Education Week Does it Again: Please STOP!

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Education Week has again posted the problematic QUALITY COUNTS indicator system including grades for school finance across the states. And again, Education Week has paid little attention to producing high quality indicators for measuring …quality? Why doesn’t that surprise me? But, they’ve made my life easier because I can simply refer you to my critique of last year’s Quality Counts School Finance Indicators:

https://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2009/01/08/education-week-quality-lacks/

Here are a few quick summary points on issues that occur year to year:

  • Ed Week uses “range” measures and “coefficient of variation” measures in its equity analysis – measures which capture overall variations and high to low variations in current expenditures across school districts. The way that Education Week calculates these measures actually penalizes states which target funds to higher need school districts, including higher poverty school districts or very small remote districts. That is, if a state actually makes efforts to accommodate cost differences across districts, they get a lower equity grade from Education Week. THAT’S JUST WRONG! Education Week uses some “cost adjustments” including a regional wage index and a nominal (and completely arbitrary) poverty adjustment. But, states like New Jersey actually provide more poverty-based support than the Ed Week adjustment, resulting in a reduction in the Ed Week equity measures. Ed Week makes no adjustment for costs associated with economies of scale or population density – major factors affecting spending variation across school districts within states.
  • Ed Week continues to use peculiar (though traditional) school finance measures like the McLoone Index to evaluate the share of children within the state who are in districts near the median spending level. This was originally conceived as a within state relative adequacy measure. But, without appropriate consideration for needs or costs, a state can score well on the Ed Week McLoone index by simply having all of its low income children clustered together in one or a handful of districts that spend at the edge of the lower half of the distribution.

Education Week staffers – Please Stop! Quality Counts is very unhelpful because of the extent to which it misinforms. There may be, and in fact are, some good and useful indicators in the report, but there are at least equal numbers of indicators that are entirely misleading. One cancels out the other.

These indicators can have a serious negative policy impact because of the way in which and extent to which they misinform. Drawing from a forthcoming technical report (referring to both Ed Week and Ed Trust indicators):

To illustrate the potential negative impact of these two reports, in 2003 in the context of state school finance litigation in Kansas, attorneys defending the State submitted in defense of the school funding formula, both the Education Trust finding that higher poverty districts had higher revenue per pupil and the Education Week finding that Kansas showed a good McLoone index. The state’s attorneys and local news outlets did not understand why Kansas received good ratings on these indices nor did they care as long as those indices were from highly publicized, publicly recognized sources. Plaintiffs pointed out that Education Trust finding was not a function of systematic poverty related support, but rather a function of small rural school support which left out the poorer urban and large town districts and that the “good” McLoone index was a function of having nearly half of the state’s children and nearly all of the state’s poor minority children attending six districts with below average revenues. These points were difficult to make in the face of media accolades for state’s supposed achievements regarding school funding equity and adequacy. The district court and eventually Supreme Court of Kansas declared the state school finance system unconstitutional, but not without at least a few vocal critics chastising the judges who would give the legislature a failing grade for a school finance system that had received a grade of “B” from a leading national media outlet.

Published by schoolfinance101

Bruce Baker is an Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. From 1997 to 2008 he was a professor at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS. He is lead author with Preston Green (Penn State University) and Craig Richards (Teachers College, Columbia University) of Financing Education Systems, a graduate level textbook on school finance policy published by Merrill/Prentice-Hall. Professor Baker has written a multitude of peer reviewed research articles on state school finance policy, teacher labor markets, school leadership labor markets and higher education finance and policy. His recent work has focused on measuring cost variations associated with schooling contexts and student population characteristics, including ways to better design state school finance policies and local district allocation formulas (including Weighted Student Funding) for better meeting the needs of students. Baker, along with Preston Green of Penn State University are co-authors of the chapter on Conceptions of Equity in the recently released Handbook of Research Education Finance and Policy, and co-authors of the chapter on the Politics of Education Finance in the Handbook of Education Politics and Policy and co-authors of the chapter on School Finance in the Handbook of Education Policy of the American Educational Research Association. Professor Baker has also consulted for state legislatures, boards of education and other organizations on education policy and school finance issues and has testified in state school finance litigation in Kansas, Missouri and Arizona. He is a member of the Think Tank Review Panel, a group of academic researchers who conduct technical reviews of publicly released think tank reports on education policy issues.

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2 thoughts on “Education Week Does it Again: Please STOP!”

  2. Yeah. You’re right. Harmful indeed. I was just feeling guilty about slamming them so hard. Newspapers across the country are either touting their state successes or decrying their failures, all based on Ed Week’s completely bogus analysis. We actually met with Ed Week staff a number of years back to try to explain ways to improve the analysis. Then staff turned over. Nothin’ changed. It wouldn’t be so bad if some of their indicators didn’t end up giving the worst equity grades to the most equitable states and vice versa. I can handle subtle shifts in ranking or grades due to methodological differences. But this is much more than that.

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