New Mexico ranks 49 out of 50 states and the District of Columbia, analyzing national and state achievements in education.
The rankings were issued Jan. 7 by the Education Week Research Center, according to the annual Quality Counts 2016, an in-depth report on new directions in school accountability.
While the nation collectively received an overall grade of C on its 2016 report card, with a score of 74.4 out of a possible 100 points, virtually unchanged from a year ago, the state of New Mexico ranked only ahead of two other states, Nevada and Mississippi in the report’s grading summary with a D grade and 65.9 out of 100 possible points. Nevada and Mississippi rounded out the bottom three with D grades and 65.2 and 65.5 total points earned respectively.
Massachusetts earned top ranking this year with a score of 86.8 and stands as the only B+ awarded school. Most states earn grades somewhere between a C and C+.
According to a press release made available by the Bethesda Maryland-based national newspaper, which focuses on education, the term “accountability” has become synonymous with testing, particularly the type of standardized assessments at the center of federally driven school accountability under the former No Child Left Behind Act.
This year’s report marks the 20th edition of the report, which Christopher Swanson, vice president of Editorial Projects in Education, the nonprofit organization that publishes the report, said could not be more timely due to the transition from No Child Left Behind to the new Every Student Succeeds Act.
New Mexico American Federation of Teachers members have praised the new law.
“The legislation maintains the level of funding for the students who need it most,” President Stephanie Ly said last month when No Child Left Behind was phased out in favor of the new law. “This prohibits the federal government from mandating teacher evaluations, stops the rampant, high-stakes consequences like school closures, opposes voucher schemes for private schools which drain resources from public schools and increases transparency and accountability for current and future charter schools.”
Despite praise for the new legislation, educators throughout the state continue to look for solutions to low test scores and to improve longterm educational outcomes, something the report addresses through various criteria.
The report’s Chance For Success Index, which captures the role of education in a person’s life from cradle to career, is one of the criteria used to rank the nation’s school districts on their ability to promote career and work opportunities beyond their educational path.
Sterling Lloyd, senior research associate at the Research Csenter said this year’s accountability changes stem in part from a shift toward the new educational legislation and rankings are based on data collected from 2013-14, and 2015.
“We often set questions about why the states fare poorly,” Lloyd said. “One of the factors is poverty. There’s a lot of agreement on the part of educators that poverty plays a significant barrier to student academic success. We try to incorporate those factors in our research and rankings.”
For example. Lloyd said the Chances for Success criteria looks at the environment, but also looks more broadly at all the other factors.
“New Mexico ranks 50 out of 51 including the District of Columbia in family income,” he said.
Lloyd said the states that fared the best tend to be in the Northeastern part of the country — these are states which face fewer challenges across the board.
Some of the criteria used in assessing educational opportunities and outcomes throughout the nation, according to the researchers, included test scores in K-12 achievement, school finance and the Chance for Success Index.
Lloyd said results inidicate, despite the fact New Mexico is toward the bottom of the overall rankings, the state has made some improvements in recent years.
“What we hope is when local educators and policy makers see this data, it will help them investigate what’s working,” he said. “Hopefully it will help them understand the reasons why the more successful states are ranking the way they do and help them understand why there are improvements in some areas while assisting them to model policies of success.”
New Mexico scored a D+ on the chance for success metric, a D+ on the school finance category and a D- on the K-12 achievement metric which measures among other things, spending and equity, how much funding a school district receives versus how much the school system spends.