Click here to read the full report.

The post Fixing Missouri’s School Funding Formula appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Governor Kehoe’s first budget does not include the $300 million requested for the formula (although it does include $200 million in other additional funding). So, let’s break down the requested increase to see if the governor is refusing to “fully fund the formula,” as accused. Perhaps instead the requested increase is not reasonable.

Technically, the SAT reflects the current expenditures per student in Missouri’s highest-performing districts, referred to in the law as Performance Districts. The thinking is that what these districts spent should be adequate. But what does it take to be a Performance District? The way the law has been interpreted is that Performance Districts are those that receive at least 90 percent of their possible points on their Annual Performance Report (APR) under Missouri’s accountability system.

The accountability system, also known as MSIP 6, gives districts points based on a rubric of items considered important by DESE and the state board of education—although some are only loosely related to performance. The FY 2026 DESE budget request relies on 2022 APR points to calculate the SAT. In 2022, districts could earn up to 52 APR points for attendance, having 8th graders fill out an Individual Career and Academic Plan, administering a Kindergarten Entry Assessment to incoming kindergartners, submitting their required financial reports on time, conducting a Climate and Culture Survey, and submitting a Continuous Improvement Plan. All 29 of the Performance Districts received 52 out of 52 points for these categories.

But let’s take a closer look. Eight of the districts only serve students in kindergarten through 8th grade—they don’t have high schools. These districts had only 114 possible APR points, and 52 of them had nothing to do with student performance.

In two of the Performance Districts, Leopold R-III and Ste. Genevieve, fewer than half of the students tested scored Proficient or higher in English/language arts. In another Performance District, Mansfield R-IV, just 52 percent of high school graduates met any benchmark for being considered college or career ready when they graduated. In Brunswick R-II just 28.6 percent of graduates received an advanced credential prior to graduating, compared to 100 percent of graduates in Jefferson C-123. Are we sure these are the best 29 districts out of more than 500?

Here’s the problem: weak accountability systems don’t hold districts accountable. In the case of Missouri, that consequence bleeds over to funding. More than half of the Performance Districts are very small, with fewer than 300 students in the entire district. Spending tends to be higher in these districts because there are few economies of scale. That higher spending leads to hundreds of more dollars for all 850,000 students in the state when it leads to a budget request to add $300 million in state spending.

So before calling foul on the governor’s budget, let’s make sure that the DESE budget request actually makes sense.

The post Performance Districts and Education Spending appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This year’s request includes an increase of nearly $350 million for the Foundation Formula, due to an increase in the base amount that the state considers “adequate” to educate a child. This amount had been $6,375 for four years, from FY 2020 through FY 2024. The FY 2025 budget included a request to increase the amount to $7,145, phased in over two years. Why the increase? Well, that’s a bit confusing. Please follow along.

Technically, the amount reflects the current expenditures per student in Missouri’s highest-performing districts, referred to as Performance Districts. The thinking is that what these districts spent should be adequate. But what does it take to be a Performance District?

The way the law has been interpreted is that Performance Districts are those that receive at least 90 percent of possible points on their Annual Performance Report (APR) under Missouri’s accountability system, after removing the outliers at the top and bottom of the list. The accountability system, also known as MSIP 6, gives districts points based on a rubric of items considered important to DESE and the state Board of Education—although some items are only loosely related to performance.

For example, districts can earn up to 52 points for attendance, having 8th graders fill out an Individual Career and Academic Plan, administering a Kindergarten Entry Assessment to incoming kindergartners, submitting their required financial reports on time, conducting a Climate and Culture Survey, and submitting a Continuous Improvement Plan. All 28 of the Performance Districts received 52 out of 52 points in these categories. Eight of the districts had only 114 possible points—so there’s almost half of them.

One of the Performance Districts was Gasconade C-4, a rural K-8 district with just 100 students. Last year, 37 percent of its students performed on grade level in English/language arts (ELA) and 27 percent did so in math—both below statewide averages. Another Performance District, Hudson R-IX, with just 39 students in grades K-8, had only one in four students on grade level in ELA and just three in ten in math. Mind you, this district has fewer than 10 students per grade.

