PRiME’s Executive Director Collin Hitt and PRiME contributor, Dr. Andrew Camp, spoke on “The Education Gadfly Show” to discuss their new Fordham education report on the Missouri charter school funding gap. The podcast is hosted by co-writer David Griffith and Mike Petrill. The report and podcast focuses on Missouri House Bill 1552 which attempted to close the funding gap between public and charter schools. The podcast examines how funding impacts students, staffing, and student achievement.

PRiME Center’s executive director Dr. Collin Hitt and Dr. David Griffith from Thomas B. Fordham Institute addressed the unsustainable funding model for Missouri’s public schools in a recent op-ed for the Missouri Independent. They highlight the disparity in funding between district public schools and charter public schools. The authors also discuss what solutions could remedy this imbalance.

Every fall and winter, Missouri schools take part in what may seem like a routine data task: reporting student enrollment on Count Day. But this process is more than a clerical requirement. The numbers submitted on these days drive state funding, federal allocations, and accountability systems that shape the resources and opportunities available to students across the state.

To calculate school funding, Missouri currently uses a model that estimates the cost of adequately educating a child and subtracts out what can be raised locally through taxes to arrive at the total aid provided to a school. The current model was developed nearly 20 years ago in 2005. There is contention with a few key pieces of the funding formula, some of which were addressed this year with the passage of Senate Bill 727, and some that persist.