I don't have enough familiarity with this sort of research to evaluate it quickly, but I was a little curious about the authors' backgrounds:<p>> Stan J. Liebowitz is the Ashbel Smith Professor of Economics at the Colloquium for the Advancement of Free Enterprise Education in the Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas.<p>> Matthew L. Kelly is a research fellow at the Colloquium for the Advancement of Free Enterprise Education in the Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas at Dallas.<p>Here's another piece by them on net neutrality: <a href="https://www.insidesources.com/state-governments-drop-net-neutrality/" rel="nofollow">https://www.insidesources.com/state-governments-drop-net-neu...</a><p>Here's the site for the "Colloquium for the Advancement of Free Enterprise Education": <a href="https://jindal.utdallas.edu/centers-of-excellence/capri/cafe/" rel="nofollow">https://jindal.utdallas.edu/centers-of-excellence/capri/cafe...</a><p>Here's a press release about the founding of this entity, which includes some information on where the funding for it comes from: <a href="https://jindal.utdallas.edu/news/new-program-at-the-jindal-school-advances-freeenterprise-education" rel="nofollow">https://jindal.utdallas.edu/news/new-program-at-the-jindal-s...</a>
I have several thoughts on this:<p>The race adjusted performance is interesting and useful but they're basically using it as a proxy for wealth. Why can't they just use some metric that directly represents wealth?<p>If Massachusetts schools are efficiency with money than the system nation wide is far more screwed up than anyone is willing to admit.<p>That state ranking depends in part on money spent is abhorrent. That should be tracked for reasons that should be obvious but not part of a composite score meant to represents results.<p>The bit about unions lines up with my anecdotal experience. I worked with the education department in college and they did not hold teachers unions in high regard. If your unions are so bad that college professors at a state school in a blue state gripe about how they hold back progress then I think it's fair to say your union is pretty bad.
There is no reason given to why they take per-student expense out of the picture, other than 'we just don't think it should count'. And that seems to be the entire basis of their finding that rankings are riddled with flaws.<p>There is much research (once you sort through the partisan fluff from research institutions with obvious bias) that supports the positive impact of revenue per student on academic achievement on standardized tests. It's actually funny this article popped up, I legit just read a paper from 2015 called "A Cost-Benefit Analysis for Per-Student Expenditures and Academic Achievement". I genuinely read that this morning. Weird. The authors found that "There was a significant correlation between revenues available per student and ACT scores as one outcome measure of achievement." And just to drive that point home, they replicated the findings from a 2002 study, further solidifying that sentiment.<p>And that's just the most recent one I've read. I'm sure there are more recent. And that is definitely just one in the series of research related to per-pupil expenditures.<p>Also, I'm afraid this piece serves no purpose other than to be self-congratulatory to the 'lower taxes at all costs' group and right-to-work proponents. Why I say this: research pieces probably shouldn't include snide comments like<p>"high-tax, high-spending progressive utopias."<p>"punishing taxes"<p>Maybe that's just me? Am I off base?<p>edit: also, the comment section on that article is awful. Just awful.
I only have 2 data points of experience on this issue. Which I know doesn't mean much, but I'm left scratching my head after looking at their list.<p>I spent the first 14 years of my life in Las Cruces, New Mexico (the state's second biggest city), and the schools I went to were not very good. I did high school in Maryland and the school system was a lot better (I initially struggled because I was so far behind everyone else - a friend of mine who moved to North Carolina for High School told me he had the same problem). In the author's ranking list, they place Maine at #48 and New Mexico at #41. I find this very hard to believe. There are so many problems that New Mexico has that Maine doesn't seem to have (gang problems, drug problems - at least at the magnitude that I saw in New Mexico). Unless Maine has some pretty bad schools, this just doesn't add up. US News lists Maine at #6, a ranking drop of 42 spots seems really significant.
I don't really understand removal of graduation rates. Obviously that's meant to act as a proxy for learning, especially for those 38 states without proficiency exams.
This is interesting. What I like about it is that it tries to remove any criteria unrelated to a student's outcomes. Too often we see esoteric ranking methodologies that, unfortunately, not many people bother to look at very closely.<p>I'm the founder of PolarisList (<a href="https://www.polarislist.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.polarislist.com</a>), a high school ranking based on the number of students sent to Harvard, Princeton, and MIT.<p>This prompted us to take a stab at generating state rankings based on our own dataset, and came up with the following list. We calculated this by looking at the number of students in a state who matriculated to the aforementioned colleges from public high schools divided by the estimated 2017 population:<p>1 Massachusetts
2 New Jersey
3 Connecticut
4 New York
5 Vermont
6 Maryland
7 Maine
8 New Hampshire
9 California
10 Virginia
11 Alaska
12 Rhode Island
13 Illinois
14 Delaware
15 Pennsylvania
16 Colorado
17 Minnesota
18 Washington
19 Michigan
20 Oregon
21 Florida
22 Georgia
23 Nebraska
24 North Dakota
25 South Dakota
26 Texas
27 Montana
28 Arizona
29 Wisconsin
30 Missouri
31 Idaho
32 West Virginia
33 Indiana
34 North Carolina
35 New Mexico
36 Ohio
37 Kansas
38 Iowa
39 Hawaii
40 Nevada
41 Kentucky
42 Wyoming
43 Oklahoma
44 Utah
45 Tennessee
46 Arkansas
47 South Carolina
48 Washington DC
49 Louisiana
50 Mississippi
51 Alabama<p>A couple thing stand out to me:
- All 3 rankings have Massachusetts and New Jersey within the top 10
- All 3 rankings have Oklahoma and Louisiana in the bottom 10
- Our numbers differ from the other datasets the most on:
- New York (#4 on our ranking, #30 on Liebowitz/Kelly, #31 on US News)
- California (#9 on our ranking, #34 on Liebowitz/Kelly, #44 on US News)
- Alaska (#11 on our ranking, #42 on Liebowitz/Kelly, #46 on US News)
Ranking is nearly meaningless. eg compare these:<p>School A - full of underachieving kids that are pushed to get avg grades<p>School B - full of avg kids getting above avg grades<p>School C - full of smart kids getting top grades<p>School D - full of smart kids getting nearly top grades, but soft skills, nice personalities and VIP friends<p>School E - Mix of kids getting relevant grades<p>Which is the best school for each kid type? They're impossible to rank. Many schools with top grades are only there because they kick out failing kids, not because they're better at teaching. Many schools are rated good because they can improve grades, but you wouldn't want to send a smart kid there. Many private schools sell themselves on creating well rounded kids, not necessarily good grades.
This may be unpopular but I really do think that spending should be included in a ranking system. There are a lot of aspects of education that standardized testing can't (or won't) measure: access to extra-curricular programs, funding for art/music departments, technical education, etc. I'm willing to bet a lot of people here have experienced first-hand the difference that having access to a decent computer lab can make. You're not going to see that reflected in tests.<p>Also, based on my own anecdotal experience of standardized testing in grade school, these tests rarely include questions about "controversial" topics in history or scientific ideas that are opposed by Christian fundamentalism. I suspect these are major areas where southern districts would struggle, given their disproportionate implementation of <i>cough</i> alternative textbooks.<p>Overall, this smells of a common trend in American institutions where there's an ideological interest at play. An issue is raised, and it's decided that we need more data to decide. The data collection (in this case standardized testing) is designed in such a way that it produces results that skew toward the ideological position. Then the bad data is used to justify the ideological position. Law enforcement works the same way. Actually now that I'm thinking about it so do our elections.
The efficiency measure sure seems dangerously misleading. My SC high school didn't have the budget to replace broken tables (which were simply overturned until a handy-ish student managed to unsteadily prop them up) and sent seniors home home early via free periods to cover for a lack of teachers.<p>Was that efficient? I suppose. Was it a desirable education? Not really.
I'm wondering if there are confounding variables that are affecting this result. For example New York and New Jersey are some of the most regressive states defined as difference in funding levels between rich and poor school districts. I found this chart which shows each states:<p><a href="http://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-get-fair-share/" rel="nofollow">http://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-g...</a><p>If race is a mediator for income levels and in turn funding level shouldn't the researchers here include the difference in funding levels between income levels into their model to determine the true performance per spent dollar?<p>I might be wrong as I'm no expert in the field but I think these type of problems are what causal models try to address. I've really enjoyed "The book of why" by Judea Pearl on the topic. It got me interested in learning more about causality.
Is it just me that has a hard time understanding the racial aggregation thing. They claim to have split Iowa and Texas results by race and age. And found that Texas did better than Iowa for whites blacks and hispanics - but then aggregating the results ala USNews, Iowa comes out on top<p>I am struggling to imagine which category is the flip category. If iowa is not doing better for white black or hispanic, which racial category is somlatge as to flip the average?
Disaggregating the results by race is real cute but also misses the point: blacks and asians and hispanics are residents of the state too and so leaving them in to evaluate the state's overall achievement (relative to other states) in education is fair. If anything it ought to be more problematic that Texas fails so badly at educating hispanic students when a fifth of them live in Texas.<p>Besides, the race in big-gap states is an unwitting proxy to income, so disaggregate by household per capita income (relative to local cost of living) if you want to disdain. This methodology would work well in all states and expose the challenges of anxiety and the quality of a student's home life in their education attainment.