Andrew LeFevre and Rea Hederman, American Legislative Exchange Council
October 2002
This is the latest in a series of state-level "report cards" from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Weighing in at 133 pages, it would have benefited from closer copyediting and more sophisticated statistical expertise, but it contains a wealth of useful data as well as an overall ranking of the fifty states according to their academic performance. The latter is based on a complex amalgam of SAT, ACT and NAEP results. While the authors acknowledge the limits of college-entrance exam score averages for purposes of rating states, they do it anyway. Each state gets a one-page summary report card. The chapters that follow deal with education inputs, outcomes and several ambitious efforts to find correlations between them. The authors work a bit too hard to show that more resources don't translate into stronger results, but they also deliver much handy data and some interesting analyses. You can buy a hard copy for $25 or download the whole thing by surfing to http://www.alec.org/meSWFiles/pdf/Education_Report_card.pdf.
