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

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

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction

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

Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Susan Pendergrass (07:29)
Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Shuls (32:09)
Thank you.

Neal McCluskey (32:09)
Great, thanks.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

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

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Dr. Jim Wyckoff, professor at the University of Virginia and director of the Education Policy Ph.D. program, about the long-term decline in student academic achievement. They discuss how national test scores, especially for the lowest-performing students, began falling well before the pandemic, why the usual explanations like COVID or Common Core miss the bigger picture, and what states can do to reverse the trend, and more.

Listen on Apple Podcasts 

Listen on Spotify

Listen on SoundCloud

Timestamps

00:00 Understanding Declining Academic Achievement
02:47 Historical Context of Academic Performance
05:43 The Impact of Policy Changes
08:31 Exploring Causes of Decline
11:14 Success Stories and Lessons Learned
13:51 The Role of State Legislation
16:49 Future Directions and Solutions

Episode Transcript

(Download)

Susan Pendergrass (00:00)
Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast, Professor Wyckoff of the University of Virginia. So you have a recent paper that really caught my eye. I’m puzzling over declining academic achievement in this country. And it’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot. And sort of as a companion issue, I work in Missouri and I’ve been talking for a long time that Missouri enrollment’s been declining and folks are like, well, yeah, the pandemic—the pandemic, kids left public schools, but they’ll probably come back. And I’m like, no, no, we had our largest kindergarten class in 2013. Any data forecaster, demographer would see this coming. This is not a pandemic problem. And I think it exacerbated it, but I think this has happened with basic student test scores in this country, where people are like, well, the pandemic caused it, and we’re gonna come back out of this.
You have a paper that’s out recently on the fact that maybe the pandemic didn’t cause it and it predated it. So I’d love it if you could just tell me a little bit about what you found looking back and why, in my opinion, it’s a bigger problem than many folks are thinking it is.

Jim Wyckoff (01:03)
Sure. So I’ve been following sort of NAEP trends, as a lot of people do, because NAEP is an incredibly reliable source of information about academic achievement at certainly the national and the state levels, and to some extent at certain large districts, the TUDA districts. And so I’ve been noticing this trend for several years now where NAEP scores have been declining—predating the pandemic by a number of years. And these declines have gotten large by almost any metric we might use to measure student achievement.
A lot of people saw the very large declines that occurred during the pandemic. And again, there was lots of discussion in both achievement and political terms about what this meant and how we were going to attribute these losses.
Last fall, I started to get more serious about wanting to understand these trends. Quite honestly, it came from a place of having some ideas, but really wanting to figure it out. The title of the article is “puzzling” because I spent a lot of time trying to better understand these trends—how large are they, when did they begin—and asking questions to help make sense of what’s going on.
One of the more surprising conclusions was that the losses that had been occurring prior to the pandemic were about half as large as the total loss that occurred by 2024. And that surprised me a little.

Susan Pendergrass (02:55)
Yeah, so we were on a bit of an upward trajectory during the era that a lot of people didn’t like, but No Child Left Behind caused a lot of anguish. I remember my oldest was in third grade the first year of No Child Left Behind testing in Virginia—SOLs—and it caused a lot of problems. But it did have results, right? No Child Left Behind, this high-accountability, high-stakes testing that people don’t like, actually improved test scores, right?

Jim Wyckoff (03:28)
Yeah, I think there are, as you suggested, large increases in NAEP scores from the early 1990s to around 2009. These increases were large by almost anyone’s standards—over 50 percent of a standard deviation, which translates to nearly two years of learning. So these were consistent, large increases.
Around 2009, the scores leveled off and then began to decline. During that 1990 to 2009 period, a number of policies played a role. NCLB began in 2002 and ran its course until around 2013 before ESSA replaced it in 2015. The best evidence we have suggests that math scores improved as a result of NCLB. Not by as much as the broader achievement gains, but still meaningful increases.

Susan Pendergrass (04:50)
Yeah. And I think it should be pointed out that in the ’90s, governors all met—actually at the University of Virginia—and there was a broader push around academic achievement. For our listeners, Missouri tracks exactly with the national results. We peaked in 2009 and have been steadily declining ever since.
Last year in Missouri and nationally, four out of ten fourth graders were essentially not literate. They didn’t reach the “basic” level in reading. We don’t know where they are between zero and basic, but they didn’t register on the scale—they’re essentially illiterate. And that, to me, is a crisis. I don’t hear it being talked about like a crisis the way it was in the ’90s after a number of major government studies. But that’s where we are. We’re back to square one, essentially—long-term NAEP trends put us back to the 1970s.

