State Education Rankings: Reality Bites, But Relativism Dulls Pain

Got this off of the PTA blast.

Georgia ranked 7th (in the US) overall in one of the plethora of rating reports. This one from Education Week magazine (www.edweek.org). The ratings report link is at the end of this post so that you have to read the pithy prose.

My immidiate inclination was to do a backfiip-high5-yes! because we all know Georgia is ranked 52nd behind some sharecropping southern state (US Territories included). How do we know that--because the Cox monopoly news media says so. They have their reasons, but that's for another time.

Anyway--reality bites, relativism dulls the pain. Not only does this rating system attempt to grade states on cradle-to-career learning, not limited to K-12 programs, but also has only one category for academic performance. Much of the ranking system is dedicated to the tricky (murky?) business of education policy (read: spending and standard setting). The idea I suppose is to consider each state's prospects for improvement in the future based on their willingness to get on an "establishment" set of priorities.

So I look at this report the way Ed Week seems to want me to look at it--

(1) Emphasis on international competitiveness--the grading system for K-12 performance is realistic or downright brutal for you grade-inflators;

(2) Emphasize where we are going as much as where we are--"go to where the puck is going, not to the puck" (or something like that)

(3) K-12 is a large intermediate phase in the larger and more accurate reality of lifelong learning.

Anyway--check out the rankings yourself--and note those K-12 grades--Georgia gets a C- and that's one of the high ones.

http://www.edweek.org/ew/toc/2012/01/12/index.html?intc=EW-QC12-FL1

We're # 6 in "transitions and alignment"--yes!! (backflip)