Quality Education
Indicator Maps & Tables

Critical Issues, Key Leaders, & Community Action

No issue presents a greater challenge to the St. Louis region than ensuring that all children have access to a quality education and that educational disparities and inequities are eliminated.  All children attend school as a legal requirement and schools provide the primary institutional platform for entry into adulthood and the workforce -- yet the educational experience of some St. Louis area children is very good while that of others is wholly inadequate.  It is in the educational arena that our region’s problems related to fragmented governmental structure and parochialism are most starkly manifested.  Students are educated primarily on the basis of the resources within each school district.  In areas where high educational need outstrips available resources, children and communities suffer.  Parents who value a good education for their children-- and who have resources-- can exercise a variety of options to find quality schools by locating in a good school district, participating in the Voluntary Interdistrict Transfer Program, or enrolling their children in parochial or private schools.  Children who live in districts that do not offer an adequate education, and whose parents lack the motivation or resources to find educational alternatives, are likely to be subjected to a poor educational experience that will have life-long negative impacts.  The Black Leadership Roundtable is conducting a well organized and high visibility initiative to eliminate the African American achievement gap. 

The Voluntary Interdistrict Transfer Program, resulting from the metropolitan area’s school desegregation case, has provided a vehicle for addressing some of the region’s major educational issues, but that program is now scheduled to end.  Governmental structures, politics and finances continue to impede broad-based, systemic educational reform efforts.  Taxes on gaming proceeds were supposed to flow into public education coffers in the state of Missouri, but were, in fact, used to supplant the financial resources for education already in place.  As long as these structural and financial problems in our system of public education persist, the well-being of many St. Louis area children will be undermined and the economic strength and quality of life in the region diminished.