By Annelise Hanshaw
Kehoe’s executive order, unveiled during his State of the State address last month, calls for the state’s education department to draw up a plan by June 30. The State Board of Education would have to approve the change for it to go into effect.
But the General Assembly wants a chance to craft the new system, with House and Senate committees debating legislation on A-F grading of public schools. And based on the committees’ discussions in the past week, the two chambers’ bills are likely to have key differences.
The Senate Education Committee heard identical bills sponsored by Republican state Sens. Ben Brown of Washington and Curtis Trent of Springfield on Tuesday afternoon. Their base legislation largely mirrors Kehoe’s request, though they presented a few edits in a committee substitute that has yet to come to a vote.
“Every mom and dad in Missouri, they already understand what an ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘C,’ ‘D’ and ‘F’ mean. They know what a good report card looks like,” Brown said. “But when it comes to schools, they are handed pages of acronyms and charts that don’t really tell them anything in plain English as to how their child’s school is actually doing.”
Both the House and Senate proposals include the public posting of a “standardized, clear and easily accessible” report card with a letter grade based on students’ scores on the state’s standardized test. But the two chambers’ legislation, which will likely undergo even more edits in coming weeks, have a number of key differences.
The House Elementary and Secondary Education Committee passed a version last week that gives an “A” grade to districts with the top 10% of scores. Grades “B” through “F” would be delineated by education officials.
The Senate’s legislation has “the ‘A’ through ‘F’ model that everybody is familiar with,” Trent said Tuesday, with scores based on the percentage of points earned. It also adopts the governor’s recommendation to increase the thresholds for ‘A’ through ‘D’ grades by 5% when 65% of schools achieve at the ‘A’ or ‘B’ level.
Trent told committee members this was intended to motivate schools to “pursue higher achievement.” But the House committee scrapped this provision, labeling it unfair to have a “forever changing target,” as the committee’s chairman described it.
It also removed a piece that would lower schools’ score by one letter grade if less than 95% of its students took the state’s standardized test. Instead, lower testing rates would be noted on the report cards but without penalizing the overall score.
Both House and Senate lawmakers proposed an incentive system that would provide additional funding for high-performing schools. The original bills call for a funding boost of $100 per student for schools with the top 5% of scores in academic performance and growth and a bonus of $50 per student for schools in the top 10%.
State Sen. Maggie Nurrenbern, a Kansas City Democrat on the Senate Education Committee, said she worried this system would benefit predominantly wealthy areas.
“These areas are going to receive more money, but our schools that are struggling and really need the additional support to bring up all students will not receive any incentive,” she said.
Trent said he viewed the incentives as a “nice bonus” but was willing to cut the program “if the financial incentive structure is a distraction from the core of the bill.”
The House kept the idea of incentives but gave the responsibility to the state’s education department to determine award amounts and criteria. The bill directs officials to give bonuses to districts based on academic growth, student improvement over multiple years, improvement among historically underserved groups, career readiness and literacy.
Public testimony on the legislation has been mixed, with some parents and advocacy organizations saying the report cards would be easier to understand than the state’s existing accountability systems. Groups representing public educators, though, say it puts too much emphasis on standardized testing.
Mike Harris, lobbyist for the Missouri State Teachers Association, acknowledged that the state’s current accountability system “has its issues.”
“However,” he added, “Our adopted resolutions clearly oppose systems that rely on high-stakes, test-driven measures that do not include local input.”
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