Education Week's ?Quality Counts? 2011 is out and contains, as did its earlier iterations, the misleading Chance for Success Index, albeit with some mitigating modifications. I wrote about this particular Index four years ago, in 2007, and noted that with its adoption ?Quality Counts? had ?abandoned standards-based reform and upended the series focus in the worst way.? Why?
Defeatism permeates the Chance-for-Success Index because it evaluates demographic indicators that are beyond the purview of schools or policymakers. It should be named the Chance-for-Failure Index. According to their formulas, Quality Counts editors implicitly tell us that students born into poor or non-English speaking households are more likely to fail.
And maybe they are. But that has nothing to do with individual states or their educational policies. Shouldn't the Index have at least tried to evaluate states on things they can control?
Education Week's 2011 Chance for Success Index still includes categories (family income, parent education, parental employment) that are not really related to a state's education policies. But now, to its credit, it also contains several categories (fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores, preschool enrollment) that are closer to the K-12 realm. Still, just because Connecticut's overall test scores are higher than Florida's, does that mean that a pupil enrolled in Connecticut's public schools will have a greater ?chance for success? than he would if he attended class in Florida? No, of course not.
?Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow