taxpayers and public schools could fully evaluate it.

The post Country Club Plaza Subsidy Deal Reveals What’s Broken in Kansas City appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Mr. Collins did not appreciate my conclusion. He called it “misleading and inflammatory,” and wrote that I was dealing in “political spin.”

I welcome the opportunity to respond. Collins wrote:

The claim that PortKC’s NDA signals secrecy is misleading and inflammatory. The NDA applies only during early negotiations, and thus, to protect complex deals before terms are finalized. That is standard in any serious public-private partnership. It doesn’t block legal disclosures, doesn’t hide information from taxing jurisdictions, and doesn’t erase public accountability. It protects taxpayers from leaks that can tank deals or drive-up costs.

PortKC literally—and I am not being figurative—requires in writing that applicants sign an NDA. I do not know what the justification is for requiring secrecy, but I do know that it is not “standard in any serious public-private partnership.” The Economic Development Corporation of Kansas City (EDCKC), which also provides a raft of public subsidies, requires no such NDA. As I wrote, I can understand why a developer would want such secrecy, but it is another thing completely to have the public body handing out taxpayer subsidies to be the one demanding discretion.

If you doubt that PortKC maintains a level of secrecy throughout its deals, search online for the terms Project Mica and Project Kestrel.

Collins continues:

PortKC’s process requires more upfront disclosure from developer’s ownership, litigation history, financials, job creation, wage data, and community impact than many.

If this is the justification, it doesn’t appear to be working. It was only three years ago that PortKC failed to discover that a developer to which it was prepared to issue subsidies, Lux Living, had a few Securities and Exchange Commission violations in its past. So much for “more upfront disclosure.”

Separately, in its most recent financial audit, PortKC was faulted for failing to demonstrate that it searched federal databases to determine if any vendors were “suspended and debarred entities” prior to payment. Again, PortKC is not demonstrating that it carefully vets applicants.

Collins continues:

Critics, like this guy [that’s me!], also ignore that PortKC posts its full fee schedule, limits its own ability to rack up costs without approval, and requires developers to follow workforce, equity, and wage policies from day one.

Yes, PortKC posts an impressive fee schedule. I can’t say that it’s complete, but it does make quite a buck from issuing taxpayer subsidies. That’s part of the problem.

Most organizations that grow as quickly as PortKC face similar growing pains, and PortKC has taken action.

Has it, though? The financial audits of 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 all point out that PortKC failed to provide “effective internal control” of finances. One such finding may be the result of growing pains, but four consecutive findings suggest an inability or an unwillingness to right the ship.

Mr. Collins concludes:

The idea that PortKC is “insisting on secrecy” is political spin. This is about protecting sensitive financial negotiations; not hiding public subsidy. If you’re serious about transparency, deal with the facts; not headlines.

Again, it’s very clear from the PortKC application that it insists on secrecy.

I understand that Mr. Collins and others in the “public-private real estate development” industry are either happy with things just as they are or are hesitant to be critical of a scheme from which they stand to gain. But the argument that taxpayers are also benefitted by “protecting sensitive financial negotiations” from taxpayer scrutiny is just silly.

Organizations like PortKC and the groups they fund want public funds dispersed in the dark. If PortKC were serious about serving the public, its leadership would remove its NDA requirement and heed the counsel of its financial auditors. Until then, it should be viewed skeptically.

The post Responding to PortKC’s Defenders appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Secrecy isn’t standard practice. The Economic Development Corporation—which oversees the TIF Commission and other incentive bodies—does not require NDAs.

These agencies also hold more public meetings, solicit community input, and include representation from schools and libraries. Mayoral appointments to the TIF Commission must be confirmed by the city council. In contrast, the mayor appoints PortKC board members unilaterally.

This lack of transparency disserves the public. While developers might prefer NDAs when pursuing public subsidies—which is a separate concern—here, it’s the public agency itself insisting on secrecy. That’s even more alarming.

