You know the feeling: researching schools for a child who learns differently and not knowing what you are actually looking for. Missouri is about to make that exercise official, with A-through-F letter grades for every public school published on school websites by September 30. The implementation plan, sent to Gov. Mike Kehoe July 1, came with its own warning label from state education officials — “notable concerns” about data quality, compressed timelines, and uncertain IT staffing that could affect accuracy in the first cycle. For the parent of a child who struggles with reading or math, there is a more fundamental problem: research on these systems finds that letter grades reflect who attends a school far more reliably than how well it teaches — and the information a struggling learner’s family actually needs won’t appear anywhere in an A.
Missouri is rolling out A-F letter grades for public schools — but the department’s own plan flags data quality concerns before a single grade is published. Research on these systems raises a deeper question: do they measure the right things for the families who need the information most?
Common questions
Does a school’s letter grade tell me if it’s good for my child who struggles with reading?
Not directly. A-F school grades reflect a mix of academic achievement, student growth, and standardized test scores — which track closely with the demographics of who attends the school. What matters for a child who struggles with reading is whether the school uses structured, explicit reading instruction and has a real process for identifying struggling readers early. Ask those questions directly at an enrollment visit; they will not appear on any report card.
What should I look for in a school instead of the letter grade?
Ask whether the school uses a structured literacy curriculum, whether teachers are trained in the science of reading, and what their process is when a child falls behind in reading. Ask how quickly they act on parent concerns and what the IEP or 504 referral process looks like. A school that has clear, honest answers to those questions is worth more than an A on a report card.
My child’s school got a low grade. Does that mean it’s failing them?
Not necessarily. Research finds that lower-graded schools often serve students from more disadvantaged backgrounds — meaning the grade reflects the school’s population more than the quality of its instruction. The better question is whether your child is making real progress and whether the school responds when they struggle. A screener is a starting point, not a diagnosis — if your child might need formal accommodations (an IEP or 504 plan) or you suspect a vision, hearing, or medical cause, a professional evaluation is the route to those supports.
What questions should I ask at a school visit to understand if it supports struggling learners?
Ask how the school identifies students who are falling behind in reading or math, which reading program they use and whether it is based on the science of reading, and how quickly they act when a child is not making expected progress. Also ask how they communicate with parents when a child stalls. Schools with clear, proactive answers to these questions serve struggling learners better than any letter grade ever signals.
Missouri’s new A-F school grades will cost $715K a year to maintain. Research says they track the neighborhood more than the teaching. Here’s what to ask instead.
The Plan, the Formula, and the Warnings
Missouri’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education submitted its 24-page plan July 1, 2026, fulfilling Gov. Kehoe’s January executive order. The grades will weight elementary and middle schools 38% on academic achievement, 33% on student growth, and 29% on growth toward proficiency; high schools will add graduation rates and postsecondary readiness metrics. Cost: $518,000 to create and $715,100 annually to maintain — most of it not yet in the department’s budget.
The department itself inserted warnings throughout the plan. State IT staff needed to run the data systems have uncertain availability because of budget cuts: “the continued availability” of those employees and contractors “is in question.” Moving standardized test deadlines up by two weeks to meet the fall publication requirement means schools accustomed to testing later in the spring could see lower scores with no change in actual instruction. The report acknowledged that “significant changes to data capture, validation and processing are necessary to meet the annual required timeline” and that these changes “may impact the quality of data used in the grade cards, especially in the initial cycle.”
Interim Commissioner Stacey Preis described the goal as giving families “a simple, comparable and rigorous picture of school performance.” The State Board of Education reviews the plan in August; it is not yet approved.
The goal for the ‘A’ through ‘F’ school grading framework is to provide families and communities with a simple, comparable and rigorous picture of school performance.
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
What the Research Says These Grades Actually Measure
The goal of simplicity is not the problem. A simple measure applied to a complex system tends to capture the simplest thing — and for school report cards, research consistently finds that the simplest thing is demographics. A Bowling Green State University study on A-F school report card grades found that socioeconomic status indicators and community characteristics were the primary differentiators in which schools received which letter grade, ahead of instructional quality. The mechanism is not hard to see: schools serving families with more resources enroll students who arrive with stronger foundational skills, which register as higher achievement on standardized tests, which becomes a higher letter on the report card. A school doing extraordinary work with a harder-to-serve population routinely earns a C while a school whose students started with every advantage earns an A.
Research on test-based school accountability under No Child Left Behind found that adoption of these systems does not reliably produce school improvement — and that schools in disadvantaged communities, under pressure to improve a letter grade, are more likely to shift toward test preparation rather than better instruction. That is the systems problem. It is the same pattern researchers documented with learning styles: a measure that sounds rigorous, gets adopted at scale, and survives for decades after the evidence says it doesn’t do what it promises. The difference is that a school grade shapes where a family moves — or doesn’t — and which children get access to which resources. For kids who are already struggling, the stakes of a misleading metric are not abstract.
Key takeaways
- Letter grades track demographics, not teaching: A Bowling Green State University study found socioeconomic status and community characteristics were the primary differentiators in A-F school grades — not instructional quality.
- Missouri flagged its own data concerns: State education officials warned that a compressed timeline and IT staffing gaps “may impact the quality of data used in the grade cards, especially in the initial cycle” — before the grades are trusted to guide families.
- The metric that matters isn’t on the card: Whether a school uses structured literacy, identifies struggling readers early, and builds cognitive skills rather than managing gaps will not appear anywhere in an A, B, or C grade.
What to Ask Instead of Looking at the Grade
A grade card is a starting point for research, not a verdict on a school — or on a child. If you are evaluating schools or questioning whether your child’s current school is a good fit, a letter grade does not tell you whether teachers are trained in structured literacy, whether the school has a real early-identification process for children who are falling behind in reading, or whether it builds skills rather than managing visible gaps with accommodations that don’t close the underlying gap. Those are the questions that determine whether a school is genuinely equipped for a child who struggles — and they require asking directly at a school visit.
Missouri’s grade cards are not final: the State Board reviews the plan in August, and the department’s own concerns about data quality remain unresolved. That window is worth using. Educators and parents who want accountability measures that actually reflect what schools do for struggling learners have an opening to push for the metrics that matter — early identification rates, structured literacy adoption, and skill trajectory — rather than test scores that mostly confirm what the neighborhood already told you.
Every parent deserves a real picture of whether a school is equipped to help their child learn — not a letter that reflects the neighborhood’s income level. The accountability metric that actually matters for a struggling learner isn’t on any report card: it’s whether the school identifies children who are falling behind early, teaches to the science of reading, and builds the underlying cognitive skill rather than managing the visible gap with accommodations that don’t close it. The system that keeps reaching for politically legible signals instead of honest diagnostics is the obstacle — and parents who know the right questions to ask are the ones who find the right school. Start with a real picture of your child’s learning profile: the Learning Success All Access program gives you a personalized, multi-system roadmap — not a label.
See what All Access gives your child
See MTSS for schools
Is your child struggling in school?
Get your free personalized learning roadmap
You describe what you see at home. We turn it into a plan you start this week.
- Answer 5 short questionnaires about what you already notice, 30–45 minutes at your own kitchen table
- Your child sits no test and gets no score: nothing to schedule, nothing for them to dread
- You do the answering, the AI does the writing, and a person reviews it before it reaches you
- Access all 40+ courses instantly: reading, math, focus, processing and more, with new ones added regularly
Why we use AI, plainly: it writes from a knowledge base our team maintains and audits. We work through it line by line and pull anything the evidence stops supporting. The roadmap you get on Tuesday reflects what we corrected on Monday, and a human still reads it before you do.
Your school district must evaluate your child free of charge if you ask in writing, whatever your income and whatever the outcome (US, 34 CFR 300.111 and 300.301(b)). That route takes time and answers a different question than you do. This one starts today, from what you already know.
Your answers stay yours. We do not sell your personal information, and we do not hand identifiable assessment data to outside AI companies to train their models.
A screener is a starting point, not a diagnosis. If your child might need formal accommodations (an IEP or 504 plan), or you suspect a vision, hearing or medical cause, pursue a professional evaluation too. That is the only route to those supports.
References
- Annelise Hanshaw, Missouri Independent — Missouri education department’s A-F school grading plan comes with warnings
- KBIA / NPR — Missouri education department’s A-F school grading plan comes with warnings
- Bowling Green State University — Discriminating Schools’ A-F Report Card Grades
- Economic Policy Institute — Problems with the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers
