Education Week - September 4, 2019 - 11

Grades Reflect Slow Grind Toward K-12 Quality
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 9

ing efforts, dating back to the 1990s, for
his state's consistent presence at the top
of national rankings.
A strong public prekindergarten program, separate state capital funding for
school construction, and a funding formula that accounts for the needs of highpoverty schools have helped promote equity and high achievement in New Jersey,
Sciarra said.
And New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, a
Democrat, recently signed a budget that
increases state aid to districts by $191 million, helping more high-poverty school
systems reach adequacy under the state's
formula. But there is still work to be done,
Sciarra said.
"We've learned over the years that you
can't just sit back and say, 'Well that's
enough. We don't need to do any more,'"
he said. "What we've learned is that the
drive for equity is never achieved."

Continued Effects of Activism
Just as states like New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Maryland are motivated to build
on their positions at the top of the Quality
Counts rankings, educators in states that
often score at the bottom of national indicators of education and well-being say
they are equally driven to improve their
systems.
In Oklahoma, which ranks among the
bottom five states, teachers used bold
permanent markers to display examples
of the Sooner State's national standings
in areas like teacher pay and per-pupil
spending on protest signs they carried
outside of the state capitol in April 2018.
In a sometimes tense standoff with state
lawmakers, they walked out of their classrooms, some shutting down entire schools
as they pushed for a $10,000 teacher pay
increase after 10 years of no raises. They
continued with their plans, even after
state lawmakers proposed a $6,000 pay
increase.
Other states at the bottom of the rankings, including Mississippi and Nevada,
also saw teacher activism in recent years.
Polling data suggest the public supports
many of their aims. A recent annual sur-

scored on a 50-point base, meaning
that all states start with 50 points
rather than zero.
To compute a state's score for a
given category, we average points
across the applicable set of
indicators. On a best-in-class scale, a
state's overall score for a category
can be gauged against an implicit
standard where 100 points would
correspond to a state that finished
first in the nation on each and every
measure.

vey by the journal Education Next found
that, among respondents who considered
themselves "informed" about average
teacher salaries in their state, the share of
those supporting a pay hike grew from 49
percent in 2018 to 56 percent in 2019. And
respondents to PDK International's poll of
public attitudes for education have ranked
school funding among schools' biggest
problems for 18 consecutive years.
Oklahoma districts are feeling the effects of their teachers' activism and increased public engagement in education,
Caney Valley Superintendent Rick Peters
said. The district, which has "more cows
than kids," had to close down for 10 days
for the walkouts, but Peters understood
his teachers' frustrations. Beyond the
$6,000 raises, they won new attention
from some lawmakers, who are more active in consulting with educators and administrators about their decisions today,
Peters said.
"Oklahoma had a decade of-for lack
of a better word-brutal funding, brutal
everything," he said. "We were at the bottom of the food chain. We were not well
thought of. But everything goes in cycles,
and I think we are on an upswing."
Still, Oklahoma's amount of per-pupil
funding, $9,250, ranks 46th among the
states in the Quality Counts analysis. The
national average was $12,756. Peters hopes
that the attention on school funding will
continue into future state budgets, allowing superintendents to recruit and retain
more-qualified teachers who can help
move the needle on student achievement.
"There were teachers getting jobs in
our state who would not have gotten an
interview prior to this debacle," he said. "I
would say we turned the corner."

A Surge in Interest
Building strong state education systems
requires adequate funding, but it also requires setting high standards, enacting
strong school-improvement strategies, and
determining how to measure and evaluate
success, said Paul Reville, who served as
Massachusetts' education commissioner
from 2008 to 2013.
Increased public attention to education
has added heat to debates over issues like

The Grading Scale
Using the scoring rules already
described, each state receives a
numerical score for each of the
indicator categories. After rounding
scores to the closest whole-number
values, we assign letter grades based
on a conventional A-F grading scale,
as follows:

charter schools, testing, and governance,
said Reville, who is now the founding director of the Education Redesign Lab at
Harvard Graduate School of Education.
And that's driven some policymakers away
from the steady work it takes to improve
education, he said. While some state leaders used to seek to be known as "education
governors," many now find that to be a "nowin" position, Reville said.
Noting that many states with poor academic outcomes also score low on wellbeing indicators, Reville said it would take
broader efforts from other sectors, like
health care and business, to really reach
equity. He pointed to initiatives like community schools and children's cabinets at
the state level. The nation as a whole got
a C-plus on Quality Counts' Chance for
Success Index, which relies on 13 indicators that measure factors like parental education, preschool enrollment, and family
income.
"I think that we've proved that schools
alone-no matter how much you reform
them-are, in general, not strong enough
to change the kinds of outcomes that you
measure in this report," he said. "In order
for students to benefit from school reform,
a lot of other factors have got to line up."
ESSA was designed to acknowledge the
importance of such nonacademic factors
by requiring schools to track issues like
chronic absenteeism, and by allowing
states to add nonacademic indicators to
their accountability systems. But, without
strong research about measuring and promoting such factors, many states were cautious about how they approached the federal law, crafting modest plans, Reville said.
"As a field, we haven't really developed
the indicators," he said. "We aren't really
ready for prime time."
Moving forward, even high-performing
states will need to innovate to maintain
a competitive edge in a global economy,
said Susanna Loeb, the director of the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. It
takes continued focus to maintain success,
and there is no quick way to turn around
struggling systems, she said.
"I think what we've learned from the
states that have done well, is that it is hard
work to have a good education system,"
Loeb said.

A = 93 to 100
A-minus = 90 to 92
B-plus = 87 to 89
B = 83 to 86
B-minus = 80 to 82
C-plus = 77 to 79
C = 73 to 76
C-minus = 70 to 72
D-plus = 67 to 69
D = 63 to 66
D-minus = 60 to 62
F = Below 60

OVERALL
GRADES
TOP-RANKED
STATE

SCORE
(GRADE)

New Jersey

87.8 B+

Massachusetts

87.8 B+

Connecticut

83.6 B

Maryland

83.1 B

New Hampshire

82.5 B

BOTTOM-RANKED
STATE

SCORE
(GRADE)

Mississippi

68.5 D+

Louisiana

67.9 D+

Oklahoma

67.6 D+

Nevada

66.9 D+

New Mexico

66.4 D

MOST IMPROVED
STATE

SCORE
(GRADE)

CHANGE

Nevada

66.9 D+

1.8 á

District of Columbia

75.0 C

1.6 á

California

74.1 C

1.5 á

Oregon

72.0 C-

1.1 á

Washington

77.2 C+

1.0 á

2018 to 2019

LARGEST DECLINES
STATE

SCORE
(GRADE)

CHANGE

West Virginia

71.5 C-

-0.7 â

New Hampshire

82.5 B

-0.4 â

Delaware

76.7 C+

-0.4 â

Hawaii

74.7 C

-0.3 â

Indiana

75.4 C

-0.3 â

2018 to 2019

SOURCE: Education Week Research Center, 2019

EDUCATION WEEK | September 4, 2019 | www.edweek.org | 11

http://www.edweek.org

Education Week - September 4, 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - September 4, 2019