PortKC has other problems, some of which I detail in a recent column for The Kansas City Star:

A series of audits from 2021 through 2024 flagged serious internal control problems, including one where the finance director had full authority over journal entries, deposits and account reconciliation — with no oversight. Port KC has repeatedly promised to fix these issues and repeatedly failed to act.

PortKC’s transparency problem is compounded by persistent failures in oversight. A string of audits from 2021 through 2024 flagged major internal control issues. In one case, the finance director had sole authority over journal entries, deposits, and account reconciliation with no checks in place. PortKC acknowledged the problem and pledged reform but never followed through.

The 2024 audit revealed yet another compliance failure: the agency hadn’t verified whether its development partners were barred from receiving federal funds—a basic federal requirement known as “Suspension and Debarment.” Given PortKC’s increasing intake of federal money, this oversight is especially serious.

These aren’t isolated lapses. PortKC also failed to properly vet Lux Living in 2022. The pattern is clear and ongoing. With long-standing problems still unaddressed, the question is no longer whether something will go wrong, but when.

These issues matter more than ever. At the time of my Star column, I noted PortKC might be involved in financing a downtown park for the Royals. That’s now more likely: the Kansas City Business Journal reports that tax-free bonds via PortKC are under discussion.

Meanwhile, city officials are exploring ways to approve deals without a public vote. Combine that with PortKC’s built-in secrecy, and the result is troubling: public funds deployed without public oversight.

The post Why Is PortKC Keeping Secrets? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Startling to me, anyway. None of the legislators on the committee seemed bothered.

Is there any public benefit to this secrecy?

There can be when vendors are bidding competitively for a state contract—say, road construction. Protecting proprietary financial or technical details in that context may encourage better bids and serve the public interest.

But stadium subsidies are different—there’s no obvious reason why secrecy is necessary or helpful. When public officials negotiate deals to hand out taxpayer money, the public deserves transparency. Teams may want discretion. State representatives may want to negotiate without tipping off competing states. But neither, in my opinion, is a good enough reason to give it to them.

Yet secrecy has become the norm. Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas won’t release the city’s proposal for a downtown stadium to the Royals—even though Clay County released its proposal. The city also kept its 2017 Amazon HQ2 bid under wraps, while many other cities disclosed theirs.

Judging by the lawmakers’ lack of reaction, non-disclosure agreements are now standard operating procedure. They shouldn’t be. Even if elected officials are fine being left in the dark, the public shouldn’t be.

The post Why Is the Department of Economic Development Keeping Secrets? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

There is one key piece of information left out of the report—how much the district actually spends. The report tells residents the district spends $1,718 less per pupil than the state average on operating expenses, but it does not tell us that amount.

While it is understandable for organizations to want to put their best foot forward, this lack of transparency is a real problem. Taxpayers should know how much their schools are spending. Unfortunately, districts and the state make this information hard to find.

That is why the Show-Me Institute created MOSchoolRankings. In addition to having detailed academic data, the site provides detailed financial records for every school district in the state. In 2023, Wentzville spent $15,759 per pupil in total expenditures. That means roughly $390,000 is being spent on a classroom of 25 students. Want to know exactly where those dollars are being spent? The website breaks these expenditures down by program, providing the most granular level of analysis in the state.

The annual reports sent by districts are not meant to be a detailed accounting of performance and spending. They are promotional materials designed to paint the district in a positive light. There is nothing wrong with that—organizations should share their successes. Taxpayers who want more information, however, should have access to it.

The post How Much Does My School District Spend? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

According to a report released by Populous in 2022, a stadium design firm that’s done work for nearly all MLB teams, The K suffers from severe structural issues that would cost more to fix than a new stadium would be to build.

The link included in that text, however, is no longer available. It now defaults to a splashy artists’ rendering of a downtown ballpark.

