While the Missouri Legislature continues to debate A–F school report cards, the Show-Me Institute recently released our annual report card update on MOSchoolRankings.org.

Our rankings are built on a model that incorporates 10 academic indicators of student success. All data are sourced from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), and all English/language arts (ELA) and math scores are based on the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP). Each component is weighted equally, and a full explanation of the methodology is available online.

Table 1 shows all 24 public school districts and charter schools that received an “A” in the 2024–2025 school year.

Suburban and rural districts dominate the top rankings, with numerous districts from St. Louis County (Ladue, Brentwood, Clayton). Many of the rural school districts are exceptionally small: Skyline has 81 students and Thornfield has 48. The largest school district on the list is Nixa Public Schools (near Springfield) with 6,518 students.

The suburban districts have relatively low rates of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (FRPL)—a common proxy for school poverty rate. Fewer than 10 percent of Ladue and Clayton students were eligible for FRPL, with Brentwood at 18 percent, Nixa at 26 percent, Festus at 28 percent, and Ozark at 35 percent. However, some rural “A” districts have a sizeable number of lower-income students.

Mansfield R-IV, which had 60 percent of its 622 students qualify for FRPL, performed above average in almost every single category (except in ELA growth). Richwoods R-VII, a small rural district about an hour from St. Louis, had 100 percent of its 125 students qualify for FRPL and had particularly impressive scores in math. These examples demonstrate that low-income schools can achieve academic success.

There is a lot more to delve into for academic performance. Table 1 is just one snapshot of what is available on MOSchoolRankings.org. Accountability tools like these can help highlight success stories, identify areas for improvement, and provide a clearer picture of how schools across Missouri are performing.

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The slow road to recovery is illustrated in the recently released preliminary results of the 2025 Missouri Assessment Program (MAP). The most recent data indicate modest improvements in mathematics, and average scores in at least some grades that are finally eclipsing pre-pandemic levels. However, the state’s stagnant reading scores continue to be a source of concern, as reading scores remain below their pre-pandemic levels in all tested grades.

Figure 1 summarizes MAP trends in the Show-Me State, including preliminary scores from the 2024–2025 school year:

Figure 1: Missouri Assessment Program (MAP) English/Language Arts Mean Scale Scores by Grade Level, 2018–2025

Source: Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education

In Figure 1, the mean scale scores represent the student body’s performance as a whole. There are several important takeaways from this figure:

• Across all grades, Missouri’s reading scores have yet to return to pre-pandemic levels.
• Except for scores in the 3rd and 5th grades, reading scores are lower now than they were in 2020–21, when the pandemic was still strongly affecting in-person schooling.

Clearly, there is still work to be done.

Potential Solutions

This post is not meant to be doom and gloom—there is hope. States such as Indiana, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee have shown that student literacy can improve substantially with the right reforms.

These states have adopted early literacy policies that are effective, though sometimes unpopular: mandatory third-grade retention, eliminating three-cueing for teaching reading, and ensuring teacher preparation programs teach evidence-based reading practices.

Other states have proved that early literacy reforms can work. The 2026 legislative session is an opportunity to take meaningful steps toward improving educational outcomes in Missouri by taking reading reform more seriously.

The post Missouri’s Stagnant Reading Scores appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Below, I will highlight problematic additions to the bill.

Phonics and Three-Cueing

The finally agreed bill now includes language to make phonics instruction (recognizing written words by connecting letters to their corresponding sounds) the primary instructional strategy for teaching word reading in early literacy. It also restricts the use of the three-cueing system (encouraging students to guess what an unfamiliar word is based on meaning, structure, or visual cues instead of sounding out the word entirely). The original amendment would have prohibited the use of three-cueing for teaching word reading, but the final version only prohibits “instruction in word reading relying primarily on the three-cueing system.” This change leaves the door open for its use and weakens the policy’s impact. I will write more about this in a future post.

