Tracking U.S. Trends

States earn B average for policies supporting ed. tech. use.

By Amy M. Hightower

States looking to see how they stacked up in Education Week ’s Technology Counts will spot a significant change in this year’s report card on state policies and practices: Because of a shortage of available data, the report does not issue overall grades. Instead, the report gives grades in two of the three categories that have undergirded the grading structure in recent years: policies related to the use of technology for learning and policies designed to increase educators’ capacity to use technology.

Recent data show that most states have made progress enacting policies related to the use of educational technology. States, on average, earned a B in that category. Nine states—Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, and West Virginia—have put in place all of the policies tracked by the report in the use-of-technology category, earning each of those states a perfect score and an A. At the other end of the spectrum, with none of those policies enacted, the District of Columbia places last and receives the only F, for the second year in a row.

Since our reporting a year ago, three states—New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and South Carolina—have shown notable improvement in the use-of-technology category, while four states—Colorado, Florida, Michigan,...