Which State Has “The Best Schools?”
I’ve written many times about how absolute performance levels – how highly students score – are not by themselves valid indicators of school quality, since, most basically, they don’t account for the fact that students enter the schooling system at different levels. One of the most blatant (and common) manifestations of this mistake is when people use NAEP results to determine the quality of a state’s schools.
For instance, you’ll often hear that Massachusetts has the “best” schools in the U.S. and Mississippi the “worst,” with both claims based solely on average scores on the NAEP (though, technically, Massachusetts is statistically tied with at least one other state on three of the four main NAEP exams, while Mississippi’s rankings vary a bit by grade/subject, and its scores are also not statistically different from several other states’).
But we all know that these two states are very different in terms of basic characteristics such as income, parental education, etc. Any assessment of educational quality, whether at the state or local level, is necessarily
For instance, you’ll often hear that Massachusetts has the “best” schools in the U.S. and Mississippi the “worst,” with both claims based solely on average scores on the NAEP (though, technically, Massachusetts is statistically tied with at least one other state on three of the four main NAEP exams, while Mississippi’s rankings vary a bit by grade/subject, and its scores are also not statistically different from several other states’).
But we all know that these two states are very different in terms of basic characteristics such as income, parental education, etc. Any assessment of educational quality, whether at the state or local level, is necessarily
