K-12 Leaders & Laggards Circa 2014: How the States Are Doing
by Frederick M. Hess • Sep 11, 2014 at 10:04 am
Cross-posted from Education Week
Cross-posted from Education Week
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Today the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is releasing its 2014 report Leaders & Laggards: A State-by-State Report Card on K-12 Educational Effectiveness (the report is not yet live, but will be linked here once it is posted). I once again had the pleasure of partnering with the Chamber on this work, serving as an advisor while my talented colleague Mike McShane served as lead researcher. We'll be discussing the results today at the Chamber in Washington, DC. (You can find more information here.) This is the third time I've teamed up with the Chamber to do a K-12 Leaders & Laggards report; the first time was in 2007 and the second in 2009 (we've also done a report on higher ed). One cool feature this time around is the ability to compare the 2014 findings to those from 2007, making it possible to see what's changed (and what hasn't) when it comes to academic outcomes. We've revisited most of the key measures we tackled previously, while also adding new metrics that look at international competitiveness, technology, and how states are handling their pensions.
Leaders & Laggards grades each state on how it's doing in 11 areas, using an A to F scale. The 11 graded areas include performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, NAEP performance for low-income and minority students, return on investment, postsecondary and workforce readiness, "truth in advertising," the teacher workforce, return on investment, and parental options, among others. (The report also calculates two additional "improvement" grades based on the progress that states made between 2007 and 2014 on overall NAEP achievement and on NAEP achievement for low-income and minority students.) The report is, very consciously, a hybrid of new measures that we've collected and others where we've simply assembled the terrific work already done by others.
No one who follows education should be all that surprised to see that Massachusetts is once again the star of the class. Massachusetts earned 6 A's and 3 B's in the 11 categories, while also posting an A and a B when it came to improvement. Other states that topped the 2014 honor roll included Maryland and Minnesota, with 5 A's each; and Colorado, Florida, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Vermont, with 4 A's each.
States generally did better across the board than they had done in 2007 and 2009, though their progress was uneven and far from satisfactory. After all, even the highest-performing states on the 2013 NAEP--Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Minnesota--only had about half of their students at the "proficient" level when we combined the performance of fourth and eighth graders in reading and math. The lowest performers--Louisiana, Mississippi, and the District of Columbia--only had about a quarter of their students achieving proficiency. Now, there are sensible questions about whether NAEP "proficiency" may be too ambitious to be a universal expectation, but my takeaway from these results is that we still have a long way to go--even in states that are doing relatively well.
I think my favorite new metric is the one that examines successful Advanced Placement completion by state. The top states had between one-fourth and one-third of their students successfully passing an AP exam. In Maryland, for instance, 30% of students graduated having passed an AP exam. In Connecticut, the figure was 29%. In Virginia and Massachusetts, it was 28%. This means that a lot of students in those states have K-12 Leaders & Laggards Circa 2014: How the States Are Doing :: Frederick M. Hess:
