“Members of the Missouri General Assembly should be especially proud of the conservative reforms they made to the state’s education system—reforms that will ensure our students get the best possible education and training for their future,” said Lloyd Smith, Executive Director of the Missouri Republican Party. “By increasing education standards, Missouri is making it more difficult for students to give up and drop out. And by rewarding the best teachers with incentives for their hard work, we have made it clear, once and for all, that students are more important than teachers’ unions.”

In addition to merit pay and additional credit requirements, the General Assembly also passed a budget that increases funding for K-12 education by $63 million and holds state funding for higher education steady.

Earlier this year, Jay Nixon boasted about a supposed “deal” that he made with the state’s public universities to hold tuition steady during the next school year. But as the Associated Press reports, no such deal was needed—tuition would have remained the same with or without Nixon’s input. From the AP article, May 10, 2009: “Gov. Jay Nixon has made much ado about brokering a deal in which colleges and universities agreed to hold tuition flat in exchange for avoiding state budget cuts. As it turns out, the same outcome may have occurred regardless of the agreement, thanks to a combination of state and federal laws and the sluggish economy.”

Thanks in part to the Republican-led General Assembly’s 2007 passage of a proposal that linked tuition increases to inflation (which was .1% last year), prices would have remained steady. To make Nixon’s credit-grab worse, the tuition limit was included in a larger education package that Nixon strongly opposed.

“Jay Nixon is taking credit for freezing the tuition at public colleges and universities, but in reality, it happened because of previous legislation that Nixon opposed,” said Smith. “The credit should go to Republicans in the General Assembly who in 2007 worked hard to pass a bill limiting tuition increases to the rate of inflation. Such a limit never would have happened if Jay Nixon had his way.”

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