Jim Wyckoff (05:51)
Yeah, certainly for the lowest-performing kids, the decline has wiped out gains made since 1990. As you’re suggesting, these results have important implications.
Since NCLB and other developments in the 2000s, I think there’s been less emphasis on academic achievement. Other issues have come forward. People have denigrated test scores to the point where we’ve missed opportunities to understand what’s going on.
And NAEP is a low-stakes, low-accountability test—nothing really rides on it. That’s why we believe it’s a strong signal of what kids are actually learning. And what they’re learning has declined significantly, as you’re pointing out.

Susan Pendergrass (06:52)
Let’s talk about your speculation as to what’s causing this. I’ve heard a lot about smartphones in classrooms, and states are starting to get active on that. You suggest it might be part of the problem. How so?

Jim Wyckoff (07:07)
Yeah, not just me—others have made this connection. Smartphones and social media really took off around 2009. Their use became much more widespread between 2009 and 2020. If you look at the data, smartphone and social media saturation grew rapidly in that period.
There’s evidence suggesting kids have become less engaged in school. That’s led to regulations about phone use in classrooms. But the problem extends beyond school—kids are less engaged with schoolwork outside the classroom too.
It’s hard to definitively link smartphone use to declining achievement, but there’s reason to believe it’s a contributing factor. Still, I don’t think any one issue—phones, NCLB, whatever—can account for the full decline. It’s likely a combination of multiple factors that vary by place and time.
And I think we’re not good at nuance in education. But we need a comprehensive, systematic approach to address this. There’s no single fix.

Susan Pendergrass (09:08)
We have some states—people are calling them “Southern miracles”—like Mississippi and Louisiana, that are doing much better in reading. But it’s not nationwide. We have broad declines, and then these little pockets of success. What does that mean going forward?

Jim Wyckoff (09:27)
I’m not sure we’ll ever come up with a good causal understanding of what caused these declines nationally. But I do think places like Mississippi give us reason for optimism.
In 2013, Mississippi got serious about the science of reading and implemented it rigorously, with supports to help teachers. If you look at their data, they improved reading scores during a period when national scores were declining. In math, they at least held steady.
Now, their scores haven’t continued rising as they did before 2009, but they’ve fared better than most. So while the science of reading isn’t a silver bullet, it’s part of the solution.
States have a real opportunity here. That includes focusing on accountability, proven policies like science of reading, and funding.
Many states cut education funding after the 2008 recession and didn’t return to pre-recession levels, inflation-adjusted, until recently. Teacher salaries fell and in some places still haven’t recovered.
Teacher quality, especially in low-performing schools, matters a lot. And demographics play a role too—we don’t measure poverty depth well, and English language learners are increasing in number.
We need state- and district-level analysis to understand what’s going on and invest in the things that work.

Susan Pendergrass (13:22)
My biggest concern is the fourth-grade scores. These kids are probably in sixth grade now, and one day they’ll go to high school unable to read their textbooks.
We’re creating an underclass that’s not going to catch up. While overall test scores are down, the steepest declines are among the lowest 10 percent of performers. I don’t know how we catch those kids up.
We’re seeing a smaller student population and a higher percentage of students who can’t read or do math. What kind of workforce will we have in ten years?
We’re dabbling in the science of reading, but accountability has dropped. Do you think Common Core contributed to this decline—or at least gave accountability a bad name?

Jim Wyckoff (14:35)
Yeah. Common Core got incredibly politicized—as a sort of top-down mandate—when in fact it came from organizations like the National Governors Association that were pushing for rigorous curriculum.
The underlying concept was good. Many states still use Common Core-style standards, even if they don’t call it that anymore.

Susan Pendergrass (15:05)
Missouri is one.

Jim Wyckoff (15:05)
Exactly. And the evidence linking Common Core to achievement declines is very thin. I don’t think it played a significant role. But like you said, these issues often get politicized and take on a life of their own.

Susan Pendergrass (15:32)
Your paper has great graphs showing projections of where we should be if we stayed on the pre-2009 trajectory. Have you done projections from 2009 forward? Because it doesn’t look good to me.

Jim Wyckoff (15:53)
If we continue the trajectory we’ve been on since 2009—or 2013—about half the decline we saw between 2019 and 2024 could’ve been predicted even without the pandemic.
So the pandemic worsened the problem, but it didn’t cause it. I see no reason to believe the decline would’ve stopped.
Unless we make serious changes, the downward trend is likely to continue. Especially for the lowest-performing group, there’s little evidence of any turnaround.
Among students at the median or higher levels, there is some evidence of recovery in math. But reading remains a problem across the board.

Susan Pendergrass (17:17)
So what should we do? I work at the state level a lot—what should state legislatures or education agencies do?

Jim Wyckoff (17:35)
This is a real opportunity for state leaders—governors and legislatures—to act.
We’re on the cusp of seeing real consequences in the workforce and higher ed outcomes. Governors could champion this issue. Academic achievement isn’t the only thing we care about in schools, but it’s a top priority.
We need to move past the cultural wars of the last decade. Most parents still care deeply about academic outcomes.
For kids from low-income families, education is their path to a better life—and we’re not serving them well right now.
This should be a bipartisan issue. Conservatives and progressives should be able to rally around this.
I know there are institutional barriers and some bureaucracies may not want the changes required, but I hope we see leadership from some states. And when we see success, others can follow.