New “Grade-Level” Category for the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP)

The new version of SB 68 also includes the addition of a fifth performance category (called “grade level”) for the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP). The MAP currently has four measures: advanced, proficient, basic, and below basic. “Proficient” is defined as mastery over all appropriate subject matter and introductory knowledge for the next grade. This sounds like an appropriate benchmark to set.

The new “grade-level” category essentially means partial mastery—a student “may be ready, with appropriate reinforcement” for the next grade. For parents, telling them their children are at “grade-level” makes it sound as if they are where they ought to be academically. But that is not what it means. Why is Missouri adding a new standard that is confusing at best and will make it harder to interpret scores? Do we really want to water down our standards when so many are at basic or below in the state?

Repurposing Scholarship Funds

Another provision allows unused funds for the Teacher Retention and Recruitment Scholarship (given to prospective teachers in high-need subject areas and schools) to be repurposed to non-high-need students in their final semester. These unused funds should be returned to the treasury to fund other existing priorities instead of being used for a new project entirely.

Open Enrollment—For a Select Few

Finally, SB 68 allows open enrollment for students whose parents are a contractor or regular employee of that district. This is a good opportunity for these families. But what Missouri needs is a universal open enrollment policy, which would help families and students in a variety of different circumstances. Why are only these families benefitted?

SB 68 illustrates the risk of omnibus bills: bad policies are often included, good policies get diluted, and elected officials can claim they had to swallow the bad with the good.

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The Missouri Senate debated this week whether we should just throw out the MSIP part. Students would still take the MAP tests, but only to meet federal requirements and get federal dollars. Supporters claim that outcomes will dramatically improve because every teacher, freed from the pressure of MAP scores, will thrive and innovate. Of course, that’s not true across the board. We have quite a few districts that need more oversight, not less.

Rather than take an accountability system with almost no teeth and toss it aside, we should be working on building a better one. It is still true that you can’t fix what you don’t measure. We need test scores to tell us if students can read and do math. We need to know how well schools are serving their students. Publicly funded systems should be held accountable to taxpayers.

We are on version six of MSIP. The state board of education recently determined that the results of MSIP 6 are not reliable enough to use without a rolling three-year average. If it is a broken accountability system—which it seems to be—let’s fix it.

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Using school-level data from the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP), we evaluated four different types of schools in the City of St. Louis: charters that were open in 2012 and are still open today, charters that have closed any time between 2012 and 2024, magnet schools (which filter enrollment), and traditional public schools. We looked at the total number of students who scored proficient or advanced in each category (charter, magnet, etc.,) and divided it by the total to calculate the percentages. In these totals, grades 3–8 are all aggregated together, and Algebra I and English II students are also included.

Since the MAP has changed in the time period we are assessing, it is difficult to measure performance within schools—but it is possible to measure performance between different types of schools.

In all three subjects (math, ELA, and science), charter schools that have been open since 2012 (SO Charters) surpassed magnet schools by 2023. In ELA, SO Charters had 7 percent fewer students who were proficient or advanced than magnets, but were 3 percent higher than traditional public schools in 2012. Fast forward to 2023, and SO Charters have 4 percent more students proficient or advanced than magnets and were 13 percent higher than traditional schools. The trend also translates to mathematics. All schools have remained relatively similar in science.

The orange line represents the group of charters that have closed down. Most recently, Hawthorne Leadership School and La Salle Charter had to shutter their doors due to low performance. The design of a charter school allows for schools with less successful models to be phased out. As the figures above display, successful models have benefitted students in the City of St. Louis.

The simple ability to close serves as a mechanism for accountability and competition. New models have been tested—some have succeeded, some have failed—but the ones that have succeeded have exceeded the performance of traditional public schools and magnets. This should be taken into consideration when weighing charter school expansion.

The post Comparing the Performance of Public Schools in the City of St. Louis appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Last year, 20 districts statewide implemented this new system as part of the Demonstration Project. Public data on this initiative will be released soon on September 30. These districts are primarily seeking exemptions because administrators in those districts do not feel the MAP is an adequate tool to improve student performance. The test is administered to students at the end of the year, which means districts do not receive test results back until the fall of the following year.

