Grading the States’ Outcomes, Policies

Quality Counts 2008 reintroduces state grades in six key areas, from the Chance-for-Success Index to the teaching profession.

By The Editors

In 2006, after a decade of producing Quality Counts, Education Week decided to take a hiatus from grading states on their efforts to improve public education as part of this annual report. We spent the past year revising our indicators to reflect the latest and best thinking from the field. Now, with the publication of the 2008 report, we are reintroducing state grades, but with several key differences.

First, we’re grading states on their performance outcomes as well as on their policy efforts. Second, we’re grading states on their efforts to better align policies across the various levels of education—from early-childhood education to postsecondary study and training. And, third, we’re introducing a greatly revised set of indicators on the teaching profession that looks more broadly at state efforts to attract, develop, and deploy talent in education, including some new indicators related to school principals.

Last year, Quality Counts introduced two new measures of state performance on which we...