Susan Pendergrass (19:52)
Yeah, and I really appreciate your scholarly approach to something I’ve been speculating about. This goes way back before the pandemic.
If we blame it on COVID, we’ll keep talking about “pandemic learning loss” when the issue runs much deeper.
We need to acknowledge the path we’ve been on and chart a better course. Where can people find your article or get in touch with you?

Jim Wyckoff (20:23)
The article is forthcoming in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. My email is mikeoff@virginia.edu.
I appreciate your interest in this topic and would love to see more people dig into it. What I’ve done is just the beginning.

Susan Pendergrass (20:48)
I couldn’t agree more. We’ve got to keep puzzling through these issues. Jim, thank you so much. Take care.

Jim Wyckoff (20:57)
Okay, thank you, Susan.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Understanding the Decline in Student Test Scores with Jim Wyckoff appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post Open Enrollment: Erasing Seven Myths in Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Numerous studies have investigated the potentially harmful effects of smartphones and social media. In fact, the U.S. Surgeon General has recently called for a warning label on social media for youth. While national leaders are considering action more broadly, numerous states are considering the issue, including Missouri. House Bill (HB) 408 proposes a statewide approach to the smartphone problem in schools.

What Would HB 408 Accomplish?

If passed, HB 408 would require every school district to adopt a written policy governing “electronic telecommunication” (primarily smartphone) use. At a minimum, each policy would need to:

• Prohibit students from using, operating, possessing, or keeping on such student’s person a smartphone or connected device during regularly scheduled instructional activities.
• Require students who bring a device to school grounds to turn it off and store it properly during instructional activities.
• Establish guidelines for using smartphones during field trips, transportation, and other “noninstructional” school activities.
• Provide exceptions for students with an individualized education program (IEP), a 504 Plan (for students with special accommodations), or those with individualized healthcare plans.

Why HB 408 Would Help

Teachers overwhelmingly report that smartphones are a major classroom disruption. A Pew Research Center study found that 72% of U.S. high school teachers say that smartphone distraction is a major problem. Additionally, 83% of National Education Association (NEA) members support prohibiting smartphone and personal devices during the entire school day.

Research reinforces these concerns, as studies have shown that receiving notifications (or even the potential of receiving them), can disrupt learning and lead to lower performance.

Bullying has routinely been connected to smartphone use, with devices being used for recording fights, cyber bullying, and spreading harmful content on social media. Missouri has seen a rising number of disciplinary incidents despite a smaller student population. In the 2012–2013 school year, there were 11,703 suspensions of 10 or more consecutive days—that number rose to 14,890 in 2022–2023.

In January, Normandy Schools Collaborative enacted a total smartphone ban on district property, citing that smartphone use has been a primary cause of bullying, staged fights, and sexual misconduct. However, the success of the policy will hinge on effective enforcement.

When asked about the total ban on school property, a director of security at the Normandy School Collaborative stated: “We tried a policy where you could have a cell phone, just not in class. The students did not adhere to the policies.”

It would be inaccurate to completely scapegoat smartphones for all the aforementioned issues in schools, but it would also be difficult to argue that they are not exacerbating the problem.

HB 408 is a policy that would potentially improve the academic and social environment for Missouri schools, but its success still hinges on how districts and parents enforce the policy. If passed, it will be fascinating to see which strategies (such as allowing cell phones but not smartphones) prove most effective.

The post Hanging Up on Smartphones in Missouri Public Schools appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The size of Missouri’s kindergarten classes is getting smaller. The birth rate peaked in the state in 2008. Five years later, kindergarten enrollment in the state peaked at nearly 72,000 children. Since then it has steadily declined and total kindergarten enrollment is down by 10,000 students. The chart below illustrates the decline:

Missouri Public Schools Kindergarten Enrollment

It doesn’t take a demographer to see where total enrollment is going. Ultimately, every public school grade will be down by at least 10,000 students—which is a total of 130,000 from peak enrollment in the state.

There will no doubt be handwringing about teacher layoffs, school closings, and consolidation. But anyone who had been paying attention could have planned for this.  We’ve had a decade to adjust our perspective.

The post Public Education in Missouri Is Shrinking appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

But let’s pull back and look at the state as a whole.

The above table has student and staff numbers for school year 2018–19 (pre-pandemic) and 2022–23 (last year). Overall, Missouri enrollment, including pre-K, fell by over 21,000 students, a trend that has been in the works for about a decade and has been much discussed on this blog. At the same time, though, Missouri school districts added over 1,300 teachers, almost 450 district administrators and staff, and about 200 school administrators and staff. Adding teachers while enrollment declined caused the number of students per teacher to fall below 13 (to 12.8) for the first time in at least 25 years. I understand why teachers prefer smaller class sizes. But these are very expensive decisions.

We are already hearing calls for the state to make up for the federal stimulus dollars that have run out. Maybe we should be asking some questions about spending decisions at the same time.

The post What Fiscal Cliff? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post Public Education at a Crossroads with Aaron Smith appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The state board made the right decision, but not necessarily for the right reasons. Don’t get me wrong— public feedback and buy-in, especially on issues such as this, is critical. But the board made the right decision because DESE did not have statutory authority to push these standards.

Back in September, I noted that the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) was pushing the social–emotional learning standards without statutory authority. At the time, DESE claimed Section 161.1050 of the revised statutes of Missouri provided the authority. In the lead up to this week’s state board meeting, DESE has changed its tune. Instead of citing the statute for the “Trauma-informed schools initiative,” it  cited Section 161.092. This section of the statutes is labeled, “Powers and duties of state board.” Despite the change, DESE still lacks statutory authority to impose the SEL standards.

Section 161.092 essentially tells the state board what it must do. It must “adopt rules governing its own proceedings,” for example. The state board must also “make an annual report.” Nowhere in the section does it mention “standards,” “social–emotional,” or anything vaguely resembling the work that DESE has been pushing.

Once again, I have posted the full statute below for you to examine. It seems DESE is grasping at straws for authority, but coming up empty.

 161.092.  Powers and duties of state board. — The state board of education shall:

(1)  Adopt rules governing its own proceedings and formulate policies for the guidance of the commissioner of education and the department of elementary and secondary education;

(2)  Carry out the educational policies of the state relating to public schools that are provided by law and supervise instruction in the public schools;

(3)  Direct the investment of all moneys received by the state to be applied to the capital of any permanent fund established for the support of public education within the jurisdiction of the department of elementary and secondary education and see that the funds are applied to the branches of educational interest of the state that by grant, gift, devise or law they were originally intended, and if necessary institute suit for and collect the funds and return them to their legitimate channels;

(4)  Cause to be assembled information which will reflect continuously the condition and management of the public schools of the state;

(5)  Require of county clerks or treasurers, boards of education or other school officers, recorders and treasurers of cities, towns and villages, copies of all records required to be made by them and all other information in relation to the funds and condition of schools and the management thereof that is deemed necessary;

(6)  Provide blanks suitable for use by officials in reporting the information required by the board;

(7)  When conditions demand, cause the laws relating to schools to be published in a separate volume, with pertinent notes and comments, for the guidance of those charged with the execution of the laws;

(8)  Grant, without fee except as provided in section 168.021, certificates of qualification and licenses to teach in any of the public schools of the state, establish requirements therefor, formulate regulations governing the issuance thereof, and cause the certificates to be revoked for the reasons and in the manner provided in section 168.071;

(9)  Classify the public schools of the state, subject to limitations provided by law and subdivision (14) of this section, establish requirements for the schools of each class, and formulate rules governing the inspection and accreditation of schools preparatory to classification, with such requirements taking effect not less than two years from the date of adoption of the proposed rule by the state board of education, provided that this condition shall not apply to any requirement for which a time line for adoption is mandated in either federal or state law.  Such rules shall include a process to allow any district that is accredited without provision that does not meet the state board’s promulgated criteria for a classification designation of accredited with distinction to propose alternative criteria to the state board to be classified as accredited with distinction;

(10)  Make an annual report on or before the first Wednesday after the first day of January to the general assembly or, when it is not in session, to the governor for publication and transmission to the general assembly.  The report shall be for the last preceding school year, and shall include:

(a)  A statement of the number of public schools in the state, the number of pupils attending the schools, their sex, and the branches taught;

(b)  A statement of the number of teachers employed, their sex, their professional training, and their average salary;

(c)  A statement of the receipts and disbursements of public school funds of every description, their sources, and the purposes for which they were disbursed;

(d)  Suggestions for the improvement of public schools; and

(e)  Any other information relative to the educational interests of the state that the law requires or the board deems important;

(11)  Make an annual report to the general assembly and the governor concerning coordination with other agencies and departments of government that support family literacy programs and other services which influence educational attainment of children of all ages;

(12)  Require from the chief officer of each division of the department of elementary and secondary education, on or before the thirty-first day of August of each year, reports containing information the board deems important and desires for publication;

(13)  Cause fifty copies of its annual report to be reserved for the use of each division of the state department of elementary and secondary education, and ten copies for preservation in the state library;

(14)  Promulgate rules under which the board shall classify the public schools of the state; provided that the appropriate scoring guides, instruments, and procedures used in determining the accreditation status of a district shall be subject to a public meeting upon notice in a newspaper of general circulation in each of the three most populous cities in the state and also a newspaper that is a certified minority business enterprise or woman-owned business enterprise in each of the two most populous cities in the state, and notice to each district board of education, each superintendent of a school district, and to the speaker of the house of representatives, the president pro tem of the senate, and the members of the joint committee on education, at least fourteen days in advance of the meeting, which shall be conducted by the department of elementary and secondary education not less than ninety days prior to their application in accreditation, with all comments received to be reported to the state board of education;

(15)  Have other powers and duties prescribed by law.

The post In Search of Statutory Authority for Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) Standards appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Missouri Elementary and Secondary Enrollment and Teachers: 2014–15 through 2021–22

Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Common Core of Data, Nonfiscal Survey, multiple years, nces.ed.gov/ccd

Missouri enrollment fell from 920,000 students in 2015 to 910,000 in 2019—before the pandemic. Even with the post-pandemic recovery, enrollment is still down over 30,000 students from six years ago. Interestingly, we now have over 3,000 more teachers to serve the smaller student body.

According to Dr. Marguerite Roza of Georgetown University, there have been three waves contributing to the growing teaching staff. The first was the post-recession hiring back of laid off teachers. Then there were seven boom years of growth in education funding (though not in enrollment). Finally, there has been the enormous influx of pandemic stimulus funds from the federal government.

Stimulus money is drying up, though. So, what happens next? The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) has just submitted a budget request that has a $300 million increase. In a logic-defying move, DESE claims that fewer students means we need a higher dollar amount per student in the foundation formula. Why? Because hiring when enrollment goes down because you’ve got the money doesn’t mean you can simply fire excess teachers when the funds dry up. Public education employment contracts don’t work that way. The system needs total funding to stay the same or increase, regardless of enrollment trends. Here’s hoping the state legislature looks at the math before agreeing to this request for no accountability.

The post Maybe the Adults Need a Math Test appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Why did the Show-Me Institute decide to include/exclude “X” category of revenue or spending?

We didn’t. These numbers all come from a report titled the Annual Secretary to the Board Report (ASBR) that each school district and charter school submits to the state. ASBRs are prepared based on guidelines in the Missouri Financial Accounting Manual. ASBRs account for each dollar that comes into a district and each that is spent. Money comes from many sources, including some that may be surprising, such as bookstore sales, food sales to parents, or tuition from other districts. Some sources, such as revenue received from issuing bonds to build a building, are large, one-time infusions of money. We didn’t distinguish between which sources are “important” or “appropriate” for users to consider. We included all money that flowed into each district from every source.

Similarly, we included every expenditure reported in the ASBR. When the site was first launched, many questioned why we included capital expenses, such as land. Again, we included everything reported and provided sufficient detail for users to disregard what they deem to not be true education expenses. Remember, however, that every dollar spent by a public school district is a dollar that wasn’t spent elsewhere for a different public purpose.

Why are the numbers so high?

When every dollar that is spent by public school districts is totaled up and divided by the number of students, the result is often higher than what the public assumes it will be. Survey after survey finds that the public grossly underestimates public education spending. In addition, public education spending-per-student data frequently excludes certain expenditures. Often what is reported is current expenditures or instruction expenditures. The expenditures per student on MOSchoolRankings.org uses the Annual Secretary to the Board Report (ASBR) Total Expenditures as the numerator and the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE)-reported enrollment for each district as the denominator.

Why don’t the numbers match the expenditures per student on the academic side of the website?

When the Show-Me Institute first launched MOSchoolRankings.org with academic grades for each school and district in the state, we included total expenditures per student for context. These numbers come from a DESE file titled Finance Data and Statistics Summary for All Districts/Charters. We have continued to use this file with each update for consistency. Why those numbers differ from the ASBR totals is not clear.

We hope you find the updated data on the website useful. We are committed to updating the MoSchoolRankings site to give Missourians the best data available on schools in our state.

The post Finance Data on MoSchoolRankings Updated appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Chronic absenteeism in this case means missing 10 percent or more of the school year—about 18 days in Missouri. Dee reports that from the school year before the pandemic (2018–19) to the year after (2021–22), Missouri’s chronic absenteeism nearly doubled, from 13 percent to 24 percent. That means nearly one quarter of our students, or just under 200,000 students, missed a potentially damaging number of days of school.

While Dee’s study only includes those two time periods, DESE data indicate that chronic absenteeism had already been on the rise in Missouri.

It’s unclear why absenteeism has been growing in Missouri, but it’s a serious problem. Missing a significant number of days can impact math and reading achievement, social–emotional development, and discipline. It is also associated with an increase in risky behaviors outside of school. Missouri leaders should be addressing this problem as the crisis that it is.

The post Where Are the Students? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

What’s interesting is that, to date, students in 96 out of Iowa’s 99 counties have received scholarships. In Kossuth County, with just 15,000 people, 183 students have received Students First ESAs. In Worth County, with a population of just 7,500 people, eight students have decided that they do, in fact, want and need school choice.

