Weighing States' School Performance, Policymaking
An Annual Survey Finds Modest Policy Changes as States Work To Keep School Improvement Efforts Afloat Amid Turbulent Fiscal Waters
At a time of persistent turbulence for America’s economy and schools, Quality Counts has continued its long-standing mission of regularly evaluating the status of states’ educational performance and policymaking. This 15th edition of Education Week ’s annual report issues summative scores and letter grades to the states and features newly updated analysis from the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center in four of the six areas tracked in the report: the Chance-for-Success Index, the K-12 Achievement Index, school finance, and policies related to transitions and alignment across stages of education.
To complement Quality Counts 2011 ’s journalistic focus on the interconnections between the larger economy and education, the EPE Research Center fielded an original survey to assess the state of public education finances and explore reactions to the Great Recession by school systems nationwide.
Key findings from this special 50-state survey appear elsewhere in the report. The overall findings of that investigation point to relatively few large-scale education policy changes at the state level that can be attributed directly to the economic downturn, which officially began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009. We find, however, that many states have enacted some more-modest policy modifications that provide local school systems with greater flexibility to meet the challenges posed by the financial crisis. For example, since the recession began, 21 states have broadened the eligible uses of education funds that had previously been reserved for spending on particular programs or groups of students. In a similar vein, 10 states have loosened their regulations on the length of the school...
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