Which is a better indicator of how a state ranks in education?

[Bei1052]

Is it the percentage of the population graduating from high school, college and/or holding advanced degrees? Standardized test scores for all students? Standardized test scores for college bound seniors? Or something else. I've actually been wondering about this for some time, as based on which factor you consider most important each state ranks differently in education than they would if you considered another factor important.

(Excuse the typographical errors in the poll.)

 

[Arwon]

How progressive they vote.

 

[amadeus]

How progressive they vote.

They won't say it, but they really mean this.

 

[Arwon]

Hey, two demographic factors predict almost the entirity of the Green vote in Australia: the percentage of people in an electorate professing no religion, and the percentage of people with degrees. The rest can mostly be explained by the question "is this seat in Tasmania?"

It's why we come second to the (conservative) Liberals, ahead of Labor, in a number of inner city seats.

 

[SKILORD]

Standardized test scores are a joke.

College degrees are better if the final statistic you are looking for is education ranking.

The joke about voting patterns is a valid point though, because highly educated districts do tend to vote liberally. But because of the nature of social division in America (which is more urban/rural rather than between different states), but it's more realistic to look at House districts than whole states. Austin is still in Texas, there are cities in Minnesota that are still pretty liberal, California has a Republican Governor. You can effectively cross reference education and political affiliation, but not with whole states.

 

[Kraznaya]

Standardized test scores are a joke.

Why?

California has a Republican Governor. .

No it doesn't.

 

[Tee Kay]

Percentage of population graduating high, college and/or holding advanced degrees?

In many cases that's more of an indicator of wealth rather than quality of education.

 

[Bamspeedy]

Or something else. I've actually been wondering about this for some time, as based on which factor you consider most important each state ranks differently in education than they would if you considered another factor important.

(Excuse the typographical errors in the poll.)

Is it the percentage of the population graduating from high school, college and/or holding advanced degrees?

Like has been said, that could be more an indication of wealth (having the money to go to college, get advanced degrees), and also some of that could be people moving.

Someone goes to high school in Montana because they grew up there, then they go to a college in another state like let's say Washington, and then gets a job in California or NY, and then decades later retires in Florida. Which state he is affecting the stats of depends on where exactly he is living at that time. When living in Florida and the fact he is a high school graduate say anything about Florida's education system?

Standardized test scores for all students? Standardized test scores for college bound seniors?

'Teaching to the test'. People memorize what is needed to pass the test then forget it or don't really learn anything such as applying what they learn to other parts of their life.

And who is the best states varies because it seems there is a split between which states use the SAT and which states use the ACT.

In the SAT, the best scores are in the middle of the country, but those states had low participation (about 5%), suggesting only the smartest students took the test so it isn't fair to compare it to states that had 50%+ of their students take the test.

In the ACT, it was the opposite in that the northeast scored the highest, but they had low participation (about 20%), also suggesting only the smartest students took this test so it isn't fair to compare it to states that had 50%+ of their students take the test.

http://www.act.org/news/data/09/states.html

http://blog.bestandworststates.com/2009/08/25/state-sat-scores-2009.aspx

 

[GhostWriter16]

I have no idea about how useful standardized tests are (Probably not very) but I voted option #3 since large portions of the student body in High School really don't care much besides passing. And some don't even care about that.

On the other hand, the college bound ones will be more likely to care. Granted, some people who aren't bound for college may care, but those that do probably will care.

 

[El_Machinae]

Huh. That's a good question.

What's a standardized test score? Well, it's a test on test-taking, but let's look at the intent. The intent is to determine what a person knows and how well they apply it. Clearly an education's effect on STCs is a good indicator of what we want education to do: teach people stuff and teach people how to use that stuff.

OTOH, what's an educational certification? Well, it's an official signal that a person knows a specific minimum competence in a certain task. Really, we want certifications, and we want more people to have certifications and an education system is 'working' if the number and the quality of certifications is increasing.

As a person, what do I want? Well, I want an education. But I also want certification if I'm going to tell other people about my fancy education. So, because a certification ideally captures the essence of a STC, then I think that a good ranking of education is the number and quality of certifications being issued. An education is invaluable, but we often get hired & admired based on certification.

Though once we see that as a metric to measure and to admire, we have to worry about people gaming the system. Your high school diploma should look less impressive than a PhD, but we still want high school students outperforming Dr. Kent Hovind at simple standardised science questions.

 

[GhostWriter16]

but we still want high school students outperforming Dr. Kent Hovind at simple standardised science questions.

What was the point of mentioning Dr. Hovind in this thread? I am genuinely curious...

