Takeaways
- Missouri is preparing to rate schools using an A-to-F grading scale.
- The grades will include a short list of factors such as academic achievement, growth and high school graduation rates.
- Supporters say the grades are easy to understand and improve transparency around school performance, while opponents worry they are oversimplified and harmful.
Brittanye Rimpson, a parent of three students in the Raytown school district, knows from experience that finding information about school performance can be tricky.
“Yeah, the information is there online,” Rimpson said. But “it’s not the easiest thing to locate or navigate or to break this data down.”
Still, she doesn’t know what to think of a plan, prompted by an executive order from Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe, to grade the state’s public schools and districts on an A-to-F scale. She appreciates the transparency but wonders what happens next, especially if a school scores badly.
“Are there some sort of sanctions, or are there some sort of additional supports that are required?” she asked. “What is the process outside of just telling us, ‘These are failing schools’?”
On Aug. 18, Missouri’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) presented a draft plan for A-to-F school rating grade cards to the State Board of Education. Parents are the primary intended audience.
The board is scheduled to approve a final version of the plan in September. Some members said they would first like to see simulations of how the proposed formula translates into scores. DESE aims to create a preliminary version of the new school rating grade cards this fall using 2024-25 data.
Supporters of assigning letter grades to schools say the beauty is in their simplicity: Everyone knows what an A, B, C, D or F grade means. In surveys, parents and voters have said they want the information.
“This is just going to be something easy, digestible, that anyone could understand, and I do love that idea,” said Leslie Kohlmeyer, executive director of Show Me KC Schools, which helps parents navigate education options. “You don’t have to be an expert to figure it out.”
Critics — including teacher groups — say the grades could be reductive and stigmatizing and obscure important context.
“It is oversimplifying something that is very complex,” said Matt Michelson, director of education policy for the Missouri State Teachers Association. “It is another measure for schools that not just confuses the public, but also confuses leaders, confuses educators. … We’re just creating more and more metrics, and we really don’t know who they’re for, what they’re supposed to do.”
Local groups are preparing to explain the grades to parents, and it’s still an open question how they’ll use the information.
“Show Me KC Schools has always operated from a place that parent advocacy is powerful,” said Danielle Dispenza, chief operating officer. “Even if you’re in a school that maybe is not performing at the level that you hope that it would be.”
But “the idea that we’re all going to be able to pack our bags and move to another school district, or just move into another school, that’s not going to happen,” she said.
How the A-F scoring system could work
The state’s system for evaluating schools, which will remain in place, is known as the Annual Performance Report. In theory, its percentage scores would be easy to translate to letter grades.
But some say the APR is confusing and doesn’t fully reflect how students are performing.
In the APR’s “continuous improvement” section, which makes up 30% of the score, districts can lose points for submitting paperwork late or partially make up for poor academic scores by creating plans to improve.
Cory Koedel, education policy director at the libertarian Show-Me Institute and a professor at the University of Missouri, said that unlike the proposed A-F letter grades, the continuous improvement section is not based on student outcomes.
Koedel doesn’t believe the public understands APR scores. The Show-Me Institute has created its own A-F scoring system.
A spreadsheet of the data that goes into calculating an APR score, shared with the media last fall, contained more than 130 columns.
It’s not clear what a similar spreadsheet for the A-F grading system would look like. But a sample grade card for an elementary school shared at the State Board of Education meeting included only nine metrics. The system focuses on academic achievement and growth, plus graduation rate and preparation for college and career at the high school level.
It still takes some real explaining to understand how the scores are calculated, whether they’re truly capturing school quality and what parents might want to do with the information.
On the A-F grade cards, academic achievement will include how high students’ test scores are in English language arts, literacy, science and math.
Collin Hitt, executive director of the Prime Center at St. Louis University, said economic circumstances predict test scores.
“It’s crucial that you have a system that does not unfairly penalize schools that enroll high percentages of low income students, that enroll high percentages of special needs students,” he said. “We know that looking at just raw measures of achievement do that without a doubt.”
During the meeting, DESE officials asked the board whether they should factor in schools’ demographics. Some board members said they were opposed, at least initially, out of a concern that it could overcomplicate the reports or create unequal standards.
Hitt said a better measure of school quality is how much students’ scores move over time once they start in a school system.
That’s where growth scores come in. “Value-added” growth measures whether students learned more or less than they were expected to during a school year, no matter where they started.
Hitt called Missouri’s method of measuring growth the best in the nation, and said he has advocated for it to be adopted by other states.
Koedel declined to comment directly on DESE’s draft plan, but also praised growth scores.
“If it were up to me, it (growth) would be weighted more than achievement,” he said. “Achievement is more correlated with the demographic and socioeconomic condition in the area. Growth is more about how much the school is actually pushing kids to learn.”
In compliance with Kehoe’s order, the grading system includes a new metric called “growth to proficiency” that measures whether a student is on track to be proficient within three years.
High schools will also be evaluated based on their four-year graduation rates and a “success ready graduate” score, which includes college and career readiness measures such as ACT, Advanced Placement and WorkKeys test scores.
During the meeting, DESE said the weighting of each element is not based on which is more important and was partially related to how many subjects are included in each metric.
The executive order mandates that scores for each school year come out in September. Because the system is new, the scores for 2025-26 will be public in 2027 and won’t include literacy. DESE will provide a first look at the grade cards this fall using 2024-25 data.
Grades will be assigned based on percentages:
- A: 89% or above
- B: 76-88%
- C: 63-75%
- D: 50-62%
- F: Below 50%
DESE still needs to determine whether all schools should get scores, including very small schools or K-2 schools where students are too young to take most standardized tests.
DESE originally said that creating the new system would cost more than $500,000 and producing the grade cards each year would cost more than $700,000. Cuts to the state’s Office of Administration might threaten the implementation of the plan.
At the state Board of Education meeting on Tuesday, DESE proposed two funding requests related to the A-to-F grading system: a more than $500,000 supplemental budget request in fiscal year 2027 for IT and data and an additional $6.5 million in fiscal year 2028 for “annual processing, maintenance, literacy reporting, and support for identification and remediation of ineffective school practices.”
Concerns with the system
In an emailed statement, North Kansas City Schools said it has questions about the cost of the grade cards “at a time when state funding for public education has been cut significantly.”
“While we fully support transparency, the state already has established accountability measures that are always publicly available,” it read in part. “We will continue to monitor the proposal and advocate for an accountability system that provides meaningful information to families and communities without diverting limited resources away from the work of educating students.”
Michelson of the teachers association said the cost of the plan is one reason to oppose it. The organization is a teachers association, but not a labor union. It advocates for policy priorities that affect teachers.
It’s not appropriate to spend so much when education is underfunded, Michelson said, and when the state already has an accountability system.
DESE piloted a program to evaluate schools based on more frequent testing, Michelson said, which he thought was a positive move away from emphasizing a single annual test score.
The A-F system reverses that trend by emphasizing several metrics that analyze the same test score in different ways, he said. That obscures the complexity of how schools meet students’ needs and community demands, such as preparing students to work in local industries.
Michelson said that judging schools based on one factor also discourages schools from innovating because they get scared to take risks.
The fact that letter grades have such instant recognizability could be a double-edged sword.
Carter Taylor, legislative chair of the Kansas City Federation of Teachers union, said teachers might shun jobs at an F-rated school out of fear the grade would reflect on them and harm their careers.
“Here in the urban core, where we know that we have a lot of students who are incredibly underprivileged and would benefit exponentially from having a skilled, passionate and well-placed educator, why would I go there when it means ‘I’ll be teaching at an F school, and that makes me an F teacher?” she asked.
Taylor, who teaches at the elementary level, said students in a poorly scored school could also feel like “F students.”
“That’s humiliating and so unfair because (my students) are so good and they try so hard and they accomplish so much,” she said.