The problem is that weak accountability systems reward weak performance. In the case of Missouri, that consequence bleeds over to funding. More than half of the Performance Districts are very small, with fewer than 300 students in the entire district. Spending tends to be higher in these districts because there are few economies of scale. That higher spending leads to hundreds of more dollars for all 850,000 students in the state and adds up to almost $350 million in state spending.

Are we sure this is the best system we can come up with?

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(2)  For districts with an average daily attendance of three hundred fifty or less in the school year preceding the payment year:

  (a)  For the 2008-09 school year, the state revenue received by a district from the state aid calculation under subsections 1 and 4 of this section, as applicable, and the classroom trust fund under section 163.043 shall not be less than the greater of state revenue received by a district in the 2004-05 or 2005-06 school year from the foundation formula, line 14, gifted, remedial reading, exceptional pupil aid, fair share, and free textbook payment amounts multiplied by the dollar value modifier;

  (b)  For each year subsequent to the 2008-09 school year, the amount shall be no less than that computed in paragraph (a) of this subdivision;

Not all of us are lawyers, so I’ll translate the above paragraph from the Missouri law on public education funding. The 184 (out of 517) school districts in Missouri that had an average daily attendance of fewer than 350 students last year either received state funding based on the foundation formula or the same amount of state funding they received nearly two decades ago, whichever is larger. These types of revenue protections are usually referred to as “hold-harmless provisions” and are meant to help districts transition from a prior formula to a new one. The 2006 Missouri Legislature decided to make that assistance permanent.

In 2023, in 138 of the 184 small districts, or 75 percent of them, the foundation formula calculation was run and then tossed out because the result was less than what those districts received the first year the formula was put into place—most likely because of declining enrollment. This means they received their 2004–05 (or 2005–06 figure if it was larger) funding at an additional cost of over $41 million in state funds than what the formula calculated for those districts last year. And they will continue to receive that amount forever, regardless of their enrollment.

When the time comes to reconsider how we fund public education in Missouri, it is imperative that legislators do not put permanent revenue protections into state statute. Doing so distorts enrollment trends, property value trends, and the distribution of taxpayer dollars. We need to make sure taxpayer dollars are spent as wisely and appropriately as possible.

The post Missouri School Districts Are Held Permanently Harmless appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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

To supplement the full report, below are six infographics designed to illustrate how billions of dollars flow into public education each year in Missouri, and how they flow out. Where does it come from, and where does it go?

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The foundation formula—which is used to equalize public education dollars between property-rich and property-poor school districts—is based on the highest student attendance number in any of the last four years. It has always been the case that Missouri districts can pick the highest of any of the last three years to use as their average daily attendance (ADA), but the law was adjusted during COVID to allow districts to use any of the last four.

Here’s what puzzles me—this is still happening. According to instructions from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), in FY 2022 student attendance was “broadly impacted” by the Delta and Omicron variants and therefore, for FY 2024, districts can still use the highest attendance of the four previous years. Isn’t it time to stop leaning on COVID?

But here’s what this means in reality. Let’s take the district Fort Zumwalt district as an example. In 2021, it received an average of about $3,000 in foundation formula money per student. Even though its ADA in 2022 was 15,971, Fort Zumwalt gets to use its 2019 ADA of 16,856 for four years, giving it almost 900 ghost students to use in the formula. Moreover, its ADA has steadily declined from over 17,200 students in 2015 to just under 16,000 in 2022—this decline started before the pandemic. Statewide, using the maximum ADA for the past four years for all school districts results in a total of 65,500 ghost kids. Using the foundation formula’s per-student State Adequacy Target amount (the minimum amount the state says each student should receive in state funding) of $6,375 results in over $415 million in funding for students who used to be in attendance.

We know that kids have been on the move since the pandemic. Homeschool numbers have skyrocketed. Private schools have enrolled public school switchers. Some students may have decided that virtual schooling worked well for them, and some parents have gotten together to start their own schools. Public funding for education can easily keep up. We should be funding students where they are, not where they used to be.

