South Carolina Ranks First in Political Negligence
Based on a U.S. News & World Report ranking, The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC) announced South Carolina ranks last in education.
South Carolina also ranks first in women being murdered by men.
Rankings are popular in the U.S., but more often than not, terrible ways to understand what is being ranked as well as distracting fodder for both the media and politicians.
Ranking itself is problematic since the act itself requires finding data that supports that ranking, and then by ranking we are ascribing both a range of quality as well as some degree of blame for the relative status.
When saying SC is last in education and first in violence toward women, we must take greater care in clarifying what these rankings mean and where the accountability lies for both outcomes and the causes for those outcomes.
I suspect many would fault SC public schools for the education ranking, but almost no one would blame heterosexual domestic relationships for the inordinate rate of men’s violence toward women in the state.
But even more important here is that both of these rankings reveal something in common nearly entirely ignored: political negligence in SC.
The U.S. News ranking of education is far less about education, in fact, than about socio-economics.
Three of the six data categories to rank states by education are test scores (ACT and NAEP math and reading), and the other three are graduation rates South Carolina Ranks First in Political Negligence | radical eyes for equity: