Brian Schimming interviews Dr. Matthew Ladner via a kind reader: 28mbp mp3 file.
The biggest opportunity we have is to “get more bang for our buck”. The mp3 file includes an interesting discussion on Florida’s approach to public information on school performance. Ladner also mentioned teacher certification reform, particularly in math & science.
New education report card grades student success:
Today the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) released a new book that provides a simple, direct way of comparing the effectiveness of public education in every state. I co-authored the Report Card on American Education: Ranking State K-12 Performance, Progress and Reform with Goldwater Institute Senior Fellow Dan Lips and school choice expert Andrew LeFevre. ALEC is distributing the book to state lawmakers across the country.
For the Report Card, we rank all 50 states and the District of Columbia based on student test scores and learning gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). We focused in particular on the scores of low-income students who were not in special education programs from 2003 to 2009, the years in which all jurisdictions took the tests used by NAEP.
Our rankings give the same weight to overall performance (which states had the highest test scores) and overall gains (which states made the most progress over time). The table below shows the rankings:
Clusty Search: Matthew Ladner
From the table listed above at the link:
“Florida scored No. 3 on the list because that state had high scores (ranked 11th overall) and made big gains (ranked first overall), even though a majority of Florida’s students come from disadvantaged backgrounds.”
Wow! Number one in improvement and number 11 for scores outright, with a majority of students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds. Seriously: how did they DO that? Around here, I hear a lot more about how we “can’t expect” MMSD students to do well, because we have so much more poverty and other disadvantaged populations than we used to have. Well, if Florida can do it, why can’t we? And why can’t we do it for ALL of our students and not just “hide” the underperforming ones in “special education”? At the same time, high-performing students learning nothing NEW can’t be expected to pull averages up either.