The post Missouri’s Ghost Students appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The following numbers are from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s (DESE) Missouri Comprehensive Data System (MCDS). The file is called “Finance Data and Statistics for All Districts” and it can be found here.

Last year, when every school in the state shut down and many were able to offer little more than homework packets and buses stopped running and buildings were closed, Missouri public school districts spent just over $16,000 per student. That sounds a lot like the tuition at a fancy private school.

Of course, we did get about $300 million in federal stimulus funds for public education, but that only explains the $330 difference in federal spending per student between 2019 and 2020. State and local spending also increased. In 2021, Missouri is set to receive an additional $2.8 billion in federal stimulus, or over $3,000 for every student in the state. Does that mean that spending per student will be $19,000 in 2021? Will it be more?

In addition to working on the budget, the Senate is set to debate whether donations to scholarship-granting organizations should continue to be treated as tax deductions or if the donor should get a full tax credit. Giving donors a full tax credit would greatly incentivize donations to these scholarship organizations. The tax-credit-funded scholarships would give families money to customize their children’s education outside of their assigned public school. The defenders of the status quo—superintendents, school boards, and teacher union leadership—will undoubtedly say we can’t afford it. In light of the numbers above, does that seem true?

The post Let’s Look at Some Numbers appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Make no mistake—people across Missouri are losing their jobs, and state income tax revenue is going to decline as a result. The timing of Missouri’s fiscal year may obscure the crisis to some extent this year, but next year will be tough. Public school districts are going to take a hit. Education is one of the very few areas of the Missouri budget that can be cut, and it will be. School districts and the legislature should be planning now.

But before we get to what districts should be doing, we need to acknowledge that we won’t have firm numbers on how many students are being educated by each district for several years. For per-student funding purposes, Missouri law allows districts to use their current enrollment or the enrollment from either of the two previous years to calculate state public education spending. Obviously, districts will want to use the highest possible number. But this year in particular students are moving around—opting for microschools, private schools, or homeschooling. There is some evidence that enrollment in the MOCAP public virtual education program is way up. At some point, we need to figure out where every student is being educated this year. It may be hard to take attendance on Zoom, but legislators cannot make informed decisions about the public education budget without solid enrollment numbers.

In the meantime, districts need to up their fiscal game, and here are a few suggestions:

• Reduce administrative costs. According to the most recent federal data (from the 2016–2017 school year), Missouri spent almost $350 million on district administrators, school boards, and their support staff. It may be time to reconsider having 520 school districts in a state with 114 counties.
• Consider how noninstructional services are provided. Could transportation or food services costs be reduced through competitive contracting? Could districts work together to share resources?
• Reconsider collective bargaining agreements and employee benefits. Step-and-ladder pay schedules, coupled with expensive pension obligations, make it very difficult for districts to reduce expenditures when their revenue declines. Salaries and promotions should be flexible, and retirement plans should be transportable 401(k) accounts.
• Delay or forego capital projects. These projects commit funds for the long term and reduce flexibility during economic downturns.

The state legislature could be doing its part as well. The current Missouri school funding formula has too many outdated “hold harmless” clauses that distort the distribution of state public education funds and, in some cases, send state funds to wealthy districts that would not normally qualify. According to the Forward through Ferguson “Still Separate, Still Unequal” project, in 2017–18, almost half of the 29 school districts in St. Louis County received hold harmless funding, including $578 in state funding per student in Ladue and $562 per student in Clayton. In addition, nearly half of the school districts in the state use property values from 15 years ago to figure out how much their local contribution of public education dollars should be, regardless of how property values have risen or fallen. That needs to change.

Finally, this year has made it clear that it’s time for public education funding to follow the child. Missouri parents who in the past gave little thought to school choice are discovering what it means to have no choice but a bad choice, and those who can afford to do so are taking matters into their own hands. Parents across the state are paying for tutors, pod coaches, private school tuition, and childcare. Meanwhile, their children are still being counted in the enrollment numbers of the schools they attended last year. It is only fair to give all parents access to a portion of their state education funding so they can spend it on options that work for their children. In several other states, governors have used stimulus funds to give parents quick access to scholarships to pay for these much-needed options. Missouri should do the same and make such scholarships a permanent option going forward.

