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by Anne Schlafly Cori
The state of Missouri recently announced that they are not going to use its own school accreditation system. In other words, no school district will be penalized for poor performance, even though their own tests have demonstrated very poor performance.
In 2021, the statewide average test scores showed that only 45% of students were proficient in English and 35% in math. Some school districts scored in single digits, which means that more than 90% of those students have failed to learn how to read or write or count.
The reason Missouri has stopped accrediting public schools is that all the schools would fail their own standard. Federal law requires 82% of students be proficient in English and 74% proficient in math. No Missouri public school meets that rate, which means — according to the law — that all the schools should be unaccredited.
We can't have that, of course; the education bureaucracy does not want to actually close any failing schools. They just are hoping you won't notice the high failure rate.
In 2013, Missouri removed accreditation from two failing St. Louis area school districts. According to the law, those students could then transfer to another school district, but the cost of those transfers bankrupted the two school districts. So no one in the Missouri education bureaucracy wants to close any failing school and spend education dollars to transfer students to better schools. No one in the Missouri education bureaucracy wants to be accountable for providing real education for students.
According to the tests, a super-majority of Missouri students are not proficient in either English or math. Where is the outrage? Are the schools simply 12 years of babysitting? More importantly, do parents and taxpayers willingly accept that for 12 years the students are not instructed in English and math, but simply warehoused?
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