Friday Ratings Madness: Quality Counts, Students First & Funding Fairness
It’s been a fun week for grading the states. First we had the wacky ratings from Students First which graded states largely on the extent to which they had adopted the preferred policies of that organization. Then we had the old-standard Education Week Quality Counts. When it comes to their finance rating system, little has changed in recent years. These two reports, of course, produced substantially conflicting results.
One might argue that both reports and ranking systems, like our School Funding Fairness report, include several indicators intended to identify policy conditions for success. This has been the standard response of Students First when they have been criticized on the basis that the states that they have applauded most tend to have pretty low average outcomes. But, the Students First report, Quality Counts and our Funding Fairness report differ quite substantially on what we consider to be policy conditions for success.
Students First has put policy conditions into three categories – 1) elevating the teaching profession, 2) parent empowerment and 3) finance and governance. Students first gives no consideration across any of these categories to whether teacher wages, for example are sufficient to recruit/retain high quality candidates into
One might argue that both reports and ranking systems, like our School Funding Fairness report, include several indicators intended to identify policy conditions for success. This has been the standard response of Students First when they have been criticized on the basis that the states that they have applauded most tend to have pretty low average outcomes. But, the Students First report, Quality Counts and our Funding Fairness report differ quite substantially on what we consider to be policy conditions for success.
Students First has put policy conditions into three categories – 1) elevating the teaching profession, 2) parent empowerment and 3) finance and governance. Students first gives no consideration across any of these categories to whether teacher wages, for example are sufficient to recruit/retain high quality candidates into