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School bills fall short again in Misouri legislature

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, May 24, 2012 - As they do in most years, legislators in Jefferson City began their 2012 session with a long list of education issues on the agenda: fixing the foundation formula, solving the Turner transfer dilemma, expanding charter schools, changing teacher tenure rules, letting state officials intervene more quickly in Kansas City schools and so on.

In the end, the only substantive issue that won approval was expanding charter schools beyond their current limits of St. Louis and Kansas City; the question is now in the hands of Gov. Jay Nixon.

So why is it so difficult for education bills to win approval from lawmakers? Not surprisingly, the answer to that pop quiz differs depending on which member of the Senate or the House you talk to.

“I think we love education bills to death,” said state Sen. Joe Keaveny, D-St. Louis. “For three years now, I have filed a real simple education bill to help give more flexibility to Shearwater Academy in St. Louis, and every time it comes to the floor, the amendments come raining down. Everybody sees it as an opportunity to get their issue taken care of, and eventually everybody finds a reason to vote against it.

“There are 522 school districts in Missouri. They have varied interests among them. We talk a lot about education reform, but depending on what school district you are representing, education reform can have a whole different meaning from what someone else means by education reform.”

To state Rep. Scott Dieckhaus, R-Washington, who chaired the House committee on education, the problem is more about outside forces trying to exert pressure on school issues being debated in the Capitol.

“A lot of the issues had a chance to run on their own and still struggled,” he said. “It goes to show what kind of grip superintendents and teachers have on the building.

“Superintendents have a lot of influence in outstate Missouri, and in the more suburban and urban areas, teachers unions are very powerful.”

And for state Rep. Margo McNeil, D-Florissant and a former teacher, the issue comes down to this: a disconnect between legislators and the people who send them to Jefferson City.

“Some of the people who are in charge were determined to do typical education reform,” she said. “They are in leadership positions, but they really don’t represent the views of either the majority or the minority caucus in general. They use these issues as bartering chips to get through what they want, even though they are things that the people of Missouri don’t want.”

Bills, bills and more bills

It’s not as if education bills are the only kind of proposed legislation with a hard time getting through the General Assembly. State Sen. David Pearce, R-Warrensburg, who will chair the joint legislative committee on education next year, points out that of more than 1,000 bills and resolutions introduced in the session that ended last week, between 7 and 8 percent passed.

“That’s as it should be,” Pearce said. “It should be difficult to pass legislation in the state of Missouri. It shouldn’t be something that happens quickly and easily.”

With education, he added, the debates often become heated “because people have passion and detailed beliefs about it.”

In the St. Louis area, the issue that may have attracted the most attention when the session began was a fix for the so-called Turner case – the debate over the law that says students living in unaccredited school districts like St. Louis or Riverview Gardens may transfer to neighboring accredited districts, with their home district paying tuition and transportation.

Along with that issue was one about the state’s chronically underfunded foundation formula, which is designed to help even out spending per pupil for districts throughout Missouri. While technically the two issues are not directly related, both involve one of the top concerns for districts throughout the state: money.

In the Turner case, suburban districts worried that they would be unable to handle a large influx of students from St. Louis, while the city school system worried it would have to pay so much for tuition and transportation it wouldn’t have funds to pay for the education for the children left behind.

With the foundation formula – a calculation so complex that few understand it fully – the worry was that a source of funds that already fell far short of what was needed would be refigured so that some districts would take big hits and others, the so-called “hold harmless” districts, would escape relatively unscathed.

McNeil, whose represents three districts in north St. Louis County – Ferguson-Florissant, Pattonville and Hazelwood – said she was pleased that officials from those schools were more concerned about stopping the swings in state funding than they were about watching their own budgets.

“They said they were willing to take cuts in funding so that everybody had a stable situation and all school districts could count on what they were going to get from the state,” she said. “I was really surprised that they were looking out for schools in the entire state of Missouri and going for a formula fix that we put forward that would have been a good solution.”

But efforts to devise a new, fair formula stalled when a judge ruled in the Turner case that the transfer law in question was unconstitutional. Now, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education will devise how the state’s school aid will be allotted.

“Once the Turner issue was pulled off the table,” said Dieckhaus, “there was not a lot of incentive for folks to negotiate on the formula.”

And even though the Turner case is likely to end up back at the Missouri Supreme Court – which already has ruled the law is constitutional – when St. Louis County Circuit Judge David Lee Vincent issued his opinion earlier this month, the pressure was off to come up with any legislative fix for the situation.

Given the likelihood that the issue will return to the General Assembly, Keaveny would like legislative debate on the transfer problem to continue. But he doesn’t see that happening.

“Why don’t we sit down and have an intelligent discussion about it and come up with a solution instead of kicking the can down the road?” he asked. “We ought to be sitting down now and be talking about it.”

Talking teacher tenure

Another issue that generated a lot of discussion but no final approval was changing the rules under which Missouri’s public school teachers are employed.

Legislation that originally would have changed many conditions of that employment – requiring that growth in student achievement be included in teacher evaluations, mandating that teachers who receive two poor evaluations in a row be fired and removing a rule that untenured teachers must be laid off before any tenured teachers are let go – was stripped down when it ran into opposition.

What was left – a prohibition against the so-called LIFO practice, where teachers who are the last to be hired are the first to be laid off – was still being debated in the final hours of the session but ran into another highly debated bill. That one would have given the state Board of Education the power to move more quickly to take over the Kansas City schools, which lost accreditation at the first of this year.