That report became an issue again when the Royals announced they wanted to leave Kauffman Stadium. The findings from the Populous report run counter to another publicly available engineering report that found Kauffman to be in satisfactory condition, with no mention of any significant concrete issues.  According to a January 31 story in The Kansas City Star:

When The Star asked a team spokesman about the discrepancy, the Royals issued a statement that said those annual assessment reports and the one Populous produced for the team are not comparable.

“The shortest and simplest answer is that these are two very different reports aimed at very different objectives. One is an annual repair plan and the other is about long-term viability,” the Royals said. “The study referenced in the public meeting came from a leading structural engineer of sports facilities. This firm knows our building well after working on the 2008 renovation. We asked them to evaluate long-term structural issues and the feasibility of extending the existing structure for 40 more years.”

Jackson County Executive Frank White asked the Jackson County Sports Complex Authority, which oversees the Chiefs and Royals stadia, to conduct an investigation. It declined.

At the March 19 library event, Mayor James held up a stack of paper when referring to a study of Kauffman Stadium. I asked for and received what he held up. Ms. Tourville, a spokeswoman for the Royals, previously referred to a report from 2007 “that has shown significant deterioration and concrete cancer.” Indeed, what Mayor James handed me are two reports dated 2007. (The scanned document is available here.)

But what about that Populous report mentioned in the media?

When Mayor James handed me the report, there were two brightly colored sticky notes on the report. On each was written “Populous studies.” (Photographs available here and here.) But the documents themselves were not the Populous study.

The Royals seemed to drop the claims of faulty concrete pretty quickly. On a March 27 discussion on Sports Radio 810, Royals President Brooks Sherman said, “We need a new stadium to be competitive with our peers” (found at 38:26 in the audio here). Later on that same program, Executive Director of the Jackson County Sports Complex Authority Jim Rowland said, of the teams, “They’ve kept the buildings in first class condition” (found at 1:13:35).

Hopefully the Royals will release whatever study Populous conducted on Kauffman in the name of transparency. If it found “severe structural issues” with Kauffman Stadium as claimed, it would be a significant development. Otherwise, this episode seems to be one of many examples of a poorly conceived and poorly run effort to get Jackson County voters to part with their money.

The post Where Is That Populous Report on Kauffman Stadium? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The Parents’ Bill of Rights focuses on five key areas: curriculum transparency, school choice, parental involvement, data privacy, and district accountability. High among those objectives is the establishment of an online portal where district curricula can be viewed by parents so that they are fully informed of the instruction happening in their schools. We discussed these issues at length before Missouri’s U.S. Civil Rights Commission Advisory Committee earlier this year.

The core of the problem, as we’ve revealed over the last few years, is that the current setup for finding out what’s going on in schools requires either a forthright district (or school) or a district that’s compliant with the letter and spirit of Missouri’s Sunshine Law. In essence, taxpayers have to ask about how their money is being spent – rather than simply receive or see it without having to beg for it. The potential result of the current law is straightforward, with districts playing games with responses or attempting to charge outrageous sums for the information.

Now it’s time for this important policy to become law. By empowering parents, improving educational outcomes, promoting school choice, enhancing transparency and accountability, and protecting student data privacy, the adoption of a Parents’ Bill of Rights could have an important impact on the state’s education system—and improve the relationship between parents and the schools they fund.

The post The Parents’ Bill of Rights: Its Time Has Come appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Several days later I received a reply by, of all things, email! Thankfully, the Governor’s office sent just what I wanted: the statistics and sources behind its claims. I must note that the original graphic was updated after I sent the Sunshine request (e.g., the word “low” was removed from “Low Cost of Doing Business”). Also, while each of the office’s claims does correspond to a study, index, or ranking in the real world, your mileage may vary regarding their persuasiveness.

Some citations used by the governor are very subjective. Several of the statistics, such as “On-the-Job Training” and “Apprenticeships” were from Missouri Government agencies, which doesn’t strike me as the most unbiased source of information. The document I received also—somewhat—answers my question from the last post and clarifies the statistic as “New Apprenticeships,” but the website’s graphic remains unchanged in that regard.

