Education advocates cite Missouri as a top battleground in fight over public schools

The culture wars dominating American politics are threatening to seep into the Missouri public education system, according to authors of a report from PEN America, a literary and free expression organization.

Since 2021, legislators in Missouri’s General Assembly have introduced 31 bills aimed at reforming the education system, the most from any one state. Only one, Senate Bill 775, which restricts access to “sexually explicit materials” in libraries, was passed into law.

Bills that so far have fallen short of passage include the establishment of a Parent’s Bill of Rights, creating an easily searchable database of curriculum and teacher training materials and monitoring the expression of gender identity in children.

“We've seen essentially a more sophisticated effort to water down our children's education for ideological reasons,” said James Tager, research director at PEN America.

Some of the practices being proposed already exist in some format, but authors of the report argue that the failed legislation would have increased the work of educators without raising their pay.

A study released in April by the National Education Association ranked Missouri last in the nation for starting teacher pay, which was around $34,000 at the time. Gov. Mike Parson signed legislation into law in June that provided state funds to ensure all public school teachers were paid at least $38,000.

The average teacher pay in the state is about $52,000, but when compared to other states, Missouri ranks 47th in the country. Education advocates worry that imposing more work upon teachers without increasing their pay runs the risk of exacerbating problems with teacher recruitment and retention.

“These individuals are finding better opportunities and saying, ‘You know what, I'm done with public education. I found another job that pays, in some cases, twice as much and they respect me and want me for their business,’” said Todd Fuller, director of marketing and communication for the Missouri State Teachers Association.

A recent Saint Louis University/YouGov poll revealed that about 81% of surveyed Missourians supported increasing teacher pay, but only 35% would recommend teaching as a profession.

In May, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education released its annual vacancy report, showing that there were over 2,600 positions to be filled. About 72% of school districts contacted responded to the survey.

Last year, at the third meeting of the Teacher Recruitment and Retention Blue Ribbon Commission, educators pointed to low pay, high student debt and lack of support as reasons for leaving the field.

“We should all be concerned if people that are educators at heart, and their passion is teaching students, want to leave the profession,” Fuller said.

Critics worry vague language could create ambiguous interpretations

A number of the proposed Missouri laws would prohibit the teaching of “divisive concepts” and reading materials containing "sexually explicit materials," which critics say is impractically vague.

“I'm a lawyer, and I don't know exactly what that means. And if I were a teacher, I would not know what that meant for my class,” Tager said.

Limiting sexually explicit content in schools could be a tricky rule to implement in practice when many iconic books contain references to sex.

For instance, George Orwell’s “1984” and Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five,” both commonly read books in high school English classes, would be banned under Senate Bill 775, which passed in June 2022. Librarians who violate the law could face a Class A misdemeanor.

State Sen. Holly Thompson Rehder, who sponsored the bill, did not respond to requests for comment about the legislation.

More: Librarians sue over Missouri law that bans 'explicit sexual material,' spurred book removals

As for a prohibition on teaching divisive concepts, authors of the report worry that such a vague blanket restriction creates ambiguity in its interpretation. For instance, teaching about topics in U.S. history could be interpreted by some as a divisive topic.

“How am I going to teach about the Civil War? How am I going to teach them about slavery? How am I going to teach about civil rights? How I'm going to teach about Native American relations with the government? How I'm going to teach about women's suffrage?” Tager said. “All of this becomes unclear.”

In 2022, state Sen. Andrew Koenig sponsored Senate Bill 810, which would have fined teachers $10,000 per violation for teaching divisive concepts. He is the sponsor of four of the 31 Missouri bills mentioned in the PEN America report.

As Koenig's bill was written, parent's would have had two weeks advance notice before any divisive concepts were to be taught, and all curriculum would be publicly available through an online portal for parents to preview.

"I don't see a problem with it. If there's something that parents don't think is appropriate for their kids, there's no reason why they can't opt out of it," Koenig said.

However, the bill remains unclear about what exactly constitutes a divisive concept. Critics have raised questions about how teachers are to determine what content parents should be notified about in order to have the option to opt their child out.

When the general public was polled about curriculum influence, 66% of Americans thought that public school teachers should have a great deal or good amount of influence when deciding what to teach, according to a PDK poll. In contrast, only about 33% of Americans thought that the governor or state legislature should exert the same level of influence in the classroom.

However, a slim majority of Americans, about 51%, think that there should be some state laws outlining what public school teachers can and cannot teach.

Legislation would ask teachers to report on changes in gender identity

Another provision lawmakers included in failed Missouri legislation would have required teachers to notify parents of a change in their child’s gender identity. Florida recently passed a similar notification requirement as part of a bill commonly referred to as the “Don’t Say Gay” law.

This provision was on theme with a wave of anti-LGBTQ bills proposed in the last legislative session, including legislation that took effect Aug. 28 restricting access to gender-affirming care for minors and restricted transgender participation on sports teams matching their chosen gender.

