Coming soon from the Prime center
Image by Alexander Stein from Pixabay
What to expect from the PRiME Center
Over the next few months, the PRiME Center will release a variety of resources for families, practitioners, lawmakers, and anyone interested in education in Missouri. This includes blog posts, policy briefs, reports, and educational profiles. Reports and policy briefs will allow us to take and provide and in-depth look into key issues in Missouri, often in context of national dialogue on an issue and in comparisons with other states. Here is a preview of just a few of the of the issues we look forward to sharing with you in the weeks and months to come:
Regional Profiles for St. Louis and Kansas City. We will be publishing regional profiles of school districts and charter schools in the St. Louis and Kansas City regions. Like the Missouri statewide profile, these will include demographic, academic, and financial information. Read the 2019 Missouri Education Profile here.
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). NAEP is an assessment given in reading and mathematics every other year to a representative sample of 4th and 8th graders in each state. Given the variation in state assessment systems, we will show how NAEP provides a common measure of student achievement that allows for state-to-state comparisons and analyses of trends over time.
St. Louis Public Schools (SLPS) Governance. In 2007, the State Board of Education voted to remove control of SLPS from the elected Board of Education, establish the Transitional School District of St. Louis, and assign governance responsibilities to a special administrative board. We will review the history of governance of SLPS, including the return of governance authority to the locally-elected SLPS Board of Education.
Missouri Learning Standards and Assessments. In 2018-19, Missouri students were assessed under the revised Missouri Assessment Program (MAP) based on the Missouri Learning Standards adopted by the State Board of Education in 2016. This will be the second consecutive year of the revised MAP after multiple transitions in both learning standards and assessments over the past few years. We will examine the impact of these transitions on state assessment results and the ability to establish meaningful year over year trends.
School funding and expenditures. Missouri schools are funded by a combination of federal, state, and local revenue. The differences in sources of revenue varies widely across school districts and charter schools. With that in mind, we will explore how this contributes to both revenue and expenditure disparities. In our PRiME research study, we will consider how school funding has changed over time and explore differences in funding levels for school districts in various contexts.
Teacher salaries. While teacher salaries in Missouri have seen small but steady increases, the average teacher salary in Missouri is still lower than the national average and the average of our border states. We will discuss teacher salaries and how this affects Missouri’s ability to recruit and retain excellent teachers. In our PRiME research study, we will compare Missouri’s teacher salaries to teacher pay in other states, we will track how the salaries have changed over time, and we will examine differences in pay for teachers working in various types of schools and districts.
Keep your eyes out for our next report on what’s going on in Missouri schools!
