District performance from the 2025 Annual Performance Report (APR / MSIP6) — the overall score plus its building blocks: English, math, college-and-career readiness, and attendance. A pattern runs through all of them: achievement follows poverty. So this page also asks three harder questions — how poor Missouri’s children actually are (the school lunch numbers no longer tell you), which districts beat the odds their demographics predict, and how far the pandemic set students back, five years on.
What this page shows
About one Missouri child in eight is poor — 13.1% of school-age children. But the free/reduced-lunch rate, the number schools leaned on for thirty years, is no longer a poverty measure: 58 districts report that 100% of students qualify.
Poverty predicts how far behind students start. It barely predicts how fast they grow. Achievement correlates with poverty at −0.65; the learning rate correlates at only −0.17.
Five years on, Missouri students score 0.70 grade levels below where they were in 2019, and only 40 of 346 districts with reliable data have fully recovered.
Data current as ofDESE Annual Performance Report 2025Stanford SEDA 2024 releaseCensus SAIPE child poverty 2023
THE STATE’S OWN SCORECARD
Annual Performance Report, 2025
The share of accountability points each district earned — Missouri’s single summary of district performance — and the two academic measures underneath it. Use the Achievement Measure selector on the map to switch between the APR score, English language arts, and mathematics.
How to read it: darker shading means a higher score. The scale is clipped at the 5th and 95th percentiles so the middle of the state stays readable — hovering any district shows its true value.
One map, three measures. APR score is the percent of accountability points earned; ELA and Math are the MAP Performance Index, a weighted score that credits partial progress toward proficiency rather than only counting the percent proficient. Darker = higher. The color scale is clamped at the 5th–95th percentile so the map stays readable; the tooltip shows each district’s true value. Source: Missouri DESE, 2025 Annual Performance Report.
Switch between ELA and math and the map barely changes — the two correlate at 0.86. A district that struggles in reading almost always struggles in math. What both maps mostly trace is not subject strength but poverty: achievement tracks a district’s poverty rate far more tightly than it tracks its spending. Which raises the obvious question — what happens once you account for poverty? That is the map two sections below.
The two components you cannot usefully map
The APR also scores college & career readiness and attendance. We have deliberately not mapped them, because they are not continuous measures: DESE awards them in bands, and almost every district lands on one of four values — 0, 50, 75 or 100. Shading a map by a four-value score invents a geographic gradient that does not exist. The honest presentation is a table.
District type
APR score
ELA (MPI)
Math (MPI)
CCR points
Attendance points
Districts
City
80.8
379.2
366.2
50
50
14
Suburb
86.0
401.8
397.2
50
75
45
Town
79.0
385.7
377.5
50
75
69
Rural
80.3
383.6
373.4
50
100
388
Missouri median
80.5
384.6
374.8
50
75
516
Median values by NCES locale, 2025 (Missouri DESE). Two things stand out. Suburban districts lead on every academic measure — and by a wide margin, about 24 MPI points in math over the typical rural district. But rural districts are the only group whose typical school earns full attendance points, while the median city district earns half. Attendance, the measure everyone began watching after the pandemic, runs in exactly the opposite direction from achievement. Per-district figures for all five measures are on each district lookup card.
HOW POOR ARE MISSOURI’S CHILDREN, REALLY?
The poverty map the school data cannot give you
Every claim on this page rests on a measure of poverty — and for thirty years the measure schools used was the free/reduced-lunch rate. That measure is now broken. Since Missouri districts began adopting community eligibility, which lets a high-poverty school feed every child for free without collecting a single family income form, a district’s reported free-lunch rate says as much about its paperwork as about its families. So this map sets school data aside entirely and asks the Census Bureau instead: what share of the children living inside each district’s boundaries is actually poor?
How to read it:red = higher child poverty than the typical Missouri district; blue = lower. The statewide rate is 13.1%; districts range from 2.5% to 46.4%.
Share of children aged 5–17 living below the federal poverty line, by school district, 2023. Red = higher poverty than the typical Missouri district; blue = lower. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates (SAIPE), a model-based estimate that draws on tax records, SNAP participation and the American Community Survey — not on anything a school reports.
About one Missouri child in eight is poor — 134,330 of the state’s 1,022,953 school-age children, or 13.1%. But the state average conceals a 19-fold spread. Kirkwood (2.5%), Rockwood (2.7%) and Ladue (3.0%) sit at one end; Middle Grove C-1 (46.4%), Marquand-Zion (41.5%) and Hayti R-II (38.8%) at the other. Among Missouri’s largest districts, St. Louis City (24.4%) and Kansas City 33 (21.4%) carry roughly five times the child poverty of Rockwood or Parkway — districts a half-hour’s drive away.
Poverty is not only an urban story. The median rural district has a 16.5% child poverty rate — almost identical to the median city district (17.1%) and more than double the median suburb (8.0%). Rural poverty is simply more spread out, and therefore easier to miss.