In some cases, the claim is ambiguous; the second-place ranking for state-level veteran benefits is based on the number of distinct benefits offered but does not consider that one benefit may be much more or less valuable than another. Again, a very subjective ranking.

And even when the statistics could be represented more favorably for the governor, they remain misleading. The “Fourth for Personal Income Tax” is certainly not measuring the lowest or highest personal income tax rates. There are eight states with no income tax (nine if you include New Hampshire), and Missouri isn’t one of them. It turns out that the governor’s office was relying on a report that ranks governors, not states. The “personal income tax” metric is derived not only by the level of income tax, but how much it has changed over each governor’s term—the governor can thank his special session last October for getting him so highly ranked on this metric.

I do appreciate that the governor’s office didn’t drag its feet with my request and provided sources for each of the claims, but I shouldn’t have had to submit a Sunshine request in the first place. It should be standard practice for the government to include sources for the claims in the documents they produce and, more to the point, practice transparency without hiding behind a fax machine. Thankfully, there are organizations like the Show-Me Institute that employ summer interns who can hold our government accountable.

*pats self on back*

If you are interested in checking out the sources yourself, click here to see the .pdf file I received from the governor’s office.

The post Just the Fax, Ma’am: Dubious “Rankings” Press Release Emphasizes Importance of Transparency (part 2) appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

That’s why the latest version of Missouri Department of Revenue’s sales and use tax mapping tool is so welcome. A story by the eMissourian is a testament to precisely how I would hope the site would be used by the media and the public:

A purchase in downtown Washington comes with an 8.85 percent sales tax, which includes a 2 percent city sales tax and a 0.375 percent tax for the Washington Area Ambulance District.

Someone making the same purchase in downtown Union would have to pay 9.475 percent in sales tax. While Union has the same 2 percent city sales tax as Washington, consumers also pay a 0.5 ambulance district tax and a 0.5 percent tax for the Union Fire Protection District. St. Clair has the same 9.475 percent sales tax rate, with its fire and ambulance districts both having half cent sales taxes.

While Pacific charges a higher 2.5 percent city sales tax, it has the same overall 9.475 percent sales tax rate because no fire sales tax is shown.

You can find the sales and use taxes in your jurisdiction, and any Missouri jurisdiction, here.

It’s worth noting that while a number of articles this month have referenced the map as “new,” as my colleague Elias Tsapelas might note, it’d be more accurate to characterize it as “improved.” House Bill 1858 in 2018 and Senate Bill 153 in 2021 both helped lead to the new initiative, and perhaps serendipitously those local rate transparency initiatives also coincided with both the Show-Me Checkbook spending transparency projects and parallel spending transparency initiatives by the state treasurer and the state office of administration.

In other words, the transparency initiatives of the late 2010s are starting to bear fruit here in the early 2020s, so while some features on the interactive map may be “new,” the ideas aren’t. Of course, the state can always do more to promote transparency, such as requiring spending transparency from local governments and curricular transparency from schools and districts. But for what this tax map narrowly seeks to do, it does a good job of it.

The post State-Created Tax Map a Solid Tool for Oversight of Local Sales and Use Taxes appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post St. Louis Water, MAP Test Opt-out, and Medical Bills appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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

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

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

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

-How much are your housing costs?

-How much does it cost to run your house?

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

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

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

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

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

That said, there is a great deal of balancing that has to take place when considering legislation like this. After all, employers and landlords both have their own interests in having a full picture of who they’re hiring or housing. Does a bank want to hire someone convicted of fraud? Probably not. Good faith arguments about the manner and extent of expungement laws are an important part of the process, and those debates are happening in Missouri over Clean Slate. For me, a Missouri version of Clean Slate needs to ensure two things happen.

First, in contrast to Clean Slate’s “automatic expungement” proposal, why not have former offenders initiate the expungement process, after which expungement is automatic?

