[Header Photo by Joshua Golde on Unsplash]
If you have been following on social media the decision in Louisiana to post the Ten Commandments in all school classrooms, you may have seen comments like this:
And this sort of “gotcha” is primarily from more progressive people who strongly support public education and democracy.
Over my forty years in education, ranking states by education has been a persistent practice in the media and by political leaders.
In fact, I published a scholarly piece in 1999 noting that both the Republican and Democratic candidates for governor ran on the platform that SC ranked 50th in the nation in education, both having nearly identical billboards across the state.
One of the ways the media brandished state rankings annually was using the SAT, a test never designed for ranking educational quality. Eventually, the College Board itself warned that ranking states by the SAT was misleading at best and false ultimately:
Useful comparisons of students’ performance are possible only if all students take the same test. Average SAT scores are not appropriate for state comparisons because the percentage of SAT takers varies widely among states. In some states, a very small percentage of college-bound seniors take the SAT. Typically, these students have strong academic backgrounds and are applicants to the nation’s most selective colleges and scholarship programs. Therefore, it is expected that the SAT Evidence-Based Reading and Writing and Math scale score averages reported for these states will be higher than the overall average. In states where a greater proportion of students, with a wide range of academic backgrounds, take the SAT, and where most colleges in the state require the test for admission, the scores are closer to the overall average.
None the less, even after the College Board started issuing state averages alphabetically, the media continues to clamor to rank and shame.
The urge to rank also has been fueled by the less often released NAEP scores; however, those rankings again are deeply misleading because, as in the case of the SAT, state populations being tested are not the same.
States with high poverty levels and multi-lingual learner populations continue to score lower, which is a historical fact of standardized testing that remains far more causally related to out-of-school factors.
As Gerald Bracey warned throughout his career, ranking states (or countries) by education fails statistically but also simply by the fact of ranking.
Ranking as a goal prioritizes metrics that create spread. In other words, seeking to rank disregards data that doesn’t help create the ranking.
For one excellent example, Bracey notes that when states or countries are statistically about the same, most rankings will list them alphabetically, giving the appearance of different levels of quality that simply doesn’t exist. The US has suffered a negative consequence of that combined with the recurring failure to note differences in populations being measured.
LA, like Mississippi and SC, has endured a long history of being education shamed as a proxy for ignoring political negligence about poverty, racism, and related inequity that negatively impacts student achievement and teacher/school impact.
So if you clicked on this post for my ranking, you are going to be disappointed.
I don’t rank.
Don’t rank states by education because doing so is a political distraction grounded in labeling and competition.
If you genuinely support public education and democracy, don’t stoop to misleading rankings to score political points.
Educational outcomes are primarily a reflection of political commitments. All across the South, specifically, states have been run by conservative politics (Democrats for decades and then Republicans since the 1960s).
A lack of political will has failed the most disadvantaged people and children in these states for many years, and the measured outcomes of students is a measure of political negligence and not the quality of children, teachers, or schools.
There is no way to justify ranking states by education unless your goal is shaming and further distraction from the political choices children and public education deserve.
LA has grossly mis-served democracy with their Ten Commandments policy, and like many states across the US, LA has inexcusably failed the children and the institution of public education for many decades as an act of political ideology.
The political leaders deserve shaming, not the students, the teachers, or the schools.
See Also
Big Lies of Education: A Nation at Risk and Education “Crisis”
Big Lies of Education: Reading Proficiency and NAEP
Big Lies of Education: National Reading Panel (NRP)
Big Lies of Education: Poverty Is an Excuse
Big Lies of Education: International Test Rankings and Economic Competitiveness
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 