Why this map matters more than it looks: the free/reduced-lunch rate and actual child poverty correlate at only r = 0.65. Statewide, districts report an average free-lunch rate of 52% while actual child poverty averages 16%. Fifty-eight Missouri districts report that 100% of their students qualify for free lunch — and among those districts, real child poverty ranges from 13% to 39%, with a median of 22%. One district (Ferguson-Florissant) reports a rate above 100%.
None of that is fraud. It is community eligibility working as designed: feed every child, ask no family to fill out a form. But it means free-lunch rate is no longer a poverty measure — and any funding formula, research study, or news story that still treats it as one is measuring the wrong thing. The map above is what poverty actually looks like.
BEATING THE ODDS
Which districts outperform what poverty predicts
Poverty explains a great deal of Missouri’s test-score map — but not all of it. This map compares each district’s actual achievement against what its poverty rate alone would predict. Blue districts score above expectation, red below; the center of the scale is exactly zero, meaning “performing as predicted.” It is the one map here that asks not who is ahead, but who is doing more with what they have.
How to read it: zero means a district performs exactly as its poverty rate predicts. Blue = scoring above what poverty predicts (doing more with what it has). Red = scoring below it. This is not a ranking of good and bad schools.
Residuals from a regression of district achievement (Stanford Education Data Archive, 2009–2019) on free/reduced-lunch rate. Units are standard deviations; roughly 0.3 SD ≈ one grade level. White = no data. A caveat, given the map above: this regression uses the free/reduced-lunch rate, which for the 2009–2019 period it covers was still a usable poverty proxy. Rebuilding it on Census child-poverty data would shift some districts, and we intend to do exactly that.
The finding that should travel: poverty predicts 42% of the variance in Missouri district test scores — this map is about the other 58%. The state’s biggest over-performers are largely high-poverty rural districts: Richland R-I in the Bootheel (about 68% free/reduced lunch) leads Missouri at +0.63 SD above prediction — roughly two grade levels better than demographics would forecast — with Kingston K-14 (85% FRL), Green Forest R-II, Middle Grove C-1 and Manes R-V alongside Ladue and Clayton at the top. The lowest residuals cluster in the St. Louis inner ring (Riverview Gardens −0.57, Normandy −0.45, St. Louis Public Schools −0.39). And once poverty is controlled, the median residual for rural, town, suburban and city districts is all about zero — rural Missouri is not behind.
LEARNING RATE
How fast students learn, not how much they know
Every other achievement map on this page measures what students know at a moment in time — and what students know is shaped by everything that happened before they walked through the door. This map measures something different and, arguably, fairer: how much students gain each year compared with the typical American district. It is the closest this site can get to measuring what a school itself contributes.
How to read it: zero is the average American district. Blue = students gain more each year than the typical U.S. district; red = less. This measures growth, not how far ahead or behind students started.
Average annual growth in test scores relative to the national average, 2009–2019 (Stanford Education Data Archive). Blue = students gain more each year than the typical U.S. district; red = less. White = no data.
Here is the finding, and it is the most important one on this page. A district’s achievement level is tightly bound to its poverty rate — the correlation is −0.65, which is why the APR map at the top of this page looks so much like a poverty map. But a district’s learning rate is almost independent of poverty: the correlation collapses to −0.17.
Put plainly: poverty predicts how far behind students start. It barely predicts how fast they grow once they are in school. Missouri’s high-poverty districts are not, as a group, teaching children more slowly. Roughly 226 of 511 Missouri districts grow their students faster than the average American district, and they are scattered across the map rather than clustered in the wealthy suburbs.
The strongest learning rate in the state belongs to Richland R-I — a high-poverty Bootheel district that is also the state’s biggest over-performer on the Beating the Odds map above. Whatever is happening there is worth understanding.
Those maps describe the decade before the pandemic — the stable, long-run picture. This one describes what happened after.
FIVE YEARS AFTER COVID
Missouri students are still two-thirds of a grade level behind
One map, five questions. Use the Recovery Measure selector to move between them: how far each district sits from its own 2019 scores, the same split into math and reading, whether it rebounded between 2022 and 2024, and where it stands today against the national average. Everything is measured in grade-level equivalents. Red is below, blue is above, zero is no change.
How to read it: figures are in grade levels. Red = below zero (still behind 2019, or below the national average). Blue = above zero. White districts are those where the data is not reliable enough to shade.
Change in average district test scores (math and reading, grades 3–8) in grade-level equivalents. Only districts meeting the Stanford Education Data Archive’s reliability standard are shaded for each measure — the shaded set changes as you switch measures, which is why some districts appear and disappear. Roughly 0.3 grade levels ≈ one-third of a school year.
The headline: Missouri students in 2024 scored an enrollment-weighted 0.70 grade levels below Missouri students in 2019. Of the 346 districts with reliable estimates, only 40 — about 1 in 8 — have fully recovered. The median district sits at −0.74; the bottom tenth are a full 1.49 grade levels behind. Among districts large enough to matter statewide, Nixa stands out as fully recovered (+0.56), while Kennett 39 (−1.87), KIPP St. Louis (−1.74), Center 58 (−1.63) and St. Louis City (−1.08) remain a grade level or more behind. A caution: the most extreme values belong to very small districts testing a few dozen children per grade — read the regional pattern, not any single small district.
