The Missouri State Board of Education voted 6-1 this past week to reclassify St. Louis Public Schools from fully accredited to provisionally accredited.
The motion to do so was made by board member Kerry Casey – a Republican who was a founding board member of the KIPP Charter School in St. Louis.
“Anything we do should have standards,” Casey said in the Tuesday meeting. “[We] should have high expectations and accountability, and unless we hold our schools accountable, which is our domain, the children of Missouri will suffer.”
St. Louis Public Schools (SLPS) has had a revolving door of superintendents and severe financial mismanagement over the past three years.
Also during that time, SLPS was given a poor rating from the state auditor, and the district moved from a surplus to a $30 million annual deficit while grappling with unauthorized spending and a bus transportation crisis.
Democrat State Board of Education member Pamela Westbrooks-Hodge was the only one to vote against the downgrade of SLPS. An appointee of former Gov. Mike Parson in 2020, she’s the only member on the state board that lives in the SLPS district.
“Our actions and responses must fit the crime,” Westbrooks-Hodge said prior to the vote. “The most serious challenges, that board member Casey has so ably recapped, are governance, financial and operational in nature.
“For those issues, MSIP 6 [Missouri School Improvement Program] provides more precise and enforceable tools for enhanced fiscal oversight, corrective action plans, structured DESE partnerships and intensified monitoring, many of which the commissioner is already doing and will amplify with transforming schools.
“Lowering accreditation is a broad classification signal, and by itself, does not fix audits, stabilize transportation or strengthen governance.”
Casey countered that SLPS “has failed to comply with the statutory requirement if we do not make this lowered classification change. We are not doing our job.”
After the vote to downgrade, SLPS issued an unsigned press release stating:
“While district leadership is disappointed with the outcome, SLPS remains fully committed to addressing the issues that contributed to this decision and to restoring full accreditation.
“SLPS leadership understands that, during today’s proceedings, an amendment to a broader accreditation motion resulted in SLPS being singled out for provisional accreditation despite other districts facing similar challenges. District leadership plans to seek clarity regarding the basis of that decision while continuing to focus on forward progress.”
All of the failures of SLPS, and other struggling districts around the state, tie into a larger debate over school choice and the future of public education in Missouri.
Republican state Sen. Ben Brown from Washington views the current educational system as failing many families, telling The Heartlander students shouldn’t be “trapped in a failing school district simply because of your zip code.”
Brown said he believes providing more freedom for parents to make decisions is essential.
“We need to explore other options because what we’ve tried thus far has not worked. The definition of insanity is just repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”
The senator advocates for a free-market approach to education, suggesting “competition breeds best results, not only in business, but in government as well, and including education.” He contends when public education essentially has a monopoly, there is “no incentive to improve performance.”
To address that, Brown has sponsored a bill requiring a Grade A through F system to serve as an accountability tool for parents. The legislative priority was mirrored by Gov. Mike Kehoe, who recently signed an executive order to implement a similar statewide school accountability grade card to show “how schools are actually performing.”
Kehoe also has pushed for public school open enrollment to ensure no child’s future is limited by their address. He described open enrollment as a matter of “fairness” and “access,” aimed at giving families the “freedom to choose the public school that best meets their child’s needs.”