The storm that was 2020 is going to linger for a few years, and policymakers in Missouri should be taking steps right now to weather it.

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We conducted a poll of Missouri voters and asked them a number of questions regarding school funding and school choice. When we asked participants how much they think we spend on each student per year, we found that the vast majority of Missourians have no idea. Seventy-two percent of Missouri voters either underestimated or were not even willing to guess how much Missouri spends in total expenditures per pupil. Approximately one-fifth of Missourians estimated that we spend less than $4,000 per pupil in current expenditures. In reality, we spend $9,400.

How does not knowing the facts allow for scare tactics to work? It’s simple. When people have more information, they are less likely to believe outlandish claims.

During the poll, we tested the impact of having spending information. We found that when individuals were told how much we spend on students, they were much less likely to say that spending is “too low.” There is room for honest debate in politics, even when it comes to education funding; but this debate should be based on the facts.

You can find the full poll on the Show-Me Institute and Friedman Foundation websites.

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Yesterday on the Show-Me Daily blog, my colleague Michael Rathbone pointed out that “there is no correlation between how much a school district is ‘underfunded’ and its actual performance.” In other words, districts that are more underfunded do just as well as districts that are nearly fully funded.

In the table below, I present all of the districts that scored a 100 percent and a 70 percent or below on the 2013 Missouri School Improvement Program Annual Performance Report (MSIP 5). Next to each district’s MSIP 5 score, I present the amount each district is underfunded per student as reported by the Missouri Budget Project. As you can see, in many cases, schools that are doing very well are relatively more “underfunded” than our lowest-performing schools.

So, are Missouri schools “underfunded”? It depends on what definition you use. They are underfunded when using the definition that the Missouri Budget Project uses, but they may not be if underfunded means “adequately” funded. Maybe we need to start rethinking how we fund education, not just how much.

Level of “Underfunding” in Missouri’s Best- and Worst-Performing Schools

The post Are Missouri Schools Underfunded? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I agree with Shuls when he says that, on principle, the foundation formula (which is the state’s method of determining how much of its annual appropriation to district aid goes to each school district) should be fully funded. The people at the Missouri Budget Project would have you believe that the more underfunded the school, the worse its performance will be. Shuls and I were skeptical that this was actually the case so we tested the Missouri Budget Project’s claim.

In our analysis, we used the Missouri Budget Project’s numbers for the amount each district was underfunded per student. In the past, I have raised issues with the Missouri’s Budget Project’s methodology (or lack thereof) in their work. However, for the sake of argument, Shuls and I decided to accept their results at face value. To measure a district’s performance, we used each district’s English and math MAP (Missouri Assessment Program) test scores and the percentage of students who scored proficient or advanced. We then ran the numbers through STATA to determine if any correlation existed between a school’s academic performance and their level of “underfundedness.” We found none (for more on our results, please see the comments section).

The underfunding of Missouri’s school districts “hurts” school districts if you define hurt as not getting money. If, however, you define hurt as having a negative impact on performance, these results indicate that is not the case. Even if these schools were fully funded, it would not guarantee that their performance would improve. A growing body of evidence suggests that increasing funding for schools will not necessarily lead to an improvement in educational outcomes. We believe in adequately funding our schools, but the state should first make sure that taxpayer money is spent wisely before asking taxpayers for even more.

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Many proposals are being floated around Jefferson City to fix the student transfer issue. Some of the proposals are no more than a shell game. For instance, the Missouri Association of School Administrators (MASA) suggested simply renaming “unaccredited” schools “academically stressed.” This simple sleight of hand would mean that no school districts are “unaccredited,” therefore, no students would be allowed to transfer. Well, I have my own renaming idea that legislators may wish to consider — renaming parts of the funding formula.

People often complain about the amount of “state funding” for education. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is notorious for pointing to the rankings of “state” spending and crying foul. Student transfers have been hung up in Kansas City because the district would not pay more than the “state” gives the district per pupil. Lee’s Summit Superintendent David McGehee recently told me on Twitter that the state should cover all costs for transferring students. Well, my sleight of hand will address these problems.

