Arkansas gets No. 8 ranking for education
Posted on Thursday, January 10, 2008
Arkansas was rewarded Wednesday for years of overhauling education policies with an eighth-place national ranking in education quality — even though student achievement is below average.
Education Week’s Quality Counts 2008 survey gave Arkansas an overall grade of B-, despite its lower-than-average test scores. The national grade was C.
The state got high marks for policies demanding high academic standards, assessment and accountability. It was also complimented for high preschool enrollment and teacherquality initiatives.
The survey gave equal weight to student achievement, student demographics, school spending and policies that researchers believe have the potential to increase student achievement.
While Arkansas earned a D in kindergarten through 12 th grade student achievement, Education Week gave it Bs in measurements such as spending, standard-setting, teacher quality and educational opportunities before and after the kindergarten to 12 th grade years. Education Week is a Washington, D. C.,-based weekly newspaper focused on American education.
The report’s high regard for Arkansas, which normally fares below average in educational measurements, was encouraging to Gov. Mike Beebe and top education officials Wednesday.
Speaking to the Arkansas Association of Educational Administrators on Wednesday, Beebe said the Education Week ranking shows that the “rest of the nation is taking notice.” He credited the “collective working environment” on education among state officials and local school officials. He said everyone involved in education in Arkansas shouldn’t stop trying to improve.
Arkansas Commissioner of Education Ken James also said Wednesday that the ranking finally gives credit where it is due.
“This is a tremendous testament to all those who have worked so diligently to reform education in Arkansas over the past several years,” James said in a statement.
Arkansas was the only state west of the Mississippi ranked in the top 10. It was one of five Southern states in the top 10. The others were Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and South Carolina.
The Southern Regional Education Board noted Wednesday that several Southern states ranked high in education policy-making. The board is a consortium of 16 Southern states. The states highlighted in the report were among the first in the country to set statewide academic standards and create tests to measure student mastery of the standards, the board said in a statement.
James acknowledged Arkansas’ low score in the survey’s student achievement category.
“Knowing as we do that we have quality teachers and sound policies in place in this state,” James said, “I am quite confident that we will see immense improvement in achievement in the near future.” Arkansas was second only to South Carolina in the survey’s measurement of teachers. The survey liked Arkansas’ requirements that teachers have degrees in the subjects that they teach, policies that encourage even distribution of talent across schools and the state’s efforts to pay teachers based on performance.
A separate analysis by the EPE Research Center compared teacher salaries with salaries of professionals in occupations that require similar skills. They include architects, computer programmers, nurses, news reporters, accountants and others. The research center is a division of the nonprofit Editorial Projects in Education, which publishes Education Week.
The analysis found that, nationally, teachers make 88 cents for every dollar earned in 16 comparable occupations. In Arkansas, teachers made 88. 4 cents on the dollar. Ten states paid teachers on par or above the salaries of comparable workers, the analysis found.
But giving equal weight to “ends and means to ends” isn’t a valid way to measure the quality of schools, said Jay Greene, endowed chair and head of the department of education reform at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
For example, while student poverty is often a predictor of test results, it doesn’t absolutely determine them, he said.
“We could have poor people and poorly educated adults with great schools,” Greene said. “Yet that’s one-sixth of our grade.” Greene also criticized the researchers for including measurements in the rankings that don’t conclusively affect education. Per-student spending and teacher salaries are two examples. A state with lower-than-average teacher salaries and high gains in test scores can get the same grade as one with high salaries and low achievement.
“This is like a consumer report that says that a low-quality product that costs a lot should be given the same grade as a high-quality product that does very little.” The most significant indicator of school quality is movement in student achievement, Greene said. Arkansas ranks very high in gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, yet Quality Counts gave the state a D in kindergarten to 12 th-grade achievement because its scores are among the bottom third of states.
The survey’s high rankings of Arkansas’ standards development and teacher-quality efforts cancel that out.
“I think they are right about that overall conclusion, but they are completely wrong about how they get there,” Greene said.
While the report does definitively rank states, the rankings shouldn’t be taken as the final word on the quality of each state’s education system, Christopher Swanson, project director, said Wednesday in a conference call with reporters. The report is intended to be a collection of data designed to inspire comparisons and discussion, he said.
“There are 51 different stories here and the overall grading is just a way to get started on those stories,” Swanson said.
Swanson also said there is “compelling evidence” that rigorous policy changes can lead to higher student achievement over time. He pointed to Florida, which he said a decade ago had low student achievement. The state overhauled educational policies and now has test scores close to the national average, he said.
“It can happen but it takes time,” he said.
The report is available at www. edweek. org / go / qc 08. Information for this article was contributed by Seth Blomeley of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
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