The Missouri National Education Association, another teachers union with chapters in the Kansas City area, has also spoken against the proposal.
Kansas City Public Schools declined to comment on the scores. A representative of Lee’s Summit schools said the district is monitoring the situation.
In a statement, the Raytown school district said it is monitoring student progress as it anticipates the A-F grade card rollout “to ensure student academic needs are met. We will examine how our district is performing as student achievement is a priority, while implementing the requirements with fidelity.”
How parents might use the information
When asked if they’d like an A-F grading system for schools, many members of the public say yes.
A St. Louis University/YouGov poll of Missouri voters found 60% supported the idea, less than 20% were opposed and the rest were unsure. Republicans were more likely to support the proposal, but close to 48% of Democrats did as well.
The majority of participants said they would grade their own school district at a B or a C.
A 2023 poll of local parents and caregivers from Show Me KC Schools and the now-closed Quality Schools Coalition found that 93% of participants wanted a “clear rating system,” though more than 80% also said they already had the information to assess school performance.
When given several options for the type of system, such as a stoplight, numerical scale or letter grade, about 70% preferred an A-F system. Participants ranked student growth, followed by high test scores and APR scores, as the most important metrics of school performance.
Blaque Kansas City, which promotes equitable and high-quality schools in Kansas City, held a gathering in July for stakeholders to ask questions and discuss what an A-F grading system would mean.
CEO Cokethea Hill-Woodard said she thinks the system is overall “a step in the right direction.”
“I know that it’s not always easy for parents to go on DESE’s website to find information about their school … and to really understand what the numbers mean,” she said. “I think they’ve been asking for more transparency and a better way to compare school options.”
Hill-Woodard said she doesn’t expect parents to focus only on their school’s grade but also to focus on things like school culture and safety.
“We tell our parents that this is just one additional piece of information. You should also go and see how a school feels. You should be able to ask questions,” she said, such as what a C or D school is doing to improve. “Ultimately, it’s the parent’s decision where to place their child.”
Currently, parents in the Kansas City area have many school options but limited ways to assess them, Hill-Woodard said, unless they have studied how to interpret APR scores.
Dispenza said she values the simplicity, transparency and “plain language” of an A-F system, but also worries about parents’ reactions if their school receives a bad grade. She said parents already agonize over the decision of where to send their children and that their viable choices can be constrained.
Show Me KC Schools plans to add the letter grades to its profiles of schools, as well as to prepare a podcast series about understanding the grades.
When parents come to Show Me KC Schools in search of help, Dispenza said, they often say they want a “good” school but might need help teasing out what that means to them. It’s rare for parents to outright say that they want the school with the highest test scores.
“Sometimes I have families that just want me to tell them what schools have a uniform, because the idea of a uniform is connected for them with what must be structure,” she said. Other parents might value word-of-mouth recommendations, transportation, proximity to home or having all of their children attend the same school.
Even if an A-F grading system helps focus parents’ attention on test scores, Dispenza said, there are practical barriers that get in the way of selecting the highest-graded school.
Within KCPS boundaries, some of the higher performing district and charter schools might be hard to access, she said. For example, some schools have admissions requirements or don’t allow new students after the early grades unless they speak a specific foreign language.
“My biggest concern is the emotional toll that it will take on a parent when they can’t get their student into the A school,” Dispenza said.
Kohlmeyer said letter grades shouldn’t be the only factor in families’ decisions. But she’s optimistic that they’ll help get a conversation started about school quality.
“If a school isn’t fully aware of their success or their failure, how can they do better?” she asked. “If a parent isn’t fully aware that a school is succeeding or failing, how can they push for change? … I think that this is going to be great for us, for our city, for our state. Eventually. There might be growing pains for sure.”
But Kohlmeyer said she also hears the concerns.
“Of course we’re all living under the fear that a lot of our schools in the urban cores are going to be Ds and Fs,” she said. “That remains to be seen, and it’s a possibly unfounded fear.”
