Missouri students deserve a clear measure of how their schools perform | Opinion

As a former middle and high school principal and the current executive director of an education nonprofit, you’d expect that I would feel comfortable analyzing the performance of our local public schools. But as a mother of a 6-year-old, I feel many of the same anxieties that other Missouri parents do about our scholars entering our public school system. My concern comes from not knowing — and not having a clear way to find out — how well our schools are actually serving our children.

Some issues in education are complex or seemingly intractable; this one is not. Clearing up this question of school performance has been fully within the control of the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. However, that department hasn’t acted, so last month Gov. Mike Kehoe took the lead and signed an executive order requiring the state department to create a plan to implement a new system for grading schools. Legislators in Jefferson City are now debating bills that would fill in the details of how these A through F grades would be calculated.

A lot is on the line. Policymakers in other states, including Illinois, have made changes and seen positive impact. They’ve done so through reforms that institute a greater accountability system focused on student growth and a more transparent system for parents like me to better understand schools’ effectiveness.

While we don’t currently have an easy way to find out how well individual schools are performing, we do know how we’re doing as a state, and it’s not a pretty picture. When current high school seniors were in pre-K, Missouri schools were scoring in the top half of all states in both reading and math in both fourth and eighth grades on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation’s Report Card test.

Since then, Missouri students dropped to the bottom half of all states in every single one of these key categories. Black and brown students saw some of the greatest drops. Meanwhile, Illinois, along with our other neighboring states of Iowa and Tennessee, moved up the rankings in all of these categories.

Missouri’s current accountability system prioritizes paperwork and the status quo. There’s a focus on kids who enter the year on grade level staying at grade level. Far less attention is paid to students who make significant progress catching up to grade level but do not quite get there.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, our schools weren’t getting enough students reading or doing math at grade level in the first place. We need to build a system that rewards teachers who move kids ahead academically, regardless of where they started the year. If a child makes good progress each year, that’s success — and that’s realistic. It often takes a few years to make up for lost time and get to grade level.

Models in Illinois, Mississippi, District of Columbia

When I was a school leader in Illinois, I saw firsthand how educators perform better and give our students a greater chance at a high-quality education when schools are held accountable. The academic improvement students make over the course of a school year, known as student growth, was always our north star. In Illinois’ accountability system, student growth made up half of a school’s performance rating. In Missouri, student growth is half as important — on the Missouri School Improvement Plan, it accounts for only 24% of a school’s score. The devaluing of progress is demoralizing for students, educators and families.

But the impact of this poor prioritization goes beyond how it makes people feel. It goes to how well students perform. There’s the old adage that what gets measured gets managed, and it’s so applicable here. Since 2009, when Missouri ranked 15th in the country in eighth grade reading, our state has dropped to 32nd. Meanwhile, states that value growth have made incredible progress, including Illinois, where eighth-graders are now the 10th-best readers in the country. In Mississippi, student growth is weighted at 54%, and in the District of Columbia, it’s at 50%.

The absence of school ratings is glaring in a broader context. In other cities and states, schools get report card grades that are simple for families to understand. In Missouri, we give scores to fast food restaurants for health inspections, but we don’t give scores to schools for how well they educate children.

Lawmakers in both parties are now building on the governor’s leadership and exploring legislation that improves the quality of our public schools by bringing greater accountability, transparency, and a renewed focus on student growth. Lawmakers are debating legislation including House Bill 2710, which our organization supports.

To the other overwhelmed parents who share my anxieties about our schools, now is the time to make your voices heard. Please take three minutes to call or write your local legislator and let them know that passing H.B. 2710 is the single most important step they can take to help families like ours by getting our kids a better education.

We simply can’t afford to let another generation of Missouri kids fall behind their peers in neighboring states.

Tiara Jordan is executive director of the education 501(c)(3) nonprofit ActivateMO.