2020 Missouri Education Profile
Image by Roy Harryman from Pixabay
2020 Missouri Education Profile
By: Evan Rhinesmith, Ph.D.
The PRiME Center is pleased to share the 2020 Missouri Education Profile, the second edition of our annual dive into Missouri’s education data. We present a 30,000-foot overview of Missouri’s schools and students and the resources supporting them. Follow this link to download a PDF copy for yourself!
Much like last year’s edition, the 2020 Missouri Education Profile presents important student success indicators including student test scores, college readiness, and graduation rates. You’ll find information on school spending and teacher pay, teacher demographics, and information on Missourians’ opinions of their schools. For many of the indicators we examine, we’ll show you how Missouri compares to our border states and to the rest of the country. We’ll also examine how these numbers vary for different types of districts within the Show-Me State. We hope that the data on these pages can be useful to parents, practitioners, and policymakers by providing some background and leading to more questions.
However, if you don’t want to follow this link to download the full profile, you can read the Executive Summary in this space:
Who are Missouri’s Students? Students in Missouri are not as diverse as students across the United States. While fewer than half of the students across the nation identify as White, 71% of Missouri students are White. Nevertheless, Missouri’s student population has grown more diverse over the past 15 years. With respect to poverty, as measured by student eligibility for Free- or Reduced-Price school lunches (FRL), students in Missouri (50% FRL) are slightly more advantaged than their peers in the border states (51% FRL) and their peers across the nation (52% FRL).
Who are Missouri’s Teachers? Missouri’s teaching workforce is overwhelmingly female (78%) and overwhelmingly White. While just over 70% of our students identify as White, 96% of teachers and staff in Missouri are White. Nearly always, students of color in Missouri are taught by teachers who are of a different race.
How Much Do Missouri Schools Spend? With regard to per-pupil expenditures, Missouri schools spend approximately $11,500 per pupil, which is roughly $400 less than border states and about $1,600 less than the national average. Similarly, average teacher pay in Missouri is about $4,000 less than in border states and about $11,000 less than the national average. Missouri’s low teacher pay remains when we adjust for the cost of living in the state. Perhaps most striking is that Missouri’s average starting salary is less than the national and border state averages.
How Are Missouri’s Students Doing? Missouri had its second year with the new Missouri Assessment Program (MAP) assessment and standards program, allowing the state to provide a more accurate depiction of overall student growth. For the 2018-19 school year, 47% and 40% of students in the publicly-available data from DESE met the state’s readiness benchmarks in Communication Arts and Math respectively. Because state-designed exams (like MAP) do not allow for across-state comparisons, we also examine the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Overall, Missouri’s NAEP scores across subjects and grade levels tracked with national trends. Math remained relatively flat while reading scores fell. The biggest hit Missouri took was in 4th-grade reading, where students scored five scale score points worse at a statistically significant level.
The 2018-19 school year saw a sizable drop in the percentage of students who participated in the ACT, as the state and several districts opted to no longer pay for students to participate in the test. With fewer students taking the test, Missouri’s average ACT score increased.
Why Growth? Academic growth is arguably more important than proficiency levels, as growth provides a measure of how much students are learning each year. While achievement levels do help us to understand whether students are meeting the expected standards of their current grade level, it is likely more useful to examine how much more students learn each year. Unlike growth, academic achievement is much more dependent on out of school factors. This does not mean achievement scores are useless. Rather, achievement scores are useful for finding patterns and trends in performance. We can use these to understand how schools serving similar students are performing, whether we are performing well in one subject versus another, and if there are certain strategies to help students grasp information that we should be helping implement on a larger scale. Mapping these changes will be especially important in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, this analysis will have to wait until spring 2021 data are available as the spring 2020 shutdown canceled standardized testing.
Of course, if you want to dig in more after reading this summary, click here to view the full report. And keep an eye on this space for future reports.