Senate Bill 134, which would have required educators to report on changes in gender identity, was proposed by state Sen. Mike Moon during the 2023 legislative session, but failed to pass. Moon did not respond to requests for comment in time for inclusion in this story.

Education advocates warn that asking teachers to judge what constitutes a change in gender identity adds another layer of responsibility to their jobs — coupled with the threat of legal action if a change is not perceived and reported.

“You're putting teachers in positions that I don't necessarily think that either the district or community members want those teachers to be in,” Fuller said.

Authors of the report expressed concern that it could also jeopardize the safety of children whose sexuality is forcibly outed to their family before they are ready to have that conversation.

“Kids get hurt by laws like this,” Tager said. “But these laws, these bills, these policy proposals are being proposed in the name of protecting kids in the name of protecting parents' choices.”

Big changes could mean more spending and staff. Who foots the bill?

Several of the 31 bills proposed in recent Missouri legislative sessions would have required the creation of an easily-searchable database with all curriculum and content to be presented to children during a school year.

This material is already available to interested parties if requested from the school district, a point that Koenig argues should make forming an online database simpler.

"What we saw during COVID is that all the documents are already online, and parents did have access to a lot of these documents during COVID," Koenig said. "So to say that this can't be done or that it's overly burdensome is just simply not true, because it was actually already done."

Even so, education advocates contend creating such an online database would take a good deal of time, money and coordination.

“That's the crux of one of the biggest issues with that bill is, ‘Who's going to pay for it? How is it going to be implemented? And how are you going to share that information, not necessarily with the parents but from school districts to [the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education],” Fuller said. “Nobody has walked that entire process through to the end.”

Koenig has a different opinion. When asked about criticism that his bill would create an undue burden for educators, he said, "I think what we learned is, that people who are saying that just don't want transparency."

Each bill including this database requirement has a different idea of how it should be managed. Some say that the teachers should be responsible for creating this database. Others think that the responsibility should fall to the school district, the commissioner of education or the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Koenig's legislation would have had educators send their materials to the state, so that no additional burden would be placed on individual school districts, although some districts indicated to him their desire to do it themselves.

Other discrepancies appear in the timeliness of updates to content in this database. Some proposals have given a tight timeline of five days to update with new content, while others allow for updates twice a year.

“There have been several instances where legislation is introduced, and sometimes is put into statute without any kind of understanding or explanation of how it's going to be implemented,” Fuller said. “And then we start to face challenges.”

One such piece of legislation was Senate Bill 4, sponsored by Koenig, who said that the issue of curriculum transparency, while always important, became a greater focus of parents during the pandemic. He began proposing versions of a Parents' Bill of Rights in 2021, sponsoring related legislation each year since.

"The Parents' Bill of Rights is just real simple," Koenig said. "It provides that transparency and let parents know that they have a right to go in and look at curriculum to know what their child is being taught at school."

He also proposed Senate Bill 645, which would have allowed access to teacher training materials. Koenig described his sponsored education legislation as a three-part approach including the Parental Bill of Rights, the online portal for accessing instructional materials and a ban on the teaching of critical race theory, or CRT.

"It had kind of what I would call a ban on CRT," Koenig said. "CRT was not mentioned in the bill because we had this specific type of activity that we wanted to prohibit, so we described that activity in there."

Springfield Public Schools faced public scrutiny about a similar issue in 2021, when its diversity training materials for educators were alleged to contain elements of critical race theory.

Some legislation would open school districts to legal action

Education advocates argue that some of the proposed legislation could also open the door to costly, time-consuming lawsuits against schools not in compliance.

Several of the failed Missouri bills included provisions allowing school district residents to file civil suits against noncompliant schools, or report them to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Missouri Attorney General.

Former Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt set a strong example for those looking to sue a school district. He engaged in months-long legal battles during the pandemic against SPS and Columbia Public Schools, among others.

More: Springfield Public Schools has spent over $250K to defend against equity lawsuit, 4 others

If residents pursue lawsuits against the school district and win their case, education advocates say it is the taxpayers that ultimately lose.

“We saw those types of things happening two years ago, when school districts were being sued for mask mandate issues,” Fuller said. “You and I were paying for what was happening in our school districts, as patrons of the district.”

What is happening in Missouri has also been playing out across the nation. The PEN America report found 392 such bills were introduced between January 2021 and June 2023, 39 of which have now passed into law.

Although all but one piece of legislation failed in Missouri, these efforts are likely to be revived in the 2024 legislative session.

“I don't think we've seen the last of them,” Fuller said. “I think some of those will come back around next year.”

Koenig is hopeful to see movement on legislation enshrining parents' rights into law.

"I'm very optimistic that we're going to get something done on parental rights," Koenig said. "It'll probably be a little bit more limited in scope from what we had last year, but I'm pretty optimistic we'll get something done."

This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Missouri leads in legislation attempting public education overhaul