Be you a school-finance junkie, an accountability hawk, or a teaching aficionado, Education Week’s annual Quality Counts report—which scores states on dozens of indicators in six buckets and offers overall grades for each jurisdiction—will be of interest. Celebrating its sweet sixteen, this year’s QC offers updated data in every category but one. The overall rankings? Thanks to Ed Week’s persistent use of some silly indicators like “Chance for Success,” wealthy states continue to float to the top. (More on that here.) Maryland’s B-plus is enough for a four-peat as the nation’s lead scorer; perennial powerhouses Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia follow close behind. Yet some shake-up has occurred, with Florida and Pennsylvania dropping from the top ten. Ohio earns a C-plus across all metrics, buttressed by its A on the “standards, assessment, and accountability” indicator and its B-plus for equity in school finance. Probably most useful are the report’s state profiles, which, after this heavy-reform year, further explain each one’s policies along QC’s six indicators. (Of course, this is the only part of the online report that costs dollars to view.) Worth mentioning too is the host of commentary and analysis of the findings—including pieces by South Korea’s former education minister Byong-man Ahn (famous for pushing back against his nation’s entrenched testing culture) and Sir Michael Barber (the theme of this year’s QC is “global competitiveness”). Also the original survey data on how state policymakers report utilizing information from other nation’s policies and practices, in which twenty-nine states say they use international data when making policy decisions. (We’re rather surprised that twenty-one states admitted to not doing the same.) Steal some time at work and immerse yourself.
Education Week, Quality Counts 2012: The Global Challenge (Bethesda, MD: Editorial Projects in Education, January 12, 2012).