Switch to reading, and the blue nearly disappears. Statewide, math is down 0.63 grade levels and reading 0.73 — but the district counts are starker: 34 of 193 districts have recovered in math, and only 14 of 193 in reading. Missouri matches the national finding from the Education Recovery Scorecard: reading loss has proved far more stubborn than math loss.
Now switch to the rebound. If recovery were underway, that view would be mostly blue. It isn’t. Missouri lost 0.62 grade levels between 2019 and 2022 — then lost a further 0.08 between 2022 and 2024. Only 100 of 318 districts gained any ground at all. The pandemic’s academic cost is not a receding problem that time is quietly solving.
And where districts stand now: only 64 of 346 — 18% — test above the national average. The median Missouri district is 0.81 grade levels below it. At the bottom sit the same inner-ring St. Louis districts that anchor every other map on this page: Riverview Gardens (−4.25) and St. Louis City (−4.24), more than four grade levels below the national mean.
Source for all five views: Stanford Education Data Archive, Version SEDA 2024 — the dataset behind the Harvard/Stanford Education Recovery Scorecard. Reardon, S. F., Fahle, E. M., Ho, A. D., Shear, B. R., Saliba, J., Min, J., Shim, J., & Kalogrides, D. (2025). Stanford Education Data Archive (Version SEDA 2024). Retrieved from https://purl.stanford.edu/pt329xg7054.
WHAT THIS PAGE MEANS
Five maps, and one uncomfortable pattern
Nearly every achievement map on this page is, underneath, a map of something else: where poor children live. Poverty explains 42% of the variance in Missouri district test scores. That single fact should change how you read a score — yours, your neighbor’s, and the one in the newspaper.
If you’re a parent or student
A district’s test score is not a grade for its teachers. It is closer to a photograph of the community around the school. The single best predictor of a Missouri district’s scores is not its spending, its class size, or its schedule — it is how many of its children are poor.
So if you want to know what your school itself is contributing, look at two maps and ignore the rest: how fast students learn, and whether the district beats what its poverty predicts. Those are the ones that ask what the school did with the children who walked through the door. On the growth map, poverty barely predicts anything — poor districts grow just about as fast as rich ones.
If you’re an educator or board member
These maps give you the two defenses that actual data supports. First, 226 of 511 Missouri districts grow faster than the average American district — growth is where schools show up in the numbers, and Missouri looks far better on growth than on level.
Second, and harder: the pandemic hole is not closed. Missouri students are still about 0.70 grade levels below 2019, and only 40 of 346 districts have recovered. Reading (−0.73) is worse than math (−0.63) and has rebounded less. If your board is being told recovery is finished, it is not.
If you’re a policymaker or legislator
The measure this state has used to target poverty aid for thirty years no longer measures poverty. Free-lunch rate and actual child poverty now correlate at only r = 0.65; 58 districts report that 100% of students qualify, and their real child poverty runs anywhere from 13% to 39%. Any formula that still keys on free-lunch counts is distributing money on a number that has quietly stopped meaning what it says.
The second finding worth your attention: once poverty is controlled, rural Missouri is not behind. The median rural district performs almost exactly as predicted. The gap is a poverty gap, not a rural gap — and that points at a different policy than the one usually proposed.
If you’re a taxpayer or community member
Report-card scores get used to rank towns, price houses, and decide where families move. These maps show what that ranking is actually tracking. A low APR in your town is, first and foremost, a description of your town’s economy — not a verdict on the people teaching in its buildings.
And the reverse deserves saying too: a high-scoring suburban district is not necessarily doing more for its students than the small rural district down the road. Several of the districts that most exceed what their circumstances predict are among Missouri’s poorest.
Questions worth asking about your own district
Where does our district sit on the Beating the Odds map — are we above or below what our poverty rate predicts? That is a fairer question than “what is our APR,” and it is the one worth taking to a board meeting.
What does the Census say our real child poverty rate is, and how does that compare to the free-lunch figure we report? If those two numbers are far apart, which one is our budget, our grants and our staffing built on?
Have our students recovered from the pandemic — and did anyone here ever tell us they hadn’t? Statewide, reading has recovered less than math. Ask what changed in our reading instruction since 2019, and whether it was enough.
Are our students growing faster or slower than the typical American district? A district can be below the state average in scores and still be doing excellent work. Growth is where you would see it.
If we outperform our poverty rate, what are we doing — and are we telling anyone? Missouri’s biggest over-performers are mostly small, poor, rural districts nobody writes about.
QUESTIONS OR DATA SUGGESTIONS?
Contact Dr. Jon Turner
Associate Professor of Educational Leadership · Missouri State University, Springfield MO