Education reports are larger research projects, often evaluating programs and highlighting the results. Here you'll find in-depth description of the data being collected, methods of analysis, previous findings from similar research, and extensive discussion of the results.
We strive to put results in context and understand how they affect Missouri schools and students.
The number of people in Missouri without stable housing is rising; this includes families, children and youth. The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act–initially established in 1987–requires schools to collect data on and provide support for students facing homelessness. However, little is known about the extent of students and families experiencing homelessness, the policies and programs that support these vulnerable students or their schooling opportunities and outcomes. In this report, I describe the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, describe recent homelessness trends, provide an overview of McKinney-Vento participation and briefly describe outcomes for students supported through McKinney-Vento programs across the state of Missouri. I conclude with a discussion of the importance of addressing homelessness in relation to student mobility.
Teacher mobility in Missouri and most states across the country reached long-term highs following the pandemic over the 2022-23 school year. Though mobility declined in 2023-24, several worrying trends have persisted across the state, including higher turnover among teachers working in urban, rural, and disproportionately low-income schools. Turnover is also disproportionately high among the state’s teachers of color, though the state has more than doubled the recruitment of new teachers of color over the past decade. As legislators and education leaders work to support Missouri’s teacher workforce, policy formation must engage with labor conditions specific to particular school and teacher characteristics to effectively improve outcomes for teachers and the students they educate.
In June 2020, Saint Louis University launched the SLU/YouGov poll to provide researchers and policymakers with an assessment of Missouri likely voters’ opinions on relevant political and educational issues. Some questions were asked in multiple polls to monitor trends over time, while others were relevant to potential policy changes that may have impacted the education sector at a given time. Here, we summarize the findings from nine polls conducted from 2020–2025 to identify trends in public opinion on Missouri’s education issues.
The newest data from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education finds that more than one in five K–12 students were chronically absent in the 2023–24 school year. From 2019 to 2024, nearly 91% of Missouri districts (499 total) have experienced a rise in chronic absenteeism—defined as missing at least ten percent of scheduled school days. Here, we explore key trends from the most recent Missouri attendance data.
A comprehensive look at public school enrollment in Missouri, the Kansas City Metro Area and the St. Louis Metro Area.
PRiME Center’s recent report highlights the Missouri schools serving students from low income households that are producing large gains in reading and math.
This 4th Edition of PRiME’s annual Missouri Statewide Growth Report covers data from the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years.
The St. Louis Teaching Fellows (STL TF) program at Saint Louis University (SLU) continues to place teachers in St. Louis area public and charter schools by providing a route to teach while simultaneously earning teaching certification and a Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) degree. The impact has grown to two active cohorts (24 students) and three classes of graduates (36 students).
This report sheds light on the relationship between four-day school weeks and attendance in Missouri and Arkansas schools.
Mentoring of early-career teachers is a key strategy used by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (MO DESE) to improve teacher retention. To that end, MO DESE needs better information on the features of mentoring that early-career teachers receive and the features that may be related to teacher retention. At the request of MO DESE, the Regional Educational Laboratory Central conducted a study of the frequency, duration, activities, and topics addressed in the mentoring received by first-year teachers in Missouri who registered for state-delivered teacher induction workshops in the 2022/23 school year. The study also sought to identify which mentoring features were related to teachers’ likelihood of returning to teach in the same school district for a second year, as measured by teacher employment records.