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:
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NAEP Score Rankings on 4th and 8th Grade Math and Reading (Performance and Gains) for low-income students |
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| Vermont | 1 | District of Columbia | 26 |
| Massachusetts | 2 | Georgia | 27 |
| Florida | 3 | Wyoming | 28 |
| New Hampshire | 4 | Connecticut | 29 |
| New York | 5 | California | 30 |
| Pennsylvania | 6 | Iowa | 31 |
| Kansas | 7 | Oregon | 32 |
| Texas | 8 | Nebraska | 33 |
| Montana | 9 | Missouri | 34 |
| New Jersey | 10 | Ohio | 35 |
| Alaska | 11 | Tennessee | 36 |
| Virginia | 12 | Kentucky | 37 |
| Indiana | 13 | Illinois | 38 |
| Maine | 14 | South Dakota | 39 |
| Hawaii | 15 | Alabama | 40 |
| Washington | 16 | North Carolina | 41 |
| Colorado | 17 | Utah | 42 |
| Nevada | 18 | Oklahoma | 43 |
| Delaware | 19 | Arkansas | 44 |
| Maryland | 20 | Arizona | 45 |
| Wisconsin | 21 | Mississippi | 46 |
| Idaho | 22 | Louisiana | 47 |
| Minnesota | 23 | New Mexico | 48 |
| North Dakota | 24 | Michigan | 49 |
| Rhode Island | 25 | West Virginia | 50 |
| South Carolina | 51 | ||
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.
It’s useful to get more info on what’s going on in education.
Alaska came in 11th and Arizona is 45th.
Can the AZ State Education establishment stop making excuses for “minority students” depressing the scores?
In terms of Native Indian population and isolated communites, AK and AZ are probably more similar than any other state, except, perhaps #48 embarrassment New Mexico, but AK with arguably more logistical problems like weather and distances and less extensive road grid than either AZ and NM is educating its students better – and not by a small margin, either. But this is all relative ONLY to other US states. Internationally, the top US states lag by double digits behind scores of other countries.
We have a long long way to go to be competitive. It takes only a week to get in ANY curriculum, textbook, and several are on record as being SUPERIOR in all ways, but AZ schools still favor weak curriculum and dumbed down courses. Have no idea why. It takes the same amount of time to teach top notch curriculum as it does to teach crap, and oftentimes the number one curriculum worldwide is not just the same price, but actually cheaper than the pretty bells and whistles crud.
As the Goldwater Institute was pointed out before, Florida’s demographics are almost identical to Arizona’s. Florida comes in at #3 and scores high on school reform as well. In 1998 AZ and FL were tied near the bottom. FL made major reforms. We did zip. 10 years later FL ranks 3rd. 10 years later there is no improvement for AZ and we retain our position near the bottom of the heap.
The publicly available results from this study are absolutely fascinating, not for any new information they reveal about state educational achievement, but for what they reveal about the beliefs of the authors. The authors rank states (and the District of Columbia) by improvement on NAEP scores but they also give ‘grades’ to states based on so-called ‘reforms’ that the authors believe are important for improvement.
The authors gave the highest grade of a B+ to Florida and the lowest of a D to five states – Nebraska, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Vermont. The top ten states in terms of improvements on test scores, according to the authors, are as follows
1 Vermont D
2 Massachusetts C
3 Florida B+
4 New Hampshire C
5 New York D+
6 Pennsylvania C
7 Kansas D+
8 Texas C
9 Montana D+
10 New Jersey C
The 10 bottom states are
41 North Carolina C
42 Utah C+
43 Oklahoma C
44 Arkansas B-
45 Arizona B-
46 Mississippi D+
47 Louisiana B
48 New Mexico B
49 MIchigan B-
50 West Virginia C
51 South Carolina B
So as one can see, the ‘reform’ grades for the top 10 states are lower than the bottom 10 states. In fact, when one looks at all the states (and D.C.) one actually finds a very weak negative correlation (-.2904) between the ranking of the states and the ‘reform’ grades they are given. The correlation is certainly too weak to claim that explicitly not doing what the authors suggest will result in higher scores but it certainly shows that there is no positive relationship between the ‘reforms’ the authors believe are needed and the actually ranking on test scores. Based on the rankings and grades provided, the one example that seems to align test scores with ‘reforms,’ Florida, is likely improving for a reason or reasons not identified by the authors or perhaps even in spite of their ‘reforms.’
todd,
Seems like your education in data analysis is lacking. What you did not consider and what is not stated in the study is how long reforms have been in place. Response time if critical in this type of study and in what has to be considered in any cause/effect analysis. It has taken 10 years for Florida’s reform to result in major change, major being student’s reading at two grade levels higher than before. So, nice try. Faulty analysis.
Stephen Kohut,
I am aware of the points you make, however, as you state this information is not included in the study. That is a shortcoming of the study, not of me and I simply am stating what their numbers say. I would also point to the fact that, as has been pointed out numerous times, the timeline of improvement in Florida has the improvement starting before the reforms were in place, in some cases, or would be registering results.
As it is, it appears that the ‘reform’ grades and the ‘improvement’ ranks (which I am accepting at face value, even though they may have there own problems) are not correlated in any significant way. This is of course not the case with things like census rank of spending per pupil or percentage of 24-35 year olds with a college degree and many others which have much higher correlation than the ‘reform’ to ‘improvement.’ I have even noticed there seems to be some pattern between states that are ranked the ‘happiest’ having some of the lowest educational rankings. Maybe bliss is ignorance?
One more thing, Stephen. Your point ignores the fact that many states with low ‘reform’ scores have high ‘improvement’ scores so clearly those changes aren’t from ‘reforms,’ now are they.