It’s a nuanced but important point. Supporters of model Clean Slate legislative language generally prefer the idea of “automatic expungement”—that after a certain period of time, an offense drops off criminal records without any action taken by the ex-offender. In Missouri, the existing expungement process is a petition-based system, which can be fraught, winding, and ultimately unwieldy for many former offenders to navigate. Many don’t bother, leaving expungeable offenses on their records.

But combining the offender-initiated expungement process with automated expungement offers the best of both worlds. It puts the responsibility on an offender to start the process of beginning a new chapter in their lives and strikes out the judicial bureaucracy that stops many ex-offenders from initiating expungement to begin with.

Second, the state should not impose a sort of prior restraint on background check companies.

The standard Clean Slate proposal contemplates restrictions on what background check companies can tell employers and landlords, even if what they tell them is true. There’s no denying the truth that ex-offenders broke the law, and background check companies have the right to share truthful information about an individual’s criminal record. The question is, how do you best balance the First Amendment rights of companies and the policy objectives of Clean Slate?

Well, a better way forward is to set out legal incentives for background check companies in the way they characterize past expunged offenses. The state should allow background check companies (1) to omit expunged offenses and protect them from liability for that omission, and (2) to report the expunged offense but only if its expungement is clearly included. Such an approach would not only allow background check companies a path to omit offenses without running afoul of the First Amendment, but it would also give ex-offenders a right to sue for defamation if their criminal history is mischaracterized by these companies.

Central to the issue of background checks is how those performing background checks even gain access to this criminal justice information, which at its core is a kind of transparency issue. Missouri has a robust court activity database where reams of case information are readily available to the public, and overall, that’s a good thing.

But while transparency of government is extraordinarily important, transparency of the records of individuals is a thornier policy subject. Individual income tax filings are highly protected documents not subject to public perusal; should non-violent and comparatively low-level criminal offenses be treated similarly? Perhaps. In any case, if the expungement of criminal records is ever to be properly effectuated, legislators must also assess how available these records should be in general.

As with all policy proposals, legislators should weigh out all the costs and benefits of Clean Slate, both as originally proposed and as it might be modified for Missouri. For a complex issue like criminal justice reform, the details matter, and getting those details right can take time. Clean Slate may or may not get done this year, but with a few tweaks, I think it can get done here in Missouri sooner, not later.

The post A (Tweaked) Clean Slate Bill Offers an Important Opportunity for Criminal Justice Reform appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

[T]he new legislation, for example, would bar teaching “that individuals, by virtue of their race, ethnicity, color, or national origin, bear collective guilt and are inherently responsible for actions committed in the past by others. . . .”

The legislation also includes a number of parental rights, including being able to access curricula, the names of guest speakers at the school, and information about collection and transmission of student data.

It sets up the “Missouri Education Transparency and Accountability Portal” allowing the public to access “every school district’s curriculum, textbooks, source materials, and syllabi.”

The package also requires the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to create a class for schools to teach about patriotism.

The vote wasn’t close at 21 in favor and 12 against, with two self-described conservatives strangely voting against the bill. Both explained the basis for their votes during the floor debate for SB 4, and to put it lightly, neither senator made a compelling case for opposition.

I’ll explore the bill more in-depth later, but I’ll say here that gripes about statutory language intended to ensure districts don’t get sued for publishing copyrighted material and penalize schools for noncompliance are unfounded and ill-considered. The senators should get better outside counsel than what they received here.

Chances are good that SB 4 will be tweaked and possibly improved by the House, which will take the bill up in the weeks ahead. Chances are also good that some schools and school districts will try to work around or undermine the intent of the law after it’s been implemented, necessitating follow-up legislation to close any loopholes that emerge. But even if SB 4 were passed as is, it’d still be one of the strongest parents’ rights bills in the country. Whenever it does pass this session, it will be a good day for taxpayers and parents.

