NEWS & EVENTS
Featured
PRiME in the news
Reflections from a Charter School Trailblazer: Collin Hitt and Kelly Garrett sit down to discuss Garrett’s 14 years of leadership at KIPP St. Louis
Reflections from a Charter School Trailblazer: Collin Hitt and Kelly Garrett sit down to discuss Garrett’s 14 years of leadership at KIPP St. Louis
In April, PRiME’s Director of Operations, Dr. Courtney Vahle, sat down with KOMU 8 and Fox23 NOW to discuss chronic absenteeism and her corresponding co-authored report, Empty Desks: An Analysis of Chronic Absenteeism in Missouri Schools (co-authored with PRiME affiliate researcher, Dr. Margaret Powers).
This report, focused on homeschooling in Missouri, found through estimations that of the over one million school-aged children in Missouri, 61,000 (6% of all school-age children) are homeschooled.
In the fall of 2024, PRiME’s Director of Operations, Dr. Courtney Vahle (With co-author, Paul Wunnenberg) took a deep dive into high school start times across Missouri. After compiling a first-of-its-kind, comprehensive dataset of Missouri high school start times, containing 295 high schools from 230 school districts across the state, the authors found that the Missouri statewide average start time, 7:48 AM, is a full 42 minutes earlier than the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends.
Each year, Missouri gives standardized tests to all public school kids grades 3 through 8 to gauge their proficiency in math and English. In the 2023–2024 school year, only a tenth of KIPP Wonder’s kids who took the tests scored “proficient” in English. That’s 31 points below the state average. But it’s just a snapshot—and, in large part, due to factors outside any school’s control, such as community and family resources. Missouri also calculates a growth metric, one that Collin Hitt, the executive director of Saint Louis University’s education policy group, PRiME Center, calls “the best in the country.” It asks the question: How far did students move forward in a subject, regardless of where they started, and in comparison to other similarly situated students? And on that metric, KIPP Wonder showed the second largest average leap in English of all public elementary schools in Missouri, according to a PRiME analysis. (They were second only to a school in the Ozarks.)
