Home / News /

Southern schools report card not all bad -- and that's progress

January 12, 2009 — Like little Johnny scraping by on his reading equivalency test, the latest report card on the nation’s public schools is a mixed bag for the South. It could be better, but it at least shows the student’s trying harder.

Education Week’s 2008 state-by-state report card on public education reflects the efforts made in the region over several decades to improve education standards. Only one state, Mississippi, had an overall grade in the nation’s bottom 10, while Virginia, Arkansas and South Carolina ranked in the top 10. Tennessee ranked first in the country in the subcategory which measures how well educations systems transition students from primary school through college or technical school or post-graduate learning programs.

It’s important to remember that this annual survey measures both policy and performance, said Sterling Lloyd, senior researcher at the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, Education Week’s research arm.

That means several Southern states which still lag the nation in performance got higher overall scores because of what they’ve tried to do about it.

We’ve become accustomed to seeing Southern states at the bottom of education rankings that it’s a little jarring to see the magazine’s subcategory, “the teaching profession,” which grades pay, working conditions and programs for teachers in each state. In this category, Southern states hold the top 10 spots, with South Carolina the only state in the country to score an A. The region also scores pretty well in the “standards, assessments and accountability” category, with Louisiana scoring second in the nation. It trails the Northeast and Midwest in the grades for how states finance their school systems, but most of the South is around the national average now in this category. It’s the Rocky Mountain and West Coast states which have run into the biggest school finance problems.

The region still trails in the rubber-meets-the-road categories which measure educational progress, but here again the report card is better than it used to be.

Most of the South lags behind the national average “chance for success,” which attempts to measure how well a public education prepares students for productive jobs, but Lloyd noted this to some degree measures past failures to prepare those who have already gone through the education system for better jobs than those they have. And while the South continues to struggle in the “K-12 achievement” category, the nation as a whole is only averaging a D-plus.

“Many states are struggling in that category. It’s not just the South,” Lloyd said.

While Mississippi ranks dead last in the “K-12 achievement” category, Virginia ranked 6^th and Florida, 7^th. Despite its budget woes, Florida improved overall this year, with strong gains in reading and math.

Other states, like Georgia and Tennessee, also showed improvement in the basic measures of school achievement, but Lloyd cautioned that it takes time for things like improved programs for teachers and improved accountability programs to result in better test scores. These aren’t the only factors that affect educational performance, either – all the accountability in the world won’t counter engrained poverty.

With the region facing severe budget problems over the next couple of years, it’s going to be harder to defend the increased investment the states have made in education, especially when they don’t produce vastly improved results quickly. But the modest progress the South has made in educating its people is worth holding on to, and could be a harbinger of even better report cards in the future.