Missouri parents will be able to see a letter grade assigned to their students' school this fall after Gov. Mike Kehoe mandated the state adopt a new accountability system earlier this year.
The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education shared the framework for the new A-F report cards that will be assigned to every public and charter school in the state on Tuesday.
The State Board of Education is expected to approve the new system next month, in line with fast-approaching deadlines outlined by Kehoe's executive order from January.
"We want to make these grade cards simple and clear for parents," said Lisa Sireno, DESE's deputy commissioner of learning services, who oversees the state's school accountability processes.
Missouri would join a growing list of Republican-led states like Indiana, Texas and Florida in adopting a similar framework.
The scores will largely rely on end-of-year testing for English language arts, science and math for schools that serve kindergarten through eighth grade students. It'll weigh literacy scores and growth scores, which is data that shows whether students are reaching grade-level standards over time.
If the draft framework is approved, it would mirror the current accreditation framework in place for Missouri school systems:
High schools will have four-year graduation rates and college and career readiness factored into their scores as well.
The report cards will be mandated for public and charter schools. Private schools can choose to opt in to the system.
Kehoe said the state's current accountability reports, known as the Annual Performance Reports, are confusing for parents to understand. The report card is not meant to replace the APR at this time, but to serve as an additional resource for parents.
According to a survey conducted earlier this year by St. Louis University's PRiME Center, an education-research center, 60% of likely voters in Missouri support the A-F grading system.
Though public school leaders contend that the APR may not be the best measure to convey how their students' school is performing, they have also pushed back against the A-F report cards — stating they don't fully capture the complexity of educating children, including those who come from low-income households or are English language learners.
Vincent Schoemehl Jr. who formerly served as the mayor of St. Louis, board member of St. Louis Public Schools and the St. Louis Language Immersion School, a charter school, said he wasn't sure whether he would vote to support the new system.
"I'm thinking specifically about the charter schools of the city of St. Louis," Schoemehl said. "I don't know what happens to their enrollment. I don't know what happens to the enrollment at SLPS if we don't do this carefully."
When asked by DESE officials whether the report cards should take student demographics into account — including race, whether students receive free or reduced-price lunches, or face language barriers — board members dismissed the factors in favor of getting the report cards out the door by the September deadline.
"I think we should have all of the same expectations for all students, and therefore measurements should not be determined differently," board member Kerry Casey of Chesterfield said in response. "Everybody should work to achieve the same standard."
The A-F report card comes with a price tag — school officials asked for $518,000 for this school year to implement the report card and then an additional $6.5 million for the next school year to further build out and maintain the new system.
Sireno also informed board members that the new report cards will likely require changing Missouri's timeline for statewide testing.
Students typically take the Missouri Assessment Program tests toward the end of the school year from late April through mid-May.
The testing window will need to be moved up or shortened so DESE can gather, clean and analyze the data in time to release the report cards in September. The executive order requires the scores be provided to school districts by Sept. 15 and then made publicly available by no later than Sept. 30.
Michael McDonald, a math teacher for the Park Hill School District in Kansas City who serves as the newly appointed teacher representative on the state school board, said changing the testing window cuts down on instructional time for teachers.
"We already don't go till the end of the semester. If you're assessing the first two weeks of May, we lose the second two weeks of May," McDonald said. "Now you're saying we're basically going to lose the month of May — a lot of our classes are semester-long classes so you're losing maybe 20% of your class time."
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