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Thursday, October 13, 2022

How Does Educational Opportunity Look In Your State?

I want to direct your attention to a great new tool from Research for Action, a non-partisan nonprofit educational research outfit. They're based in Philly, and I've talked about their work before; they do good stuff. 

This new tool is the Educational Opportunity Dashboard, and it breaks down and crunches data from fifty states that comes from the 2017-2018 federal Civil Rights Data Collection, so it's all pre-COVID, but still interesting, and the dashboard is very easy to use.

The EOI looks at fourteen factors, grouped around educators, school climate and curriculum. It's not the exact list I would pick (in particular, I don't care about how many AP courses a school offers), but it's still instructive. 

You can see how states stack up against each other from various angles, like the gap for opportunities between different groups of students. For example, it turns out that Pennsylvania has a respectable level of average opportunity index, but when you look at the gap between white students and students of color, we're 50th in the nation

Beyond rankings, you can see state's individual scores. You can also break down each state's numbers for each of the fourteen categories and see how they compare to nation. For instance, in Pennsylvania we do better than the national numbers for certified teachers and experienced teachers, but are far worse when it comes to student-counselor ratios. 

Reformsters have insisted for decades now that we focus on "outcomes" ("deliverables") and ignore inputs, which suits them fine because they'd rather not have to deal with how underserved so many schools are. But it has led us to a situation where, as has been said many times, we're trying to make the pig gain weight by measuring it. But if you want the pig to gain weight--especially if you want to understand why Wilbur is gaining weight and Peppa is not, it only makes sense to check to see if they're both being given a full-sized meal. This dashboard is a step in that direction. 

It's a worthwhile tool to check out, easy to use, easy to read, and fully explained. RFA has done an excellent job on this; folks who are interested in the state of educational opportunity in the nation and their own home state will find it useful and interesting. 


3 comments:

  1. Did they include the "opportunity costs" inflicted on every state through NCLB/RTTT/NCLBW/ESSA via test and punish reform?

    The past 20 years has seen an unprecedented expansion of the null curricula, particularly at the K to 8 levels. Doors closed and windows shuttered - and opportunities lost . . . forever.

    Did they include the curricular constraints imposed on the teaching of ELA and math by self-limiting Common Core standards?

    And did they include the wholesale elimination of content and procedural knowledge in favor of vague, subjective, and unteachable 21st century thinking skills coerced through the Common Core standards?

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  2. Is the reason Florida is 8th in the nation that we are ruining opportunity for everybody regardless of their demographics? Like Ron DeSantis, it's not you, Ron hates everybody.

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  3. Gregory Sampson, I think you nailed it. It's hard to believe that West Virginia, Arkansas and Florida rank in the top 10 for educational opportunities.

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