Oppose the "A through F" School Inequity Bill

I urge you to oppose HB2710 (Diehl), SB1194 (Brown), SB1653 (Trent), and HB2539 (Patterson), the proposed “A through F” school accountability bills. While framed as a tool for transparency, this legislation represents a harmful step toward privatizing education and punishing our most vulnerable public schools. This system is not about helping students learn. It is about creating a simplistic, misleading label that undermines confidence in public education. Reducing a school’s complex work to a single letter grade ignores the real challenges our students and educators face. A school in a low-income neighborhood serving students with unstable housing, food insecurity, and limited resources will inevitably score lower on standardized tests than a wealthy suburban school. Under this bill, that struggling school receives a “D” or “F” and less funding, while the wealthy school gets an “A” and a financial bonus. This is not accountability. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy that starves the schools that need the most help. The funding incentives in these bills are deeply regressive. This system rewards predominantly wealthy areas with more money while schools fighting to close opportunity gaps get nothing. We should be directing resources to the students and schools with the greatest needs, not creating a system where the rich get richer and struggling schools are left to fail. Additionally, the bill places an outsized emphasis on a single standardized test. High-stakes testing does not measure the full picture of a student’s potential or a school’s value. It ignores arts programs, career and technical education, mental health support, and the creation of a safe and welcoming environment. It punishes schools that serve large populations of English language learners and students with disabilities, groups that may not meet arbitrary "proficiency" targets despite making significant progress. The original Senate version’s “auto-adjust” mechanism, which raises the bar when too many schools succeed, exposes the cynical nature of this proposal. It is designed to ensure that a certain number of schools always fail, creating a permanent underclass of “failing” institutions that can be used to justify vouchers, charter school expansion, and privatization. Our goal should be for every school to succeed, not to manufacture failure for political points. Finally, this bill is a solution in search of a problem. We already have a school accountability system. If we want to improve it, we should work with educators and parents to create meaningful, multiple-measure reports that provide context, not condemnation. We should invest in reducing class sizes, increasing mental health staff, and ensuring every child has a full stomach before they walk into class. Please oppose all these bills. Do not let Missouri turn its public schools into a high-stakes casino where only a few come out winners and our most vulnerable children are the ones who lose.