Missouri schools are provided funding based on a complex formula (read my funding formula primer for a deeper explanation). There are several pots of money calculated as “local effort” or local dollars. The biggest pot of money comes from local property taxes. “To calculate how much local revenue can be generated from property taxes, DESE multiplies the assessed valuation, as of December 31, 2004, by 3.43 percent and then deducts collector and assessor fees from the local tax revenue.”  Here is an illustration of how this works.

It doesn’t matter what tax rate the district actually uses. It could be higher than 3.43 percent or it could be lower, but the state will calculate using the $3.43 per $100 of assessed valuation, or 3.43 percent.

Those dollars are called “local dollars.” They could just as easily be called “state dollars.” After all, that is the consistent figure the state uses to determine how much additional funding a district needs to meet the “state adequacy target.” The state adequacy target is the dollar amount that the state ensures every school district will have to educate students.

It may sound crazy to call local dollars “state dollars” but it is not unprecedented. This is what Arkansas does and that state outranks Missouri in the rankings the Post-Dispatch always uses.

This simple sleight of hand would not change tax rates, would not increase taxes, and would not change anything about school funding. It would increase what we call “state funding” for education. It would improve our rankings in the state-by-state comparisons. And it would increase the “state” share of funding used for student transfers.

The post The School Funding Shell Game appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Like the blind men, Desnoyer looks at one part of school finance and thinks he can explain the whole. This just isn’t so. For instance, he makes the claim that districts with high poverty rates receive less funding than districts with low poverty rates. Sure, if you look at the Clayton School District and the Riverview Gardens School District, this seems correct. However, it is not true when you look at the whole elephant.

Below, I present a table that plots each public school district in the state (charter schools not included). On the Y-axis is 2012 per-pupil expenditure. On the X-axis is percent of students in each district who are eligible for free or reduced price lunches (FRL), a proxy for poverty. As it turns out, school districts with higher poverty rates actually spend more, on average, than those with lower poverty rates. In fact, a 10 percentage point increase in FRL is associated with a $168 increase in per pupil expenditures.

The same is true when you plot the percentage of black students and per-pupil expenditures. Here, a-10 point increase in the percent of black students is associated with a $275 increase in per-pupil expenditures.

Desnoyer cites statistics that indicate we spend less on our impoverished schools. I’m not sure where he gets his statistics (he doesn’t say), but they don’t hold for Missouri. In 2012, we spent an average of $11,099 in the 17 districts with greater than 80 percent of their students receiving free or reduced price lunches (FRL). We spent just $10,179 on the 15 districts with less than 20 percent FRL.

He goes on to suggest we need a “mechanism that guarantees a minimum amount of funding for each district to stay accredited.” What he is suggesting is simply impossible. We do not know how much money it takes for a district to stay accredited. As we saw in Kansas City throughout the 1980s and 1990s, throwing massive amounts of money at a school system does not guarantee success. We do, however, have a mechanism that helps to level out funding and bring poor districts up to a reasonable level — our funding formula.

Either willfully or unknowingly, Desnoyer looks at a few facts and thinks he knows the whole; he does not. School finance is indeed a complicated endeavor and we can have a legitimate conversation about whether we should spend more money on disadvantaged students, but we should not start that conversation with a misstatement of the facts.

The post The Blind Men And School Funding appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Fallacy 2: Real spending on Missouri’s education system has been decreasing

The editors of the Post-Dispatch wrote: “Almost every budget in Missouri produces more education dollars than the one the year before. Mostly that’s because of the realities of inflation. If the education budget is measured in constant dollars, the story is entirely different.”

The editorial board is implying that real spending on education has not been increasing. In fact, they say “schools have less buying power nearly every year.”

According to data from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, state and local dollars in 2008 kept pace with inflation in 2009, but dropped off with the recession in 2010. Since then, state and local spending has increased approximately 5 percent. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, state and local spending fell off the pace of inflation by just three-tenths of a percentage point.

So yes, if we look at the facts with blinders on, it does appear that legislators are not keeping pace with inflation.