Is our neighbor to the north really that different? Missouri families need school choice. They need it when their local school is too small or too big, when it doesn’t serve their child’s disability, when their child feels bullied or lost, or when their high school student needs a high-level STEM or language course that the local district doesn’t offer. The assigned-school-only dominoes are starting to fall. And they’re falling in our backyard. When will Missouri leadership get it?

The post I Guess Rural Iowa Is Entirely Different than Rural Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Sure, enrollment in many of our already small rural districts has declined so much that it raises the question of how the districts can continue to exist. But that’s not the whole story. Some of the “best” districts in St. Louis County have been experiencing steady enrollment declines. In 2017–18, the Clayton School District had almost 2,800 students. Last year, it had fewer than 2,400. A loss of four hundred students in a district of that size is significant. Similarly, Parkway C-2 has lost 1,000 students in the past few years, going from nearly 18,000 students in 2018–19 to fewer than 17,000. Rockwood, which had nearly 23,000 students a decade ago, now has just under 21,000, having lost 1,900 students from its high-water mark.

In fact, every district other than Ladue and Lindbergh has seen enrollment losses since 2010. But their gains of approximately 2,300 students don’t come close to offsetting the countywide loss of over 11,000. St. Louis County’s neighbor, St. Charles County, shows similar trends. The biggest districts are down by thousands of students.

So what does this mean? Even with no boundary changes, we will have excess capacity and too many teachers in most districts unless we make the region and the state more attractive to families. Districts can no longer rest on their laurels and assume their classrooms will be filled. Programs that allow parents to choose a school for each of their children and that allow districts to specialize in what they offer should be welcomed. Those hard district lines meant to keep students out may need to become more porous.

Public education in Missouri is no longer a system of more—more students, more teachers, more school buildings, more money. It’s a shrinking system, and that will bring difficult decisions. It’s time to start thinking about how we can design a smarter system to better serve our region.

The post The System We Have Is Not the System We’ve Had appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post Funding Open Enrollment in Missouri with Aaron Smith appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

For decades, the state and the federal government have poured billions into the system to try to balance the disconnect between students living in wealthy neighborhoods and students living in poor neighborhoods. The wealth gap between neighborhoods was referred to as the “big white elephant” by the board member who provided the first quote. As it turns out, monopolistic bureaucracies are reliably terrible at solving this problem. Complicated funding formulas try to take into account how much residents of local districts could contribute to public education based on the value of all property in the district in an attempt to redistribute funds from wealthy districts to poor districts. The result is that some districts, such as Brentwood and Ladue, receive about $600 per student from the state, and others—mostly small rural districts—receive as much as $16,000 per student. The federal formula to redistribute resources to low-income districts, also known as Title I, is ridiculously Byzantine and political.

Here’s the problem with “resource deployment.” It hasn’t worked. The achievement gaps between low-income and non-low-income students in Missouri have only gotten wider. In 2019, 45 percent of non-low-income 8th graders scored Proficient or higher in reading on the Nation’s Report Card, compared to just 21 percent of low-income 8th graders. The gap in math was even larger–27 percentage points. In 2003, the gap in reading was 19 percentage points and the gap in math was 22.

We cannot equalize opportunity using a top-down approach. Resources should be deployed to families to spend at the school of their choice. I continue to assert that if low-income families were given the responsibility for choosing which schools received their children’s public education funding, four out of five families would not accept below grade level results.

The post Resource Deployment Isn’t the Solution appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

But the big news is that now any West Virginia family with children enrolled in a public school can take nearly $4,300 in state education funding to the school of their choice. The program isn’t just for low-income parents, or parents of students with disabilities, or parents in larger cities, or parents of students in low-performing schools—ANY parent of a public school student can use their state funding to attend a private school, purchase tutoring services, sign-up for courses leading to an industry-recognized credential in a trade, or enroll in educational therapies.

This win for West Virginia families comes close on the heels of an even bigger one for Arizona families. Arizona’s groundbreaking universal scholarship of $6,500 can also be used by students who are already attending a private school or homeschooled students.

West Virginia and Arizona lawmakers trusted families to decide what’s best for their children’s education. They trusted that putting families in charge is true school accountability. Nearly 70 percent of Missouri students are below grade level in math. Do we believe that if Missouri families were given the same choices they wouldn’t consider different educational options? Those in charge of public education in Missouri tell us not to worry that only 32 percent of our students are proficient in math—they’re working on it. Put parents at the helm and see how many would be okay with that.

Kudos, West Virginia. Missouri, we got next.

The post It’s Happening appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Too often, local officials have resisted oversight of Missouri public schools and districts. School bureaucrats from across the state have pushed back against Sunshine requests filed by the public, including many from the Show-Me Curricula Project, and now lawsuits are flying. I’ve heard stories from concerned parents and teachers about their treatment by school officials and their fears of persecution for speaking up about controversial issues.

