Bills seek to grade Missouri educators

When the end of the semester rolls around for Missouri students, their academic performance is assessed by simple letters on grade cards: A-F.

One state legislator wants Missouri public schools to be graded in the same way.

This revised system of evaluating schools is one of many pre-filed bills concerning Missouri education for the upcoming legislative session, which begins Jan. 7.

Sen. Ed Emery, R-Lamar, pre-filed Senate Bill 27, which would give schools a report card with letter grades of A-F. The goal of the report card, Emery said, is to make it easier for parents to access and understand how their children's schools are performing.

"I'm convinced from other states that have done this type of rating that you see a significant increase in parental involvement once they have more information," Emery said.

The report card is one of many measures included in SB 27. In addition, the bill would do away with tenure for teachers who are hired after Aug. 27, 2015, and require teachers and administrators be evaluated annually.

According to SB 27, evaluations would be conducted either by a district-set system or through a system developed by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. At least 30 percent of the evaluation would depend on student achievement, and teachers' salaries would be adjusted based on these evaluations.

Similar measures were included in Amendment 3, the state ballot measure that was rejected by 76 percent of voters in November. The amendment would have replaced tenure with three-year contracts and required that at least half of teacher evaluation be based on student performance data.

But Emery said he expects to see increasing support for his bill from Missouri parents.

"It changes the whole balance of power, so to speak," Emery said. "It empowers the consumers of education, and it focuses on the kids rather than the institution."

Bills: best served in small pieces?

Emery also filed Senate Bill 28, which isolates the A-F school evaluation system without SB 27's additional parts.

"There's an ongoing debate about whether a legislative package or individual piece of legislation will work more effectively," Emery said, a debate that several legislators have taken into account when pre-filing bills for the upcoming session.

In fact, several bills that either died in the legislature or were vetoed by Gov. Jay Nixon in 2014 are being resurrected in 2015. This time around, though, the bills have been refined and divided into chunks that exclude more controversial measures from last year.

Rep. David Wood, R-Versailles, for instance, is breaking down a bill from last year's session. House Bill 42 would revise the accreditation system so that the accreditation of schools in failing districts would be considered building by building. That way, students in unaccredited school could transfer to a better-performing school within their districts.

A previous version of the bill vetoed by the governor in 2014 included the option for students to transfer to private schools, but Wood hopes that this scaled down version of the HB 42 will help its chances of becoming law.

Sen. David Pearce, R-Warrensburg, however, took another approach to filing legislation. His Senate Bill 1 takes up multiple issues regarding Missouri education. Among other measures, it includes creating a "School Transfer and Improvement Task Force;" allowing the school board of an accredited district to sponsor charter schools located in unaccredited school districts; and giving the State Board of Education intervention powers to cease the corporate organization of an unaccredited school district.

Missouri will just have to wait for 2015 to see whether the condensed bills or larger legislation perform better in the upcoming session, Wood said.

Scrutinizing accreditation

School accreditation is a hot topic in Missouri, and Wood is not the only legislator to take it on.

Sen. Paul LeVota, D-Independence, pre-filed Senate Bill 70, which aims to tackle accreditation in a different way. This bill would prohibit the State Board of Education from classifying a school district's accreditation if no board member represents the school's district.

It would also allow each school district to set an ideal class size and student-teacher ratio. Districts adopting this policy would be allowed to deny transfer students if admitting them would violate the predetermined class size and ratio.

"School districts wouldn't be overflowing with students they couldn't handle," LeVota said.

A bill including these provisions was also vetoed by the Gov. Nixon in 2014. But since LeVota has simplified the measures included in the legislation, he is more confident about its chances of receiving the governor's nod in 2015.

Emery also filed Senate Bill 64, which would require the State Board to classify each school district as unaccredited, provisionally accredited, accredited or accredited with distinction. The bill was filed in response to the board's previous attempts to create "non-categories" of accreditation, Emery said, in order to avoid measuring school performance.

Statewide standards, statewide assessments

Another contentious concern in the Missouri legislature is setting state standards for student evaluation.

Work groups consisting of Missouri educators, school administrators and parents are currently meeting in order to create statewide standards for science, math, English and social studies. These expectations for student growth will replace the national Common Core standards adopted by Missouri along with 44 other states.

But according to Wood, Missouri also needs revised standardized tests that align with the new standards determined by the work groups. So he filed House Bill 43, which would require a Missouri public university to write statewide assessments.

Since the University of Missouri-Columbia has both a department of education and the Assessment Resource Center, the university is a contender for creating these statewide exams, Wood said.

The university-formulated assessments would replace Common Core testing beginning in 2017.