The post Parents’ Bill of Rights Legislation Clears Senate appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Of course, public education has a lot of moving parts and they all cost money. But it’s public money—our money. That’s why the Show-Me Institute decided to build a website that would allow anyone to see how every dollar was spent in 2021 in each of the 551 public school districts and charter school local education agencies in the state. MOSchoolRankings.org, which already has two years of school and district report cards with letter grades, now also shows where every dollar came from and how it was spent. These data were already available on the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) website as Annual Secretary to the Board (ASBR) reports. We simply put them into a single data file and built a portal to make it easy for users to dig into the numbers.

Did we include spending on land, buildings, or other capital? Those are in the ASBR, so, yes. Did we include principal and interest payments on debt? Yes, we did. Did we include district revenue from athletic event admissions and bookstore sales? We did. Did we include revenue that one school district pays to another school district? We did. Did we include revenue that parents pay as tuition to send their children to a school outside their district? We did. Did we include revenue from bond sales that are issued to build things? We did. If the district reported it to the state as a source of revenue or as an expense, we included it.

I believe that the public sector should make it easy for citizens to see how their money is being spent. I don’t believe that the powers that be should 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. Heck, we even made 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.

Of course, when you look at the numbers for a district, you may have some questions. Those are questions that ought to be answered by superintendents, school boards and DESE.

The post Follow the Money appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This report is concerned with the ways in which Missouri counties spent the funds they received as a result of the CARES Act, as well as how each county reported its expenditures. The Institute used Sunshine Law inquiries to request CARES Act expense report sheets from every county in Missouri. Unfortunately, gaps in data created by non-responses from some counties and limited descriptions of spending from the counties that did respond illustrate yet again that state and local governments in Missouri have a long way to go to meet the transparency obligations they have when they spend taxpayer money.

Click here to read the full report.

The post Transparency in County CARES Act Spending Underwhelms in Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The kinds of education transparency that the legislature will grapple with are likely threefold.

• Transparency in spending: Previous Show-Me Checkbook projects have mainly looked at how local governments spend money, but districts and schools also should be transparent and accountable for how they spend taxpayer money. Especially in an environment where teacher pay is a hot topic, seeing exactly where tax money is going today will be illuminating about where tax money should be going tomorrow. My colleague, our director of education Susan Pendergrass, will have much more on this soon.
• Transparency in curriculum: It is no secret that we sent thousands of Sunshine Law requests to schools and districts around the state over the last couple years asking what they’re teaching kids and telling teachers about a host of hot-button education topics, the responses to which (when there have been responses) have been mostly incomplete. At this point, I believe the state needs to mandate transparency of these institutions. Taxpayers can debate whether it’s appropriate to teach critical race theory in the classroom or to instruct teachers that Christians oppress all other religions, but that debate can only happen if taxpayers are aware of the content.
• Transparency in performance: When true school choice is widely available in the state, parents will have some decisions to make about where to send their kids. How good each educational option is will play a major role in those decisions. Unfortunately, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) has done an abysmal job ensuring parents have tools to easily distinguish between failing and succeeding schools and districts. The law must change to make that information more widely available and to ensure failure is administratively corrected, not administratively protected. Susan’s MoSchoolRankings.org is a valuable bridge of information as we wait for the state to take action.

These reform ideas are showing up individually in a lot of pieces of education legislation, but the legislation they’re most often appearing in are “parents’ bill of rights” proposals. We’ve talked about those kinds of laws in the past, and whether legislators pass all these reforms at once with a parents’ bill of rights or separately, these reforms would be a significant advance in parent-empowering policy. Parents need school choice, and better still, they need informed school choice.

The post A Reminder: Missouri Still Needs Transparency in Education appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

2020-2021 Data Now Available at MoSchoolRankings.org

Missouri Has an Education Emergency

Missouri schools are failing to teach the core subjects of reading and math and the most recent test scores show that students are falling further behind.