This is not how parents and taxpayers should be treated by our public education system. Enough is enough.

In an effort to put the power of schooling back in the hands of the public that funds it, today I am introducing the Missouri Parents’ Bill of Rights (MPBR).

The MPBR emphasizes two objectives—transparency and accountability—and sets out reforms that would allow taxpayers and parents to see exactly how their schools and districts are operating and what they are teaching. Titularly highlighting parents’ role in the education of Missouri kids, the MPBR is geared toward promoting good, responsive governance in taxpayer-supported schools and school districts. Certainly, many of these reforms could be just as easily applied to other local governments like cities and counties—and eventually should.

But the taxpaying public should have an unambiguous right to see what’s being taught to their kids, how schools are performing, and how money is being spent. Taxpayers and parents should be able to use every tool available to them to ensure Missouri kids can have a productive educational career and life. For that to happen, taxpayers and parents must have oversight of the educational bodies in our state.

As I’ve written before, the privilege of taxing comes with a duty of forthrightness and responsibility. Denying that forthrightness and responsibility is to entertain the idea that government rules the people and not the other way around. The MPBR seeks to proclaim unequivocally where power in our system resides—with the people—and to emphasize that transparency and accountability are non-negotiable preconditions to accessing tax dollars.

Stay tuned in the days, weeks, and months ahead as we go into greater depth on this initiative.

We’ve only just begun.

Missouri Parents’ Bill of Rights

The parents of Missouri’s children have a fundamental right to participate in and direct the education of their children. In order to effectuate and protect those rights, the state hereby adopts an approach that affirms “sunlight is the best disinfectant” to ensure parents can see, understand and trust representations made by state and local education officials about their children’s education and equips parents with the tools to make informed choices to educate their children especially if, in their judgment, the unique needs of their children are not being met.

Those rights include but are not limited to:

• the right to transparent access to school and school district curricula and lesson plans, made available in an electronically searchable format and available at all times online on the homepage of the website hosted by the district (an expansion of RSMo §162.208) and submitted to the state to affirm compliance.
  • Curricula shall be available to the public at least 30 days before the beginning of a semester’s classes.
  • Because they are often formulated up to the date of instruction, lesson plans shall be available to the public no later than 30 days after the date such course materials were taught. Parents nonetheless have the right to request such materials directly from teachers prior to that time.
  • The right to instructional material includes the right to transparent access to school and school district faculty and staff training materials, also made available in an electronically searchable format and available at all times online on a website hosted by the state.
• the right to transparent access to school and school district academic performance information in an easy to understand and electronically searchable format, available at all times online on the homepage of the website hosted by the district (an expansion of RSMo §162.208) and based on data from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. That information shall be regularly updated and shall include:
  • the percentage of all students scoring at the Proficient level or higher on all assessments administered under the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP)
  • the percentage of students in each reportable subgroup, including race/ethnicity, economically disadvantaged, students with disabilities, and English language learners, scoring at the Proficient level or higher on all assessments administered under the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP)
  • the Growth score in English/language arts (ELA), measured in National Curve Equivalents (NCE) for grades 3 through 8
  • the Growth score in math, measured in National Curve Equivalents (NCE) for grades 3 thru 8
• the right to transparent access to school and school district financial information in an easy to understand and electronically searchable format, available at all times online on the homepage of the website hosted by the district (a new section under RSMo Chapter 162) and submitted to the state to affirm compliance. That information shall be regularly updated and shall include:
  • transactional data similar to that produced from an accounts payable report, and if practicable rendered in a manner similar to the existing Show-Me Checkbook website maintained by the Treasurer’s Office.
  • the district’s latest financial statements filed with the state.
• the right to transparent access to contract negotiations between the district and labor groups with whom the district is considering entering into labor agreement (a new section under RSMo Chapter 162) including access to all materials used in negotiation and all finalized documents that describe the legal obligations of parties pursuant to an agreement. Such documents shall be available in an electronically searchable format and available at all times online on the homepage of the website hosted by the district (an expansion of RSMo §162.208) and submitted to the state to affirm compliance.
• the right to choose existing educational choice options provided by law that best suit the learning needs of their children.
• the right to request to opt their children out of the classroom for any presentation of content listed in the syllabus with which they disagree.
• the right to control their children’s likeness in district materials, subject to exceptions like court orders.
• the right to control their children’s health and identifying markers, including but not limited to the right to opt out of health measures not required by state order or statute.

Failure by a school or school district to abide by these rights and expectations could subject the school or school district to financial penalties by the state and administrative penalties affecting the privileges afforded districts under state law.

Download a Copy of the Missouri Parents’ Bill of Rights

The post Missouri Parents’ Bill of Rights appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The growth of the St. Louis MSA, which contains 7 counties in Missouri and 8 counties in Illinois, has been stagnant for years, driven in no small part by poor population growth in St. Louis City. While some lawmakers were pleasantly surprised that our 2020 numbers weren’t worse, I’m disappointed at what has become of a once booming and prosperous Midwestern region.

