By Matthew Ladner, Ph.D.

Goldwater Institute

Today, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) released a new book that provides a simple, direct way of comparing the effectiveness of public education in every state. I co-authored the Report Card on American Education: Ranking State K-12 Performance, Progress and Reform with Goldwater Institute Senior Fellow Dan Lips and school choice expert Andrew LeFevre. ALEC is distributing the book to state lawmakers across the country.

For the Report Card, we rank all 50 states and the District of Columbia based on student test scores and learning gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). We focused in particular on the scores of low-income students who were not in special education programs from 2003 to 2009, the years in which all jurisdictions took the tests used by NAEP

Our rankings give the same weight to overall performance (which states had the highest test scores) and overall gains (which states made the most progress over time). The table below shows the rankings:

Our rankings are not favorable for states with low test scores that didn’t improve over time, like Arizona. States fare well in the rankings if they had relatively high NAEP scores that continued to rise during those six years.

Florida scored No. 3 on the list because that state had high scores (ranked 11th overall) and made big gains (ranked first overall), even though a majority of Florida’s students come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

This year the Arizona Legislature adopted a number of Florida’s previous education reforms that led to that state’s top ranking. Now, policymakers should use this new report card as a rallying cry to make sure those reforms are carried out in every Arizona public school.

The ALEC Report Card demonstrates once again why when it comes to K-12 reform: I’ll have what Florida is having!

Dr. Matthew Ladner is vice president of research for the Goldwater Institute.