There is no correlation between either spending per child or class size and academic perfomance. The number one factor impacting student performance is the quality of the teacher. Neither certifications nor years of experience beyond 2 have any correlation to teacher quality. The quality of the teacher is best determined quantitatively based on student academic achievement.
Nice to see you validate Terry Goddard’s point in tonight’s debate with the Governor about the state of education under Brewer.
Thanks to the unions, teachers do not have any compulsion to actually be competent in any given subject. The teachers colleges monopoly graduates teaching “process” but not teachers certified in math or grammar or any particular science.
There are so many things wrong in the USA education right now it’s hard to know where to start. The education establishment’s reaction to testing is teaching to the test, not to the subject. Schools are becoming boring drudgery where they drug kids who manifest being bored and impatient with drudgery. There are excellent curriculum available out there in the market for any school, but the education establishment is highly politicized and more interested in politics than learning, so they repeatedly pick the crappy, partisan textbooks.
Fire every teacher and then what? Thanks to them our society is undereducated.
The two best math teachers we’ve had so far were engineers, turned teachers. Heads and shoulders above the public and private school professional teachers, but the markedly less competent teachers got union priority.
Unions are killing our schools, wrecking the next generation’s chances for achievement.
Stephen Kohut,
Do you know what a tautology – The quality of the teacher is quantitatively based on student academic achievement and the academic achievement is based on the quality of the teacher.
Anyway, you are wrong there is in fact a correlation between spending and achievement when comparing states. Does it account for all differences, hardly, but the correlation exists and is much stronger than what is presented by the ‘reform’ grades. When one looks at the local level the correlation becomes even more pronounced.
Class size is correlated with achievement and anyone telling you differently is incorrect. Classes with 15-18 students, especially during k-3 have lasting positive affects.
wanumba,
Actually, math scores have been increasing in the US in recent years but what is severely falling behind is reading. Several states have better math outcomes than Europe and are only bested by Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. However, the variation from state to state is so wide that the US as a whole is quite poor. Far and away the best state for math is MA, you know with its high taxes, strong unions and so forth.
Stephen and Todd-
You have touched upon some issues that also came up on some conference calls on the Report Card yesterday, and so I would like to address them.
First, Stephen’s point about the policy grades being a snapshot are completely valid. We averaged policy reform grades from a number of sources (Education Trust, Fordham, etc) and the highest grade was Florida at a B+.
The point made about the duration of good policy is also important. Florida has had strong reform policies in place for since 1999, and now have great results to show for it. It happened steadily over time.
I for one can’t wait to see what happens when someone goes to A+, but even then, we are likely to be looking at incremental progress over time. There are no magic bullets in K-12 reform, but there are tools that achieve real results.
Finally, we have an extensive discussion about the racial achievement gap in the book. Our method of comparison in looking at the scores of general education program low-income children does not make any control for race. Because the racial achievement gap can be narrowed, as it has been substantially in Florida, we believe it can be closed.
Vermont scores poorly on reform but high on our ranking. This is mostly an artifact of the racial achievement gap. The fact that a majority-minority state like Florida can score #3 in the overall rankings is far more instructive to our situation in Arizona.
-ML
-ML
todd,
I love it when you post hot air from the latest teacher’s union talking points of “it’s for the children”. Hog wash. It’s about money lining the pockets of those piggies feeding at the public trough.
Education has beens tudied to death and the findings are well know and very disliked by those piggies because they let out all the hot air of spending, class size, all those thinks the unions love.
THE critical items is teach quality which is not tenure, which is not certifications, which is not time in the saddle, all those things the unions want to use as the drivers for pay and retention.
Spending versus student performance has been studied to death by the unions hoping for a correlation. There is not one. Bad luck there. I suggest you look at the pile of reports by Brookings and others.
The data on class size is equally as telling and uncorrelated to student performance. The latest stake through the heart on thsi one comes from the conservative bastion known as Harvard.
Sell your wares elsewhere, we are all full up on union talking points here.
Stephen Kohut,
I belong to no teacher’s unions and I receive no talking points from any. My statements come from my own studying of the issue.
todd,
Then you need to do a lot more research. None of the basic understandings of what effects academic performace is new.
I’ve also found that liberals look at education like some strange animal that can’t be compared to anything else. I’ve had the President of a local school board who claims a PhD in Education and an engineering degree tell me that you can’t compare education and industry because “it is different”, “you are dealing with people and not widgets”. I’m sorry but the concepts of training, validation of training and measuring key performance indicators of a process are applicable to education, industrial settings, the military, and on and on. It’s about as basic an analysis of a process for altering the knowledge and abilities of a human product as you can get. It’s done all the time.
Stephen Kohut,
And the ‘key performance measures’ used in this report don’t align with the hypothesis of what is causing the improvement. It would make a lot more sense to ask how MA, NY, VT all have significant improvements and are not following the supposed ‘reforms.’ Yet you don’t even bother to ask how they are doing it, do you.
todd,
Matt Ladner already responding to VT in his post above. You did read it, right? If not, it’s racial demographics.
A glance at NY & MA show that they offer charter school choice. If you want more then buy and read the book. FL is the poster child for effective school reform and its been studied to death over the last 10 years. I’ve spent enough time talking with Matt to know he is a good number cruncher.
Stephen
Ladner really didn’t answer my points at all, it was just a bunch of hand-waving. Nice try.
todd,
Handwaving tends to meaan that I don’t like what I’m hearing so I’m going to ridicule it.
I pray that some employer does’t pay you to do scientific data anaylsis. If so they are not getting their moneys worth.