Good news! The Network for Public Education will soon issue our first national report card.
What is your state doing to keep public education vibrant and strong? Do students have a good chance to succeed in schools that are funded adequately with appropriate class sizes? Does your state support teacher professionalism? Has your state repelled the forces of privatization? These are some of the questions the report will address.
Our first national report card, Valuing Public Education: A 50 State Report Card, evaluates states on their support for public schools.
It will be released February 2 at the National Press Club in D.C.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What an IMPORTANT and PRICELESS action. Thank You and Bless You!
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Is it not automatically subjective no matter how they decide how or whether to calculate public money going to charter schools?
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Has your state repelled the forces of privatization? …fair enough….it will be unabashedly subjective………hopefully it will be tolled out there like all the propaganda from the privatization advocates as facts…….somehow, I imagine the media will manage to scrutinize it more thoroughly than usual for education reports. Fault will be found.
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So true about the scrutiny. Hopefully this will lead to counter-scrutiny of Reformist reports.
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Can’t wait to see this!
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Fantastic!
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That’s a great idea. Thanks to all who worked on it.
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Feel free to contact us at Game On for Kansas Schools for inside information on Kansas.
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I hope the National Press Club announcement and follow-on Q&A will be broadcast and that you can give some tips on how to see that event and listen in.
I note that EdWeek has given Cami Anderson a Commentary space to write about an educational marketplace (in Newark) that benefits students because, you know, the best public, charter, and private schools will withstand the competition and it is both “divisive” and “self-serving” for anyone to claim otherwise. This is to say that she is part of the propaganda machinery proclaiming the virtues of “market-based” solutions to education, (and likely everything else).
Of course, with the market-based approach to education aided and abetted by Congress and many state officials, we also see a sharp increase in administrative takeovers of public schools and more generally a concerted effort to shrink the public sphere, treat the common good as a ridiculous concept, and undermine democratic governance in favor of administrative appointments of the kind put in place by Scott Walker’s “emergency management” in Flint Michigan. That manager contaminated the water supply to save money and caused irreversible damage to citizens, especially children. Adding insult to injury, that person now in charge of “saving” Detroit public schools.
The marketers insist that public education in the US costs too much and has not produced any significant gains–returns of the investment–with (of course) test scores and high school graduation rates the measures of choice, outcomes only. The costs of absurd but profitable tests, test prep materials, disruptive trainings, non-stop churn of policies and quests for silver bullets are never fully examined. There is no measure of the “collateral damage” that failed policies and snake-oil products and services have produced, especially from the fixation on standards and testing as if these were perfected means of diagnosing system failures and also the cure for every problem.
In any case, I hope the report card project causes some much needed thinking about public education, and from a frame of reference other than “markets are always best.”
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I agree. There are several indicators that should be used to gauge how much support a state gives to public education. While they are at it, I wish they would also rate various presidents’ contributions to public education.
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I’m looking forward to reading the report.
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This is a very important and useful step towards changing the conversation. Not only do we have right on our side, we are also gaining might, thanks to NPE.
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