Missouri’s Department of Secondary and Elementary (MO DESE) has not offered the level of transparency regarding student performance that is necessary to create an education system focused on higher standards, reducing achievement gaps, and results-based accountability.

The status quo is leaving thousands of students behind without the fundamental skills to pursue higher education or compete in the modern labor market.

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.

Visit MoSchoolRankings.org

The post We Gave DESE a Report Card appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In July of 2022, the Show-Me Institute kicked off a repeat of its Show-Me Curricula Project.

Click Here to Review the Documents We Have Received

The post The Show-Me Curricula Project appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

What I didn’t mention was that all three of those districts broke three classic classroom rules I’m sure their students follow (or are supposed to follow, anyway).

1. Never copy your neighbor’s homework.

   The letters sent by all three school districts in response to our request were very similar. Each cited the same list of terms and asked for similar amounts to provide records—Blackwater requested $207,584, while Malta Bend and Gilliam charged $196,908. In fact, the Gilliam School District sent us the form letter copied onto its letterhead but written as if it were from Malta Bend. Interestingly, all three schools are within twenty miles of each other. It seems like Gilliam, Malta Bend, and Blackwater might need to learn to keep their eyes on their own papers.

2. Don’t start your assignment before you read it.

   All three districts responded to a Sunshine Law records request in their reply to us, but they didn’t respond to ours. Instead, they each sent a form letter written in response to another organization’s request on similar topics, which asked the school districts to look for 78 key terms compared to our request’s eight. Malta Bend even neglected to change the name of the addressee in its response letter. It’s concerning that all three districts either didn’t take the time to read our request or chose to send a response written for a completely different situation, rather than understand our inquiry and provide a real estimate.

3. Don’t wait until the last minute to finish your work.

   Gilliam and Malta Bend both responded to our request on the last day allowed under the Sunshine Law. Maybe these districts panicked knowing they hadn’t studied for this transparency “exam.” Whatever the reason, mistakes were made as the response window closed.

In the end, after we reported them to the attorney general’s sunshine office, all three districts charged us nothing to inform us they had no responsive documents, and I had a useful conversation with the superintendent of Gilliam, who only recently assumed his position. To some extent, the unhelpful responses we initially received were understandable, since all three districts have two or fewer schools and, given their relative anonymity compared to big districts, have limited experience handling Sunshine Law requests.

Ultimately, Gilliam, Malta Bend, and Blackwater chose a fast, last-minute, and incorrect reaction to our request rather than taking the time to respond fully and accurately. Our districts and schools should hold themselves to a higher standard.

The post School Districts Should Follow Their Own Rules appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

However, the most obvious difference between the 2021 and 2022 requests isn’t the quicker time frame and greater participation. It’s higher prices—far higher prices. If we had paid for every school to respond fully to our request in 2021, the total bill would have come out to $59,980.63. In 2022, we would have paid $908,192.38. The average requested cost was $3,332.26 in 2021; it was $26,711.54 in 2022.

A significant amount of the massive price increase can be attributed to a group of three schools in the center of the state that each charged over $100,000 (I’ll discuss these schools in more detail in a later post). Still, ten other districts raised their estimates by at least $1,000, with the largest increase coming from rural Neelyville, which asked for $56,218.95. In 2021, Neelyville said it had no responsive documents to our request and did not bill us.

It’s not clear what is driving the huge price increase from Neelyville. Given that we have received underwhelming and disappointing responses from both small districts and large districts, it would seem the differences in curricular openness depend mostly on whether there’s a “culture of transparency” at a school, not whether critical race theory is present in the curriculum. (Just ask Kansas City Public Schools, which readily provided its school’s curricula and posts supporting these ideas in response to our request last year!) If nothing else, it would seem Neelyville’s “culture of transparency” has declined in the last 12 months.

In the end, schools choose whether their cultures will include transparency or not, and the estimates we’ve received in our curriculum requests show a troubling trend toward noncompliance.

The post Inflation? Try an $800,000 Price Hike appeared first on Show-Me Institute.