This, however, is a short-sighted analysis and ignores the long-term reality. From 1992 to 2008, we increased spending on education in Missouri by nearly 40 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars. These data come from the Digest of Education Statistics Table 194.

Real spending on education has taken a slight hit in recent years due to the recession, but over the course of the past 20 years, the state has continually increased education spending.

The post Dismantling The Post-Dispatch’s Piece About Education (Part 2 of 4) appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Fallacy 1: Percent of general revenue spent on education is the most important comparison

It’s one thing to make bold claims that you can back up. It’s another thing entirely to make a bold claim that you yourself probably don’t actually agree with.

The Post-Dispatch editorial board stated the “amount of general revenue dollars the state is investing in schools, compared to how much money they spend on everything else” is the most important comparison.

Really?

You would be hard-pressed to find anyone else who agrees with this sentiment. Would the editors be fine with a tax cut that led to across-the-board cuts to every spending program, as long as the percent of the pie spent on education increases? Not likely. In fact, the editors deride policymakers for passing a “bill that cuts Missouri’s already very low taxes even lower, thus starving the schools of future revenue.”

It seems obvious that the Post-Dispatch editorial board cares about the percent of the pie spent on education and the size of the pie.

Nevertheless, the editors continue with their overemphasis of the “slice of the pie” analogy and make an incorrect statement: “In fact, as a percentage of the overall general revenue pie, the slice devoted to education has been shrinking since 2002.” They note that in 2002, the state spent 37 percent of general revenue on education. The budget for 2014 calls for 35 percent to be spent on education. They claim this is a “historic” low. But, the historic low that the Post-Dispatch is reporting doesn’t really seem that historic. In fact, in 2010, education was just 32 percent of the budget and in 2011, it was just 34.73 percent of the budget.

On this matter, the Post-Dispatch was simply wrong, and there is more of that to come.

Analysis continued in part 2, part 3, and part 4.

The post Dismantling The Post-Dispatch’s Piece About Education (Part 1 of 4) appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The truth is, Missouri voters do not hate children, or even taxation for education. Take, for example, the results of Proposition S in Saint Louis County. Even though the property taxes for schools in the county are 50 percent higher than the average school property tax rate in the state, voters approved the 19 percent property tax increase with 59 percent of the vote.

Many Missourians simply did not believe that the increased revenue from the tobacco tax would actually go to education, and for good reason. Though the drafters of the legislation said the funds would be “in addition to” funds generated by the funding formula, they inserted a provision that allowed those funds to replace general revenue when the state could not fully fund their obligations to K-12 schools. As it turns out, that is exactly the position we are in right now. Missourians simply do not do not like taxes that unfairly target one population with dubious claims that they will benefit schools.

Proponents of Prop B claim big tobacco used scare tactics to garner opposition to the measure. In fact, the opposite was true, as advocates for the tax increase suggested the revenue generated would prevent teacher layoffs and increased class sizes. Those claims, of course, are not likely to come to fruition. However, if the state continues to underfund its obligations, the result is a massive lawsuit. Unless legislators want the courts to settle the issue of education funding, they need to have some serious discussions when they return to Jefferson City.

The debate about education funding will certainly be contentious and will pit rural, urban, and suburban legislators and school districts against each other. It could also be highly productive, allowing lawmakers to tackle some of the most pressing issues in K-12 education.

For instance, legislators could work out the kinks in the intradistrict transfer bill so more students have access to high-quality schools.

They could improve transparency by ensuring the money follows the child to their school, not just to their district. This would ensure money designated for high-poverty or special needs students is actually spent on those kids and not at wealthier schools in the district.

Or, lawmakers could consider tax-credit scholarships or education savings accounts as a way to save money and ensure parents have more educational options for their kids.

To many, taxing smokers to fund education sounded like a good idea. In reality, Prop B would have done little to build a strong, sustainable education system, but it would have provided cover for legislators to avoid the tough discussions that are needed. It is possible the “no” vote was actually a blessing for education funding; it may force legislators to go to the state capital and do the difficult job that they have been elected to do.

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

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