The system adopted by these district tests students  three times per year in English/language arts and math. Missouri could also consider pairing this model with a teacher rating system (like Tennessee’s) to gauge how effective a teacher’s class and curriculum are.

The fact that many districts believe that they could develop better testing than DESE speaks volumes. The MAP needs to be timelier, and it needs to be more informative for students, parents, and teachers. My colleague, James Shuls, lamented the lack of detail in a 2018 blog post.

Even with the shortcomings of the MAP test, Missouri ought to have a uniform statewide test that allows researchers, district officials, and policymakers to learn about different education strategies and trends. If a district implements a new strategy for teaching algebra, and it sees great improvement on the MAP, another district could mimic its practices.

There will be more clarity when statistics for the Demonstration Project are released in a month. If the results are encouraging, fully transitioning to this new testing system statewide might be worth considering.

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The authors note that how time is used matters, as it can be difficult to convert total scheduled hours into actual instructional hours. The amount of time at recess, the use of substitute teachers, snow days, etc., all can have an impact on student learning and diminish instructional time.

In their case study of the Providence Public School District in Rhode Island, Kraft and Novicoff estimate that elementary school students lose 16 percent of their instructional time, middle school students lose 21 percent, and high school students lose 25 percent. They observe that unexcused student absences account for the largest portion of the lost time (Missouri has a serious chronic absenteeism problem), but outside interruptions and teacher absences also have an impact.

The authors note that “most school systems which (sic) substantially increase total time are able to convert this additional time into at least small gains in academic achievement.” Essentially, even if the time is used poorly, there are gains to be made just by scheduling more hours in school.

In the paper, which uses national 2017–2018 statistics, Missouri ranked 46th in average number of instructional days and 24th in average number of instructional hours. It must be noted that these were our rankings prior to the passage of Senate Bill 743 in 2018, which removed the requirement for a minimum number of school days starting in the 2019–2020 school year. That was the same year the COVID-19 pandemic broke out—leaving in its wake an immense loss in instructional time, and a need to catch up.

Rather than increasing time to make up for the lost hours, Missouri schools have decreased hours—between 20-30 fewer hours per year on average. This is a small decrease, but it’s a puzzling decision given how much COVID set students back.

Test scores have been decreasing over the last three years as well. In 2019, 39% of Missouri 4th graders scored proficient or higher on the math portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and 34% scored proficient or higher in reading. In 2022, these numbers dropped to 34% and 30%, respectively. Missouri 8th graders fared no better, dropping from 32% in math and 33% in reading to 24% and 28%.

Similarly, on the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP), Missouri 4th and 8th graders have failed to bounce back from the pandemic drop. In fact, English/language arts scores are actually lower than the post-COVID year (2020-2021). In the 2021–2022 school year, 46% and 49% of Missouri 4th and 8th graders, respectively, scored above proficient. In the 2022–2023 school year, those scores fell to 43% for 4th graders and 46% for 8th graders.

Missouri students are losing out on instructional time, and our test scores are falling. There may be several reasons why scores are declining, but less time learning seems to be at least part of it. The evidence from scholars such as Kraft and Novicoff—along with common sense—makes it clear that kids are going to learn less if they have less instructional time.

Our students should be going to school more, not less.

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Missouri quietly released last year’s Missouri Assessment Program (MAP) scores for schools and districts recently. Because Missouri, like most states, currently has a chronic absenteeism problem and because Missouri chose the broadest rule for suppressing data due to privacy concerns, dozens of districts have no useable public test score data in either English/language arts (ELA) or math. How are these districts doing? I have no idea. But I do know that the average spending per student in the “no test score districts” was over $27,000 last year.

The state board of education’s reactions to last year’s statewide test scores, which were dismal, included the two standards—not enough teachers and not enough money. They threw in COVID and classroom behavior for good measure. And despite having multiple districts with fewer than 10 percent of students scoring at grade level on the MAP exam, the state board decided to keep designating 512 out of 518 school districts as fully accredited and have the remaining six be partially accredited—grade inflation at its best.

What if we leaned into testing to find out how we’re doing? What if we didn’t blame money or the kids? Success Academy, a well-known charter network in New York City that enrolls almost exclusively low-income students of color, had to rent an exhibition hall to accommodate students taking an AP exam this spring because there were so many of them. The academy’s founder and CEO, Eva Moskowitz said, “With rampant grade inflation and inconsistent state standards, AP and SAT tests are a critical tool . . . especially for low-income students of color.”

As the pandemic moves further into the rearview mirror, we need a clearer picture of the toll it has taken on Missouri’s children and their futures. We need more accountability, not less.

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Missouri, along with many other states, is struggling to bounce back to pre-pandemic achievement levels. In Missouri, scores have mostly recovered in math, but our English/language arts (ELA) scores have declined.

Here is a brief overview of the preliminary 2023 MAP results.

Mathematics took a bigger initial dive but has largely bounced back to its pre-pandemic levels. All cohorts of students (3rd grade, 4th grade, 5th grade, etc.,) have gradually recovered in mathematics and had a higher average score in 2023 than they did in 2021. On the other hand, only Missouri 5th graders had a higher average score for ELA in 2023 than they did in 2021. Interestingly, ELA scores are actually decreasing rather than recovering (hopefully the new LETRS program can help).

Particularly concerning are 3rd-grade and middle-school ELA levels, both of which are still much lower than pre-pandemic levels. For 3rd graders, scores slumped in 2021. Even as kids returned to school full time, scores have not increased—but have remained completely stagnant. Missouri’s 6th graders have actually had their scores decrease steadily for four straight years, with scores decreasing even before the pandemic. Compared with other grade cohorts, Missouri 6th graders have the biggest loss between pre- and post-pandemic scores. Additionally, our state’s 7th graders have had their scores drop lower every year since 2021 (8th graders dropped in 2022 and remained steady in 2023). Our middle schoolers are not rebounding from the pandemic, they are actually struggling even more in ELA.

We need drastic actions to address this education emergency. Missouri’s Commissioner of Education claimed that the teacher shortage is impacting student learning as positions are filled with substitutes or left vacant entirely. I agree that there is a teacher shortage in Missouri, but it’s concentrated in specific schools and subject areas. We need major change. Allowing school districts to offer bonuses or higher salaries to recruit and retain high need positions could help fill these roles and make the education system more responsive to the market.

These scores are concerning, but I am hopeful that these “deflating” results might motivate our legislators and districts to bring more freedom and innovation to education in our state.

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*Affton, Branson, Center, Confluence Academies, Fayette, Lebanon, Lee’s Summit, Lewis County, Liberty, Lindbergh, Lonedell, Mehlville, Neosho, Ozark, Parkway, Pattonville, Raymore-Peculiar, Ritenour, Ste. Genevieve, and Shell Knob

The Demonstration Project is a formal trial implemented with the goal of determining whether the Missouri Assessment Project (MAP) (which tests at the end of the year) should be replaced with an individualized and continuous system. I have discussed the details, benefits, and concerns with this project in two previous posts. If this new system sees success, Missouri could try to incorporate it statewide.

What will change for students this year?

Students in these 20 districts will be tested more frequently—three times in English/language arts (ELA) and three times in math (45 minutes for each subject), and the assessments will be on a computer. Students should know that it is an adaptive test, meaning the test will change in real time based on the responses—if a student misses questions, the test offers easier questions and vice versa. For a test taker, this means one cannot afford to make any careless mistakes. On traditional tests, all questions are weighted equally, so if one accidentally marks bubble C instead of bubble B, it will count as one mistake. However, if one accidentally picks bubble C or carelessly forgets to flip the sign on a negative number, the adaptive test will count it wrong and think the student cannot do harder problems since one of the easier problems was missed. Therefore, students should double check their work, because a careless mistake on the wrong problem can tank their score.

