Walter Russell Mead has a really silly post today on the results of Newsweek‘s rankings of the top public schools in the country:
The results make depressing reading for the teacher unions: The very best public high schools in the country are heavily concentrated in red states.
Three of the nation’s ten best public high schools are in Texas—the no-income tax, right-to-work state that blue model defenders like to characterize as America at its worst. Florida, another no-income tax, right-to-work state long misgoverned by the evil and rapacious Bush dynasty, has two of the top ten schools.
Newsweek measured individual schools, not school systems, so the ratings are useful for parents who are moving to a given state and wondering what school to send their kids to, but they’re not useful at all for evaluating governance. The metrics used might say something about the individual teachers or administrators at these schools or the demographics of the population they serve, but they don’t say anything about education policy. It would be as if you took the lowest crime neighborhoods in the country and concluded that those states have the best anti-crime policies, rather than looking at the state as a whole.
If you wanted to evaluate education policy, you’d have to look at other metrics–namely something like the what National Assessment of Educational Progress does. Texas wasn’t included in their latest study assessing 12th grade students in 11 states, but Florida was, and students there performed below the national average in reading and math. Bad news for the rapacious Bush dynasty?
Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and South Dakota ended up with scores in math and reading higher than the national average. Only two of those–Iowa and South Dakota–are right to work states.