What is it that keeps St. Louis out of the race?

Maybe it’s the sales tax rates that can be over 11 percent. Or the earnings tax in St. Louis City. Perhaps it’s the poor public schools and lack of school choice. Or the crime. It’s likely a mix of all these things and more; anything that makes St. Louis a less attractive place to live, work, or start a business has negative effects on population growth. You would think that years of stagnant growth would inspire lawmakers to take steps in the right direction, but we’ve seen little change. Maybe this fall from the top 20 will finally light a fire under lawmakers.

The post We’re Not in Last Place—We’re Not Even in the Race appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Many Americans don’t know that anti-miscegenation laws—laws prohibiting certain races from marrying one another—were in effect well into the 20th century, including here in Missouri. They were odious laws affecting the marriages of not just the first generation, but of their children, their children’s children, and their children’s children’s children. The generational injustice of such laws was breathtaking.

For the better part of a century, Americans tried to move past this sort of thinking. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” is the American dream, of a world defined not by who your family was but by who you are. It’s the dream of families of all colors that their children will not suffer because of the stations or sins of earlier generations.

It is right and proper that America’s tumultuous racial history is taught in every American classroom. Yet the line between racial understanding and racial grievance can be a thin one, so it’s unsurprising that there has been so much debate recently over the issue of critical race theory (CRT) and whether it should be taught in our schools.

While the precise contours of CRT vary from adherent to adherent, CRT as a belief system posits that white supremacy serves as the foundation of American institutions and government, and that white supremacy is advanced by whites as a class and who, individually, are definitionally racist regardless of their personal views. If the use of “class” sounds vaguely Marxist, it’s because CRT indeed has roots in Marxism, and some of its adherents are plain about their support for the suspension of private property rights and redistribution of wealth on the basis of race. Additionally, CRT (again, generally) gives great weight to ideas of race essentialism (that the color of our skin drives our value system,) neo-segregation (that racial groups should be regularly separated to develop their own identities), and collective guilt (that the wrongs of the past are assignable to racial groups today.)

In other words, it’s a belief system that is in direct contradiction to King’s dream. That, to me, is intolerable, and promoting such a worldview in public schools would be an alarming throwback to the bad old days of legally-enforced and culturally-accepted racism.

Some may feel differently, and that’s their right. But do Missouri parents even know whether their kids are learning this content? Have Missouri schools been transparent about whether and to what extent they agree with the principles of CRT? Parents have a right to know what’s being taught to their children regardless of the subject, but that’s especially true of contentious curricula that use CRT concepts.

For my part, I’d like to think that Missourians will reject critical race theory for themselves and their kids. Maybe that’s because of my own background and upbringing. Above all else, I think most Missourians believe we are all really part of an “American family,” with shared successes, shared disappointments, and shared history.

But being American isn’t about who our parents were or what we look like. It’s about what we choose to be . . . and what we choose to be together. As we look back at our American story, I hope we don’t lose sight of that; otherwise I fear we won’t just be looking back at the past, but falling back into its errors, as well.

The post Yes, We Should Be Concerned About Critical Race Theory appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

By the start of the next school year, public education should finally be back to pre-COVID normal, right? Buses will be running and school buildings will be filled with students and teachers from 8 a.m. to 3 pm. Not so fast.

The most interesting (to me) takeaway from the April survey of parents is this. When asked “After (emphasis mine) the pandemic, if given the option, to what extent would you prefer schooling to be scheduled each week at home with a parent or tutor to provide the best education for your child?” just 47 percent of public school parents said they would prefer for their children to be educated “Completely outside the home.” Thirteen percent said “Completely at home.” The remaining parents want a combination of days in school and days at home—generally two of one and three of the other. Think about that—almost half of parents surveyed want a new normal.

Last spring, just about every parent with a school-age child was forced to try homeschooling. Clearly, many liked it and would like to continue. But the conundrum to me is what to do with the 4 out of 10 parents who want their kids home some of the time—say a couple of days a week. Should districts just ignore them? Should we assume that when that option goes away, those 20 million or so parents will just give in to reality?

Maybe it’s time to expand the definition of a public school. Could we have rotating in-person and at-home schedules? Could we let teachers form micro-schools with a few families from their school? Could we let the education hubs that have popped up to facilitate public education, like YMCA’s or Boys and Girls Clubs, get fast tracked as charter schools?

One thing I know for sure: The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) is going to distribute state education funding to school districts based on the average daily attendance in their buildings a year or two ago. DESE is essentially going to pretend that it’s 2019 and every school-age child will be in a building full time. Reconsidering the definition of a public school would be a better way to have money follow children to the environment of their choice.

The post What Parents Want appeared first on Show-Me Institute.