Students in these 20 districts will also take the MAP this year. The federal government mandates that every district in a state participate in a uniform standardized test. The MAP is a federally approved and mandated test, so any exemption from taking the MAP would have to come directly from the federal government. These 20 districts have requested a federal waiver, and we will see whether it is accepted or not.

What will change for parents?

The results of these student assessments will return quickly via an online form, and there will be a detailed breakdown of each student’s strengths and weaknesses (here is an example of adaptive test results). A dashboard will also be designed to report annual performance targets and goals. Page 29 of this report shows a sample dashboard. A parent should be able to access information relating to their district via the dashboard.

Hopefully this new trial will yield success that can help us find better ways to teach and assess our students.

The post 20 Missouri Districts Get the Green Light to Try New Assessment System appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

There are legitimate issues with using the MAP to evaluate individual student performance. The current test delivers lagged results—students take the test in the spring, but schools do not get the results until the fall. Additionally, the MAP does not shed enough light on what particular concepts a student is struggling with. My colleague, James Shuls, previously wrote about this and provided an image of a sample test result. As one can see, there is not a lot of specific information for educators to work with to target learning weaknesses in different students.

One of the goals of the new standardized test is to better inform educators on what topics students are struggling with. But what is the point of quizzes, homework, tests, presentations, essays, and in-class discussions? Are our districts not paying adequate attention to their students as they progress through their classes? Having a continuous testing structure throughout the year could be a useful tool, but a district’s understanding of its student body should not be contingent on it.

A standardized test should be built to compare your school district to others around the state to ensure your teachers are actually teaching the material and not handing out free A’s. If students flunk an algebra section of a standardized test even when a vast majority of them receive high marks in the classroom, it would raise questions about the rigor of the course. Standardized tests can also be useful for comparing teaching strategies. If a similar district nearby receives high scores on its algebra standardized test, struggling districts can mimic its practices.

Unfortunately, DESE has made it harder to compare and contrast district achievement over time with repeated changes to our standardized tests and accountability system.

It is also fair to wonder about the timing here. As mentioned before, one of the goals of the project is to create a reimagined assessment and accreditation system. The first results from the new Missouri School Improvement Program 6 (MSIP 6) were released a few months ago—and they were not pretty. Do officials believe the system they designed is so bad that they want to change it as soon as possible? Or are they concerned that far too many districts were provisionally accredited?

The biggest takeaway from this story is how many problems there are in education policy in Missouri. The status quo needs to be changed in numerous ways. It remains to be seen if these 20 districts will find success with this trial program (I hope they do), but the problems in our state go much deeper than deciding which standardized test to use.

The post 20 Missouri Districts Seek Exemption from the Missouri Assessment Program (Part 2) appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This waiver is being requested in partnership with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) in order to conduct a formal study (called the Demonstration Project) to determine if a new testing system should replace the existing MAP. If the exemption is granted, these districts would use their own test but would not administer the MAP. If the waiver is denied, these twenty districts would use their own test and also administer the MAP.

The MAP test is traditionally given to 3rd through 8th-grade students in Missouri at the end of the school year to evaluate their understanding in mathematics, English/language arts, and science. MAP testing also includes End of Course (EOC) tests for high school students who have completed four chosen subjects—Algebra I (or II if you took Algebra I in middle school), Government, Biology, and English II.

The Demonstration Project will use an adaptive testing system, which will test students and provide timely results three times per year. An adaptive test essentially learns who a test-taker is. As students miss questions, the prompts become easier, and vice versa. Through this process, a computer algorithm can learn a student’s skill set, provide a detailed report to the teacher, remember it, and use that student’s proficiency as a baseline for the next standardized test. In practice, a student will sit down at a computer for 90 minutes to take one 45-minute adaptive test on ELA and one 45-minute adaptive test on mathematics three times per year. Since this system is online and designed for quick feedback, a detailed breakdown of how each student performed will be provided to teachers and parents in order to help students improve throughout the year. The new state assessment will shift from a “lagging” indicator to a “leading indicator.” This system will require 280 less minutes of testing time and will cost $21.60 more per student annually.

