Here’s a wonky study comparing the education results of states — a different study that merits a serious look. It uses REAL criteria, not typical left wing assumptions that dominate most such “surveys.”
The results will disturb most progressives. And the MSM. Which is why you’ve likely heard nothing about this study.
For instance, the common assumption made by most such surveys is that the primary factor in the quality of education is the amount of money SPENT on education. As this study details, there is in reality no significant correlation between spending and education RESULTS.
For results, the study concentrated on “the students’ performance on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), a battery of standardized tests sometimes called ‘The Nation’s Report Card.’ These tests are given to fourth and eighth graders as well as some high school seniors.”
As this article details, the study “removed factors that do not measure K–12 student performance or teaching effectiveness, such as spending per student (intentions to raise performance are not the same as raising performance), graduation rates (which often indicate nothing about learning, since 38 states do not have graduation proficiency exams), and pre-K enrollment.”
The other big survey change was “to disaggregate student performance data so that we could compare likes with likes. Traditional rankings effectively reward states for not having many minority students. States do well simply because they are populated by families from more socioeconomically successful ethnic categories—not because they are actually doing a good job educating their various categories of students.”
“Student heterogeneity is precisely why traditional state education rankings can be so misleading. Small, largely white states in New England, such as Maine and Vermont, do very well in these rankings, but that status merely reflects their small black and Hispanic populations.”
This study does NOT always end up favoring red states over blue states. For instance, it ranks California a respectable 14th best state in education efficiency — much better that the traditional U.S. News and World Report‘s 44th education rank of the Golden State.
But in general, the northeast states that fare so well in the “old school” education surveys drop dramatically when these more germane factors are applied. Conversely, often denigrated states such as Texas and Florida rank in the top five with this results-oriented, race-adjusted criteria.
One other unsurprising result was discovered in the study. There’s a strong NEGATIVE correlation between the strength of the education unions and the education results. This is another factor the MSM will not cover.
Here’s the REASON article summarizing the study:
https://reason.com/2018/10/07/everything-you-know-about-stat/
It is based on the full study published in 2018 by the Cato Institute:
https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/fixing-bias-current-state-k-12-education-rankings