On charter schools (thanks @piper4missouri for elevating this conversation in #moleg): I've worked with St. Louis kids for over 13 years now, and I've worked with rural communities for over 6 years.

Missouri has a big charter school problem.

1/

Charter schools are not all bad. Public schools are not all bad. The system we have in Missouri is all sorts of bad.

We don't require much accountability when it comes to charters, and we don't invest enough in public schools.

That mix is a particularly bad one.

2/

School districts in Missouri get a big chunk of funding from local property taxes. That means wealthier areas have a higher capacity to educate their kids, and poorer areas have a lower capacity, everything else being equal.

https://www.mobudget.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/K-12-2020-Budget-Primer.pdf

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Ex: St. Louis City can raise property taxes to the max and still fall short of wealthy districts. That's because there are less local resources to go around.

State funding is supposed to help make up for those disparities, but Missouri officials are defunding education.

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St. Louis City also has the added challenge of being a district dealing with significant population decline. A district that once served over 100,000 children now serves less than 20,000. Buildings, transportation, and so many other costs weigh pretty heavily.

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Right now, St. Louis Public is proposing to close more schools. That's because the student population is too small to serve in some areas and, by consolidating the student population into fewer schools, the district believes it can better concentrate its resources.

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Another line of thought is it's better to have smaller schools so each child can get more attention from teachers. I agree. The problem is, at Clay Elementary - one of the schools on the closing list - they only had one teacher available for ALL of 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades.

7/

One reason schools are closing is because students are going elsewhere. Some families are leaving the City. We're losing people.

Some are choosing charter schools, and charter schools are choosing them.

Less students in public schools = less support for public schools

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A few charter schools are phenomenal places of learning. Many are not. One charter was open for three years, taught students absolutely nothing, shut down, sent kids back to local public schools where they needed a lot of attention, and then reopened under a different name.

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In Missouri, failing charter schools are allowed to continue. They aren't governed like public schools are. When they eventually collapse, the underfunded public school system is the one expected to cover.

Here's just one report of lack of oversight: https://app.auditor.mo.gov/Repository/Press/2020028881286.pdf

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In rural Missouri, we have a similar challenge that is magnified: Some rural districts also serve small student populations. Opening a charter school in those districts would force public consolidations too, but how do you consolidate when you only have one middle school?

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Charter expansion into rural Missouri would inevitably mean a massive change to public education in rural Missouri, starting with district consolidations, longer transportation times, and virtually no good options for when specific charter schools fail.

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This doesn't make much sense from an economics view either. Unregulated expansion of charter schools doesn't create competition. It creates unfair competition. Charters don't have to take all kids and don't have to abide by the same rules as public schools.

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A few charters in Missouri have introduced very innovative learning methods, but allowing the bad ones to proliferate doesn't even give public schools the chance to adapt. It's just a constant fight and continuous chaos. These systems are not working together.

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With unregulated expansion and management of charter schools, and continued defunding of public schools, public schools eventually disappear, and we're left with a system that is much less accountable to the public and has no plan for when schools fail.

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No question: Some kids fit better in some environments than others. I'm a big proponent of letting teachers teach and bringing more creativity back into classrooms. We could be promoting that creativity within our public school system instead of defunding it to replace it.

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Seeing elected officials talk about proudly defunding public education and eliminating oversight just to make a point - primarily to their political donors - without mentioning the threat to our kids and the real brokenness they've created is just really sad.

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Missouri has a long history of innovation in public education. We have wonderful teachers and wonderful schools, and we'd have even more if our system worked.

So now let me tell you a secret: We could be a leader in America again if it wasn't for our current leadership.

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