 

[El_Machinae]

Because Hovind is a fake PhD and is a deceiving moron. Additionally, he's a poster-child of being a fake PhD and a deceiving moron. I'm able to use him in a metaphor very easily, and so I did.

I was talking about how we want to see certifications improve, but we have to be careful of the metric. If a State wanted to (say) see an 'increase in PhDs', we'd have to worry about incentives being created that would cause an increase in fake PhD certifications.

 

[downtown]

I think it's graduation rate. Bamspeedy did a good job explaining how using post secondary can be tricky (so many variables to track), so if our intent is to track state by state, then we should use only K-12 data.

ACT/standardized test score data can paint a useful picture, but for all intents and purposes, I think ACT score, if we're looking at large populations of people, kinda has a diminishing utility above a certain score...we don't need every student to qualify for Harvard. If a state's public school graduates are competitive applicants for their state universities, then I think that school is doing an excellent job. To give you guys a ballpark figure, a very good public district will have an average ACT score of around a 24-25. I don't think any states, are above that. The National Average is around a 21.

Graduation rate tells a lot about the achievement gap in a state...what's the difference between the "good" schools and the "bad" ones? Are the lowest achievers still able to to meet the min benchmark? I'm sure that there are wealthy suburbs in places like Alabama and Arkansas that have good schools, but when over 30% of their students can't meet the 10th grade benchmarks, I think it's hard to say that their STATE is "good with education". States like California and New York (high wealth states) also are going to have very good schools at the top end...but that bottom end is awfully large.

I think if you look at graduation rate, and to a lesser extent, standardized test scores, you find that schools in the northeast and the northern midwest/plains states tend to be the best for education, and schools in the west (nevada, new mexico) and the south tend to be the worst.

 

[GhostWriter16]

Because Hovind is a fake PhD and is a deceiving moron. Additionally, he's a poster-child of being a fake PhD and a deceiving moron. I'm able to use him in a metaphor very easily, and so I did.

I was talking about how we want to see certifications improve, but we have to be careful of the metric. If a State wanted to (say) see an 'increase in PhDs', we'd have to worry about incentives being created that would cause an increase in fake PhD certifications.

OK now I'm curious, how is his PhD fake?

Also, how is he deceiving? I'm not going to ask why you think he's a moron, because I'm well aware of what you (And most people on here) think of Creation Scientists. But I haven't seen ANY REASON to say he doesn't believe what he's saying.

 

[El_Machinae]

This is off-topic, so I won't be discussing it further.

Wikipedia has entries on both his PhD and that even the more mainstream Creationists think he's a lying moron. The deception is proven by the fact that you've been deceived by him years after he's been discredited. Of course, the people who introduced his crap to children are also culpable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Hovind#Education
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Hovind#From_creationists

 

[civ_king]

Standardized test scores are a joke.

College degrees are better if the final statistic you are looking for is education ranking.

The joke about voting patterns is a valid point though, because highly educated districts do tend to vote liberally. But because of the nature of social division in America (which is more urban/rural rather than between different states), but it's more realistic to look at House districts than whole states. Austin is still in Texas, there are cities in Minnesota that are still pretty liberal, California has a Republican Governor. You can effectively cross reference education and political affiliation, but not with whole states.

As of January 3rd 2011 California has a Democrat running the state who beat the Republican candidate by ~13%, election wise he stomped her despite being massively outspent

 

[SKILORD]

Why?

Because the statistics don't reflect anything meaningful.

No it doesn't.

D'oh!

 

[downtown]

Because the statistics don't reflect anything meaningful.

Sure they do!

Standardized test scores, alone, do not produce a perfect representation of student learning....but that doesn't mean they don't tell us anything meaningful. That data does a pretty good job of showing bare bones, lower level-Blooms competency.

If you need to know if your students have in depth critical reading skills, or content knowledge above say, 10th grade, you'd use classwork, or AP scores, or other metrics. (AP scores are standardized tests btw).

If you need to know what % of kids can do Algebra, or read, or write a competent, 5 paragraph essay, a state graduation test is fine.

 

[Reginleif]

'Teaching to the test'. People memorize what is needed to pass the test then forget it or don't really learn anything such as applying what they learn to other parts of their life.

This is fact, but only so long as the current acedemic system believes that multiple choice is a good substitute for essay writing and other critical exersises (Which it does...).

 

[warpus]

The best measure would be an analysis of the percentage of students that were able to secure meaningful jobs after graduating high school, college, or whichever. Of course, such a thing would be impossible to quantify.