U.S. schools get a C on Quality Counts Report. Here's why.
| Massachusetts defends schools from privatization. Ranks #1 in Quality Counts. |
Edweek's annual Quality Counts report gives the nation's increasingly two-tier school system, letter grade C, as it almost always does. 30 years of corporate-style school reform under both Democratic and Republican regimes, hasn't moved the needle very much.
My problem with the report is that in reality, there is no national school system or one set of standards for them to be graded on. This will be increasingly so during the Betsy DeVos era. So Edweek creates it's own as well as its own grading metrics.
As you can tell, I'm skeptical. What they've done here, as most of these studies do (without a mention of race or poverty btw) is throw together into one pot, the nations's wealthy schools with those with concentrated poverty, as if they were all one thing that could be graded on the same rubric. If the nation's wealthiest schools were separated out, they would likely get an A grade, using Edweek's indices. Resourced-starved, racially-isolated schools with high concentrations of children living in poverty would likely get an F. Mush them all together and you inevitably wind up with a C.
Here's the indices they use:
• The Chance-for-Success Index uses a cradle-to-career perspective to examine the role of education in promoting positive outcomes throughout an individual’s lifetime.
• The school finance analysis evaluates spending on education and equity in funding Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: U.S. schools get a C on Quality Counts Report. Here's why.: