(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
The American Legislative Exchange Council released the Report Card on American Education: Ranking State K-12 Performance, Progress and Reform today coauthored by yours truly, Andy LeFevre and Dan Lips. Follow the link and check out our rankings of state NAEP performance based on the overall math and reading scores and gains of general education low-income children, and our “poll of polls” grades for K-12 policy in each state.
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush penned the foreward. After losing a bet Stanford Political Scientist Terry Moe gave the book a very kind endorsement:
Everyone interested in education reform should read this book. Using a method that—by focusing on the achievement of low-income children—allows for apples-to-apples comparisons across the states, the authors present a treasure trove of eye-opening performance data and arrive at a ranking of state performance that reveals both surprising success and shocking failure. The book is well worth reading for the data alone. But it also offers a good deal more, from research summaries to methodological clarifications to model legislation—and concludes with an insightful discussion of the high-powered reforms that have helped some states out-perform others, and that offer the nation a path to improvement. I should add, finally—and with genuine admiration—that the book is beautifully written and a pleasure to read: something I can rarely say about a data analysis.
JPGB readers will of course realize that this is quite a tribute to Andy and Dan, given your painfully intimate knowledge of my garbled writing. Thanks also to Jeff Reed and Dave Myslinski from ALEC (Jeff is now rocking and rolling at the Foundation for Educational Choice), Jay and my Goldwater Institute comrades.
Check it out and let me know what you think. Be nice though: today is my birthday, which makes me even more emotionally volatile than usual.
UPDATE: Here is a link to the PDF.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
What happened to North Dakota? Some years ago, according to ALEC, North Dakota ranked with Singapore (the only US State to do so) on TIMSS comparisons. By some measures (various NAEP 8th grade Math percentile scores), North Dakota was tops. What happened? Waves of reform, I expect.
Our method of grading the states focused on the overall performance and gains of low-income students between 2003 and 2009 on the four main NAEP tests.
There may be a very large achievement gap between rich and poor students.