Below are the 20 districts that are seeking exemption from the MAP:

• Affton, Branson, Center, Confluence Academies, Fayette, Lebanon, Lee’s Summit, Lewis County, Liberty, Lindbergh, Lonedell, Mehlville, Neosho, Ozark, Parkway, Pattonville, Raymore-Peculiar, Ritenour, Ste. Genevieve, and Shell Knob

These 20 districts roughly represent the demographics of Missouri, with huge districts, rural districts, and a charter school (although low-income students are underrepresented).

The study was created because of doubts about the effectiveness of the MAP; as the Demonstration Project proposal states, “The MAP was never intended as a progress monitoring tool at the student level.” Since the MAP is administered at the end of the year, districts do not receive test results until fall of the following year. Districts claim that makes it very difficult to make adjustments and corrections within the school year if a student is struggling in a certain subject. They also claim that adaptive standardized testing throughout the year would allow teachers and administrators to make adjustments to help students before the next school year. (There are reasons to take these complaints from districts with a grain of salt, which I will get into in my next blog post.)

It will be interesting to see if this trial is successful. The desire to try something different than MAP (which traces its origins back to 1993) raises plenty of questions in itself, and I will discuss those issues also in my next post.

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The current Missouri School Improvement Plan’s (MSIP) accreditation system has a confusing scoring method that is far too generous to schools. As a result, zero districts were unaccredited and only 6 were provisionally accredited in 2018. Additionally, accreditation is only given at the district level and not to individual schools, so low-performing schools might get a free pass based on their district’s accreditation.

Near full accreditation is difficult to reconcile with the fact that in 2018, 25 districts had less than one-quarter of eighth graders score proficient or advanced in English language arts on the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP) exam, yet only 3 of those districts were provisionally accredited. 117 districts had less than one-quarter of eighth graders score proficient or advanced in math and only 4 of them were provisionally accredited. Other districts have similar or lower MAP performance levels than the provisionally accredited districts, but still receive full accreditation.

Other states have adopted more informative school grading systems. Florida has been a pioneer in school grading, using an A–F scale that grades each school and district since 1999. Florida recently announced that teachers can receive a one-time bonus for working in schools that receive Title I funds and receive a grade of D or F. This is a great example of the importance of a clear accountability system for schools and districts. Florida’s grading system was used to identify low-performing schools, and the state then implemented a policy to try and help students in those schools. A teacher incentive program won’t cure everything that ails schools in Florida, but it’s a step in the right direction that is only possible because of a quality accountability system.

A transparent grading system in Missouri could spur demand for options like charter schools or education savings accounts. But as long as 99 percent of school districts continue to receive full accreditation and parents have few ways to find important school information, low-performing schools will fly under the radar and educational choice may never appear in Missouri.

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Taken at face value, the numbers aren’t strong.

The table below shows the percentages of students who scored “proficient” or better in grades 3–8 in English Language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics.

In grades 5–8, fewer than half of students scored proficient or better in Math. At 63.2%, 4th-grade ELA is the highest single score, and that is still less than two-thirds of students.

So what does all of this mean? Well, it’s a bit complicated. This was the first year for the new MAP test and new cutoff scores for proficiency. Missouri developed a new test and set new expectations after jettisoning the Common Core–aligned Smarter Balanced Assessment, so it’s hard to put these numbers in context. Are these standards too high? Too low? Just right? It’s probably too soon to say.

One thing we can do is compare these results, at least for the 4th and 8th grades, the scores on the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP), a test that is administered to a representative sample of students every two years. The following table shows the proficiency results from 2015.

NAEP is designed to set a higher standard than most state tests, but there is still a pretty large gap between what NAEP defines as proficient and what the MAP test does—that is, unless our students made huge gains in one year. Given the small likelihood of that, it looks like MAP might need to raise the bar.

