Education Week recently released their annual Quality Counts Report. You can see their nifty graphics here and some more detailed information here. Arkansas received a B- this year (it’s worth mentioning that we received the same grade last year as well). To create a report like this it is necessary to define what quality in education is. It’s obvious from the data items included in this report that, for the Ed Week editors, quality is almost entirely about inputs. While it is true that better ingredients tend to make a better product, good ingredients are not sufficient. You could give a bad cook the highest quality ingredients but the end product would still be inedible.  Further, education research has shown time and again that the inputs we think matter are at best loosely correlated with achievement. So why focus on inputs?… because it is easy. While I think the right inputs are important, I would much rather see that Arkansas’ students are achieving at the highest level regardless of what input mix got us there.

And what does our achievement grade look like? Ed Week gives us a D where it counts!

Stuart Buck wrote a great critique of the Quality Counts Report over at Jay Greene’s blog last year. You can see it here. But for those of you who are lazy here is a little taste.

…imagine a state that managed to produce A-level achievement even though its population was poor and disadvantaged (and thus got a lower grade on the “Chances for Success” measure).  Under any rational grading system, we should give that state the highest possible rating.  But the Quality Counts method would actually downgrade the state for having too many poor children.  By the same token, Quality Counts would upgrade a poor-achieving state that happened to have a privileged and rich student population, even though that state’s education system would obviously be far more incompetent and inefficient.  If anything, the “Chances for Success” ranking should be counted inversely as compared to all the other measures of a state’s education system.

Margaret Raymond from CREDO writes on the Ed Next blog that the variation in the report’s Chance-for-Success Index can almost entirely be explained by state demographic changes rather than changes in education quality. Here is the money quote.

Until the measures that are incorporated into the Quality Counts ratings are more clearly tied to education outcomes, we are likely to see continued shifts in rankings that bear little resemblance to actual changes in education quality.

Margaret and her CREDO team present revised estimates of the index here. Arkansas moves up ten spots, from 45th to 35th, but is still in the bottom third of the ranking.

Anyway you look at it, Arkansas has a lot of work to do to improve the quality of its schools.