This twenty-first edition of Quality Counts from Education Week builds on past annual installments to look at the state of K–12 education in the U.S. at the beginning of 2017. With a changing of the guard at the White House and the Department of Education, this year’s report focuses on the challenges faced by state and district leaders to ensure that the provisions of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) will be met by the beginning of the 2017–18 school year.
Though ESSA affords state and district leaders greater flexibility, the business of crafting a more nuanced accountability system that effectively balances contentious areas such as teacher evaluation with other indicators of school quality is not straightforward. This report serves as the latest opportunity to gauge the success of efforts undertaken so far, and to guide state and district leaders on where to focus their energies over the coming year.
To determine the quality of U.S. K–12 education, authors looked at thirty-nine distinct indicators based on analyses of state and federal data to determine a letter-grade ranking for each state and the nation as a whole. These were divided into three research indices: 1) chance-for-success, which includes indicators from early foundations (like family income or parent’s education), school years (like fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores), and adult outcomes (like percentage of adults aged twenty-four to sixty-four with incomes above the national median); 2) school finance, which examines educational expenditure patterns and the distribution of funds within states; and 3) K–12 achievement, which assesses the performance of each state’s public schools through current achievement levels, improvements over time, and poverty-based gaps. An overall state score is calculated from the average of the three individual index scores and a nationwide average is determined.
Overall, authors give the nation a middling—and all too familiar—grade of C, with 74.2 out of a possible 100 points (almost no change from 2016). Massachusetts is top of the class with 86.5 (B), followed closely by New Jersey (85.6), Vermont (83.8), New Hampshire (83.4), Maryland (82.8), and Connecticut (82.7). Nevada props up the pack with a measly 65.0 (D), sharing this ignominy with Mississippi (65.8) and New Mexico (66.3).
The report’s chance-for-success index shows little change from 2016. The nation earns a steady C+, but it’s the disparity of state-level scores that surprises—or doesn’t. Massachusetts leads the nation once again with 91.0 (A-), while New Mexico stumbles to 66.4 (D). However, we still think this index should be consigned to the dustbin of education wonk history, since it’s so highly correlated with a state’s wealth, and thus makes rich states’ education systems look better than they really are.
Next, using 2014 data (the most recent available), authors determine that the nation earns a C for school finance. Wyoming tops the table with 89.5 (A-), followed closely by the usual suspects of New Jersey (88.1), Connecticut (87.4), and Maryland (86.6). Idaho flat-lines with 58.9 (F).
In terms of achievement, the nation earns a C- (85.2). Massachusetts (85.2) tops the class again, while Mississippi (60.0) and New Mexico (61.8) scrape the bottom of the barrel with the only D grades for this area.
To anyone following the state of K–12 education in the U.S. over the past decade, these results are not the least bit surprising, and remind us why both major parties agreed to a major overhaul of No Child Left Behind in the first place. Across the board, K–12 education is still not performing well enough.
Yet there have been some tentative positive trends. Montana gained 1.3 points since 2016, while New Hampshire edged upwards by 1 point (and into the top-five states). Despite the transition in the nation’s capital, states are already smack-bang in the middle of fine-tuning their ESSA blueprints. How each state eventually balances the jumble of potential accountability measures into one final coherent system will ultimately determine who the movers and shakers in education quality will be over the coming years.
SOURCE: Quality Counts 2017: Under Construction—Building on ESSA’s K-12 Foundation, Education Week (January 2016).