All of that said, these numbers do create a baseline that subsequent years of assessments can be compared to. It will be interesting to see how they change over time.

The post Statewide MAP Results Are Out, and They Don’t Look Great appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In reality, 44.9 percent of all Missouri students—some 387,704 students in total—attend rural schools.

Rural schools often get overlooked in discussions of education reform, with city and suburban schools typically taking center stage. But it would be difficult to have a serious conversation about improving Missouri’s education system without recognizing the role of rural schools. Which leads us to the question: How well are rural students in Missouri performing? Mike McShane broke down their performance in a series of figures that tell the story.

Figure 2 from the paper outlines Missouri MAP test results for 4th- and 8th-graders by geographic location. The MAP is a state standardized test administered to students in 3rd through 8th grade and then again in 10th grade. In the areas of math and English language arts, 4th-graders in the suburbs scored the highest followed by children in towns. However, 8th-graders in rural areas scored second-highest only to students in the suburbs. Unfortunately, city schools scored the lowest in every category.

Figure 3 outlines the combined MAP proficiency rates for 4th and 8th graders in towns and rural communities. Only 45% of 4th-graders were proficient in English, and only 43% were proficient in math. 8th-graders scored slightly better at 51% proficiency in English and 45% proficiency in math. These numbers are bleak. Clearly there is room for improvement.

Finally, Figure 4 outlines the results of ACT scores, comparing rural students to urban students. On average, urban students scored 0.6 points higher, a statistically significant difference.

Based on these results, we can see that rural schools have room to improve. Implementing things like course access programs or education savings accounts would help each family design the education program that best meets their child’s needs. Putting families in control is the first step toward giving rural schools the help they need to rise to the top. 

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Funds raised from the tax increase will be directed toward priorities such as hiring 16 new certified teachers to help struggling students and restoring technology and student club funding. Proponents of Proposition R say that without additional funds, home values will decrease due to declining academic performance. Opponents believe the additional funds won’t be used wisely, in which case the increased tax rate will lower the value of their homes.

Analysts at the Show-Me Institute have looked at how school quality and tax rates affect home prices. In Real Estate Assessment and Property Taxation, analysts demonstrated that the quality of schools and their related tax rates are capitalized into the value of property. As the video below explains, homeowners in the Clayton and Ladue school districts in Richmond Heights pay substantially more for comparable homes with better performing schools and lower tax rates.  

In short, homeowners and voters want to get the most bang for their tax bucks. The following data on school performance and school funding may shed some light on what’s going on in the district.

First, the graph below shows how Mehlville and the districts around it performed on the MAP test in 2015 in both math and science.

Mehlville doesn’t look great. In fact, the district has the second lowest math scores in the area.

But, if we look at a second data set—college readiness indicators like average ACT scores, college remediation rates (the percentage of students who enroll in courses they should have completed in high school), and the number of AP courses the district is offering—Melville is performing better than other districts in the area (see table below). 

Even with reports of losing teachers to neighboring districts, Mehlville is able to offer a large number of AP courses and prepare students for college at about the same rate as neighboring districts with more teachers and administrators (as our next graph displays).

The graph below presents teacher/student and administrator/student ratios. Mehlville has more students per teacher than Kirkwood, but fewer students per teacher than Lindbergh, even though both are better-performing districts. Mehlville also has the highest student-to-administrator ratio in the area.

Finally, relative to other school district property tax rates in the area, Melville has the lowest rate:

So what should we make of all of this? Frankly, it’s tough to say. In some ways, it appears that Mehlville is operating efficiently. With fewer teachers and administrators and a lower tax burden, the district is achieving about as well on several key indicators as other districts. In other ways, it appears that the district is lagging behind.

The real question is whether new dollars will do anything to move the needle on student performance. Simply hiring more teachers and investing in technology and student clubs doesn’t seem particularly compelling. What’s more, will raising taxes hurt Mehlville’s competitive edge in recruiting new homeowners? Without strong answers to these questions, it is hard to determine if taxpayers should get behind any effort to increase tax rates in the district.

