Most State Education Report Cards Miss the Critical Ingredients
Once when I was in high school, a friend handed me a plate of chocolate chip cookies. They looked delicious! But just as I was about to eat one, she snatched them back. They looked great on the outside, she told me, but they tasted terrible. She had left out a key ingredient—sugar.
This story is exactly how I think about the numerous state education report cards making the rounds. Instead of filling you with great, inspiring information, most of these glossy, colorful reports are misleading and ideological. They are basically not worth consuming.
One of the mechanisms so-called education “reformers” have used to promote their top-down, privatization agenda for public education is the state-by-state education report card. Organizations such as Students First, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and Education Next have recently released report cards for each of the fifty states.
What’s wrong with these state report cards? Most state-by-state ratings focus primarily on outcomes, such as state standardized test scores, and basically ignore educational inputs—the ingredients—that make public education successful. These report cards are obsessed with accountability systems that look like bold education “reform,” but that favor top-down, private control of public schools, with dubious results for kids.
Take just two examples.
Students First, an organization started by the controversial District of Columbia education reformer Michelle Rhee, issued report cards giving positive ratings to states if they allowed for parent trigger. Parent trigger is a policy that allows parents (in any given year) to vote to turn over a school and all of its public property to a corporation with a simple majority vote. The Students First report also gave states favorable ratings for prioritizing states’ and mayor's’ ability to take over school districts. Top-down hostile takeovers of schools by states and mayors have a long and documented history of underwhelming performance and failure.
The state education reports issued by ALEC, a prominent corporate lobbying group that promotes neoliberal model legislation across public policy issues, prioritized “innovative educational practices necessary for transformational change.” They gave states positive ratings if they allowed the use of public dollars for private school choice (i.e. tax credits, vouchers, education savings accounts).
Several decades of peer-reviewed charter school and voucher research have demonstrated that choice is not a panacea. In fact, school choice has in many ways enhanced this country’s
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