QUALITY COUNTS 2007

Annual Education Report Tracks Students from Cradle to Adulthood

By Headwaters News, 1-05-07

Education Weekly’s Annual Quality Counts report historically tracks states’ efforts in key areas of education. This year, the report takes a much more sweeping look at those key policies and analyzes how they connect with other socio-economic factors within the states, such as early childhood education, teacher preparation, postsecondary education, and economic and workforce development.

This year the report looks at how well states’ policies ease the transition from early childhood to elementary education and from high school to secondary school and into the workforce.

On Thursday, an Associated Press article in the Santa Fe New Mexican painted a pretty dismal picture of New Mexico’s ability to prepare its children for life after formal education.

The state ranked 47th in the nation for academic performance of its students and 39th in its ability in to align education systems to carry students from preschool to the workforce.

State Public Education Secretary Veronica Garcia praised the report for incorporating socio-economic factors into its analysis of states’ educational efforts, but said this year’s report depended upon statistics gathered between 2000 and 2003, and therefore did not consider the great strides made within the past two years in the state, both in the education and economic sectors.

Utah had much more to crow about in this year’s report. Last year, the Beehive State ranked poorly in the Quality Counts report that looked only at the state’s schools system.

The Salt Lake Tribune reports that this year, Utah ranked 20th, second only to Colorado in the West.

Education officials said none of the categories in which Utah scored low were surprising to them as efforts were already under way to address them. Patti Harrington, the Utah State Schools Superintendent, did take exception to the low score the state received on early childhood programs. She said Utah has a high number of stay-at-home parents, who often do as good a job or better than preschools in preparing children for school.

Wyoming ranked 24th in the nation in this year’s annual Quality Counts report. The Casper Star-Tribune said that the state’s early childhood programs propelled the state upwards in the ranking, but also found that after high school the state’s ranking dipped significantly.

Only about 42 percent of Wyoming’s high school graduates go on to post-secondary training, about five percentage points lower than the national average. Wyoming officials said the state’s current low unemployment could have something to do with fewer students electing to attend college.

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