Sometimes, it seems like folks just can’t get enough of 50-state education rankings. Hey, if your state didn’t make the top 10 of Education Week’s Quality Counts list, then maybe it’s in the top 10 of the Students First or the National Council on Teacher Quality’s (NCTQ) lists.
These lists are not all created the same way and—you guessed it—they provide a head-spinning array of rankings. So, in steps an older fourth ranking report called the Child Well-Being Index, produced by the Foundation for Child Development (FCD). They decided to put all three of the new rankings in perspective by diving into the factors that affect student learning, both within and outside of school.
The New America Foundation’s Early Ed Watch blog provides details of the comparison. Connecticut appears on two of the top ten lists: (1) NCTQ’s list that emphasizes state policies that ensure teacher education programs are preparing classroom-ready teachers and (2) FCD’s ranking of seven areas of child well-being, which weighs more out-of-school factors. No states made it onto all four lists and only Massachusetts and Florida appeared on three of the four.
