John Richard Schrock: Education rankings arbitrary, often political

Where does Kansas rank when it comes to the quality of schools, teachers and the education provided? It all depends on who does the survey, what they measure, and how they interpret the results.

If you follow U.S. News and World Report, Kansas ranks No. 47 (fourth from the bottom with Washington, D.C., as a 51st “state”) based on a mix of reading and math scores, advancing the performance of poor kids, and levels of Advanced Placement/International Baccalaureate students.

But based on ratings on a scale of one through five submitted by parents, students and teachers to the national SchoolDigger site, Kansas ranks No. 4 from the top.

Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst uses a report card that finds many states, including Kansas, essentially failing. Her group assigns scores for states allowing private school vouchers, charter schools and a “parent trigger” that permits parents to take charge of failing schools. Kansas requires charter schools to be recommended by the local school district, and that dooms Kansas on such a ranking system.

WalletHub, a financial social media company, recently ranked Kansas fifth as a “top-performing state in terms of education.” This is apparently the ranking Gov. Sam Brownback touts in his campaign. WalletHub’s 12 “key metrics” include student-teacher ratios, dropout rates and bullying incidents. Its category of “lowest percentage of children who repeated one or more grades” failed to realize that some states automatically promote all students.

Education Week, the K-12 newspaper of record, issues many annual rankings on criteria that vary year by year and involve ever-changing fads. Because the nature of Kansas educational governance does not allow for rapid turnover in leadership, and with our relatively unconsolidated rural school autonomy, Kansas does not see the rapid adoption of educational cure-alls that whipsaw teachers in other states. As a result, Education Week surveys often rank Kansas in the middle of the pack.

The January 2014 report by the National Council on Teacher Quality has its own agenda, giving Kansas various D’s for not expanding the teacher pool or identifying effective teachers, and an F for not “exiting” (firing) ineffective teachers.

The American Legislative Exchange Council gave Kansas a B-plus and an A-minus for academic standards in language arts and mathematics, respectively. But ALEC has the same agenda as NCTQ on school choice and “expanding the teaching pool” (letting more folks teach without training), and gave grades similar to NCTQ’s for teacher training and firing. On cost per student, Kansas was ranked 26th, and on students scoring “proficient” or higher, it ranked 19th.

What about a reliable long-term national “standard”? The National Assessment of Educational Progress was first administered in 1969. Managed by more test-savvy experts at the U.S. Department of Education, the NAEP for 2013 has Kansas with nine states significantly higher, 20 significantly lower and 22 in the same range with insignificant differences. Thus, Kansas is somewhat average.

The various rankings select criteria that are at best arbitrary and incomplete. At worst, they are irrelevant, political and used to assign meaningless scores to make unjustified policy.

What we should really focus on is having good teachers in our classrooms, just as we should be concerned with having good surgeons in our hospitals – period. “State report card” rankings give voice to nonprofessionals who usually have political agendas.

This story was originally published September 24, 2014 at 7:03 PM with the headline "John Richard Schrock: Education rankings arbitrary, often political."