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Friday, April 1, 2005
C’mon, This Can Be Fun
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
My colleague Paul Donsky has had time to noodle around on the schoolmatters site, and has this to say:
“You’ve heard people makes the cracks at work and at cocktail parties — about how Georgia has the worst public education in the country. That conventional wisdom is largely based on SAT scores, which usually finds Georiga ranked 50th or 49th in the country, depending on the year. But schoolmatters makes it easy to compare states on another important academic barometer, the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) tests. The web site includes NAEP data from 2003. From the home page, click on the southeastern region on the colored map and then on “Georgia.” Then click on the words “compare states” in the upper right-hand corner of the page. That will call up a table with data like enrollment, percent of students in poverty, and NAEP scores. To find out where Georgia stacks up in, say, fourth-grade reading, simply click on “sort by NAEP Grade 4 reading proficiency” and you’ll quickly see that 27 percent of Georgia students scored at that level — 12th lowest score (not counting D.C) in the country. Not great, to be sure, but better than several Southern states as well as California and Arizona. You can also build custom tables. Let’s say you want to see how Georgia stacks up to states with similar poverty levels as Georgia. First click on “sort by Economincally disadvantaged enrollment.” Scroll down to Georgia, and click the little boxes next to the states just above or below (note that you can’t click more than 4). Go to the bottom of the page. Click on the “compare” button, and a new chart is created. Have fun!”
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