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            On August 10, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education released the MAP scores for 2015. Direct comparisons between this year’s results and those from previous years are problematic, because in the interim the state changed its standards. This makes it difficult to assess how much any particular school or district has improved student learning over time. If that’s not enough, the 2015 test results are based on Common Core, adding another layer of difficulty. Despite the challenges in making comparisons over time, we can take a snapshot of student performance, and that snapshot isn’t pretty.

            It turns out that elementary and middle school students did comparatively well in language arts and social studies. In both cases, over 60 percent of the test-takers had passing scores. However, the outcome was not as rosy when in math and science. Fewer than half of students achieved proficiency in math. For science, the one area where the standards remained unchanged from 2014, just under half of students (49 percent) achieved proficiency in 2015, a result little changed from last year.

            The overall results point out a continuing problem: poor scores in math and science. While some schools undoubtedly are producing students who are doing quite well, the fact is that even with changing standards, Missouri’s math and science scores have been low for some time. This is not a good omen for the future of Missouri’s economy. Mountains of economic research (see my essay, “Are Education and Economic Growth Related?”) show that a population’s math ability is directly related to its economic success. That is to say, countries and states in which the residents have more advanced math skills also tend to have higher levels of income and output per person.

Missouri’s future prosperity depends on the ability of our students to compete for high-quality, well-paying jobs. Those jobs will require math and science skills that our schools currently aren’t providing.

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In the article, I mention that their child attends a school where only one-third of all students are reading on grade level. Today, the paper ran a letter from the school’s principal, Adam Meador, which takes issue with my statements. “[W]e use many tools to measure student success. . . . James Shuls chose to focus on only one — MAP data . . .,” Meador wrote.

I need to say two things about this:

1. My calculations were based on the only publicly available data that I have access to, the school’s performance on the MAP (Missouri Assessment Program). The MAP is a standardized test that was developed with input from Missouri teachers. The scores on the MAP represent what Missourians have deemed that students should know or be able to do. If there is an issue with that, it should be taken up with the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

2. This argument misses the point. The bottom line is not whether the school is doing poorly or well, but that the family is not satisfied. I have yet to see one argument against the actual crux of the article, that the private school choice programs can give parents the opportunity they deserve to send their child to a school that meets their unique needs at a cost savings to taxpayers and the public school district. By my calculations, the district could save more than $1.6 million if it contracts with private schools in the area.

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As you will see, Missouri charter schools have shown steady growth over the past five years. Though there still is much to be desired, there also is room for optimism.

The data I use in this analysis contain the results of the Missouri Assessment Program (MAP) and End-of-Course exams (EOC) for the past five years. In Missouri, students in grades three through eight take the MAP test in communication arts, math, and science. End-of-Course exams are required in four subjects: algebra I, biology, English II, and government. Student scores are reported in one of four categories: below basic, basic, proficient, and advanced.

These data provide for a simple comparison of schools and school districts at one point in time, but should be viewed with some caution because the scores do not capture prior student achievement.

Below, I display the percentage of students in Saint Louis and Kansas City charter and traditional public schools scoring proficient or advanced on all required communication arts exams in each of the past five years. This includes students who took the MAP or required EOC exams in communication arts.

In both cities, the overall performance of students is low, with less than 35 percent of students scoring proficient or advanced in all four groups. Of the four, Kansas City charter schools have slightly higher achievement in most years, including 2012. Noticeably, charter schools in Saint Louis have shown steady increases in the percent of students scoring proficient or advanced since 2008. They have closed the gap with Saint Louis Public Schools in terms of achievement, from 7.6 percentage points in 2011 to 3.3 percentage points in 2012. Over the past five years, the percentage of students scoring proficient or advanced in communication arts has increased 74 percent in Saint Louis and 26 percent in Kansas City, respectively.

Charter and Traditional Public School Performance in Communication Arts

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