Current law requires that the board wait two years before it can put into place a special administrative board like the ones that currently govern unaccredited schools in St. Louis and Riverview Gardens. A bill to let the state take over now won approval in the Senate, but a threatened filibuster derailed both it and the LIFO bill in the closing hours of the session.

To some, that outcome was good. State Sen. Jane Cunningham, R-Chesterfield, said she hasn’t seen much good coming from the state takeover in St. Louis.

“The SAB in St. Louis has been a miserable failure,” she said. “If you look at the statute, they expect some turnaround within three years. We’re in the fifth year, and there is not one academic achievement goal that has been met. I don’t know how anybody can call that success.”

But state Rep. Tishaura Jones, D-St. Louis, recalled a comment from a Kansas City colleague, that the city has “17,000 kids who can’t read and they have suffered from 40 years of superintendent turnover. It’s time for something drastic to happen in that district.”

To Pearce, in the Senate, the failure to bring the Kansas City bill to a vote “was a huge mistake. I totally disagree with Scott Dieckhaus on that, and I place all of the blame with him. I think it’s unconscionable what he did, and 17,000 children will drastically suffer because of what he did.”

The failure to pass any significant changes in teacher employment rules is, to Dieckhaus and to Cunningham, a clear indication of the lobbying power of teachers unions. Cunningham says she has not suffered from opposing the teachers’ goals, but others haven’t been so forthright.

“Their bark is worse than their bite,” she said of the teachers unions. “That is what I have learned. I have never been defeated in an election, and I have stood for education reform for 12 years.

"I think legislators are more frightened than they have to be, in terms of re-election, but re-election is a high priority for any legislator, and it’s very difficult when you have teachers in your district who are well organized and will contact you at any turn.”

Charting new waters

The one significant piece of school legislation that did pass, expanding charter schools and establishing a statewide charter school commission, made it through for a couple of reasons, lawmakers said.

First, as Jones noted, the bill was kept free of other issues and concentrated only on charters.

“We were able to keep it clean,” she said. “That was the leadership of Scott Dieckhaus. He fought really hard to keep it clean.”

Second, she noted, the issue had been discussed in past sessions, and more experience with charter schools in the state had brought a greater understanding.

“We fought most of the battle last year,” Jones said. “We vetted all of the interest groups, and everybody had a chance to get something into the bill that they wanted. We were able to actually gain more votes because of the situation in Kansas City. We had more Kansas City Democrats voting with us this year.”

Not everyone is happy with the bill, which besides allowing charters outside Kansas City and St. Louis requires new procedures and regulations to strengthen the accountability of the schools and their sponsors.

McNeil, who wants Nixon to veto the bill, said, “I don’t think charters have proven they are any better than the public schools they were supposed to be the savior of, and a lot of times they have been worse.

“Some of the outstate legislators decided that charters wouldn’t really affect their school districts. If you are an accredited district, the elected school board would determine whether they needed a charter school, so I don’t think they liked it but it was something they said they could live with.

“Personally, I think that because of the strength of the charter reform lobby, and the fact that we had out-of-state groups coming into Missouri and putting a lot of money into education reform, there is a lot of fear that a school board could be lobbied as hard to set up a charter, before the people of a community could realize a charter is being contemplated.”

What the future holds

Will the power of such outside groups, on both sides of education questions, continue to control the outcome of school bills in Jefferson City? Some of the main players this year won’t be around for next year’s session – Dieckhaus is retiring to direct the House GOP campaign committee, Jones is leaving to run for St. Louis treasurer, and Cunningham's Senate career is ending because of the way her district was redrawn.

But, they and others say, the influences will remain, and sometimes they can be seen as stronger than the will of the general public.

“I think the people of Missouri want good public schools,” McNeil said.

“They appreciate public schools, and they understand the public schools are in the best interest of a democratic society. It’s a bipartisan issue: Republicans as well as Democrats support public education. You see people willing to stand up for education.”

The problem comes, Cunningham said, when special interests have a way to express their views on education issues while the general public does not. Too often, she added, such pressure makes lawmakers vote against their own consciences.

“The children are voiceless,” she said. “They have no lobbyists. Parents aren’t organized by any union that lets them know what is happening in the Capitol or when a vote is coming down. So we only hear from one side, typically.”

Balancing what interest groups want with what conscience dictates can be a delicate exercise, Jones said. And trying to figure out what the public wants isn’t easy, either.

“I try to do surveys before I even get to the session,” she said, “to poll my voters to see how they want me to respond to certain things. The problem is that there is such a low response rate.

“I sent out 18,000 surveys, and 300 people responded. We need more everyday people to get involved in the process.”

Looking ahead to the next session, Keaveny put his hopes this way:

“Maybe if we take some of the personalities out of it, we can accomplish something. I’m optimistic. That’s not to say that the personalities are wrong. It’s all about the art of compromise.”

Dale Singer began his career in professional journalism in 1969 by talking his way into a summer vacation replacement job at the now-defunct United Press International bureau in St. Louis; he later joined UPI full-time in 1972. Eight years later, he moved to the Post-Dispatch, where for the next 28-plus years he was a business reporter and editor, a Metro reporter specializing in education, assistant editor of the Editorial Page for 10 years and finally news editor of the newspaper's website. In September of 2008, he joined the staff of the Beacon, where he reported primarily on education. In addition to practicing journalism, Dale has been an adjunct professor at University College at Washington U. He and his wife live in west St. Louis County with their spoiled Bichon, Teddy. They have two adult daughters, who have followed them into the word business as a communications manager and a website editor, and three grandchildren. Dale reported for St. Louis Public Radio from 2013 to 2016.