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March 5, 2007
Is your state a leader or laggard?
The U.S. business community came out with their take last week on how states compare in educating our nation’s youth. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce in partnership with the Center for American Progress and the American Enterprise Institute released their Leaders and Laggards: A State-by-State Report Card on Educational Effectiveness report that graded each state (including D.C.) on nine separate indicators of achievement, effectiveness, and management.
The report in many ways reflects the Chamber’s view that schools need to be run more like businesses, for example, by including a “flexibility” indicator based partially on how many charter schools state law allows and the amount of autonomy principals have. But it can be a useful resource to determine where your state compares to other states in other areas, too. Most of the grades will not be new to many BoardBuzz readers since they just incorporated rankings from previous report cards by Achieve, Inc, Education Next, Education Week, the Fordham Foundation, and NAEP into this one report. However, they did have one new and quite interesting indicator called “return on investment.”
Return on investment grades states on their ability to get high scores on NAEP at the lowest cost (adjusting for cost-of-living and certain student populations). For example, New Jersey received a “D” in return on investment while Massachusetts received an “A” even though both states received “A’s” in “academic achievement.” The reason? New Jersey spent proportionately more to get that “A.”
Significantly, return on investment, like most of the indicators in this report card, is graded on a curve, like a norm-referenced test. It tells us that New Jersey doesn’t get as much bang for their buck as Massachusetts but not by how much or even why. So just because your state scores an “F” in a category, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are doing a great deal worse than a state that received an “A.”
Although these rankings are far from perfect, they can be used as a starting point for states to figure out which areas they are strong in compared to other states and which areas they may need to improve. If you are confused about what this and all those other education report cards are actually grading, check out the Center for Public Education's latest release, Roundup of National Report Cards to get a quick summary on what each report is about.
Posted March 5, 2007 5:23 PM |
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