Apparently dumb behavior is par for the course in New Mexico's schools:
The smartest state in the union for the second consecutive year is Massachusetts. The dumbest, for the third year in a row, is New Mexico.These are the findings of the Education State Rankings, a survey by Morgan Quitno Press of hundreds of public school systems in all 50 states. States were graded on a variety of factors based on how they compare to the national average. These included such positive attributes as per-pupil expenditures, public high school graduation rates, average class size, student reading and math proficiency, and pupil-teacher ratios. States received negative points for high drop-out rates and physical violence.
Wonder how the New Mexicans feel about this? I also wonder how much of the data are driven by student populations that historically do worse on standardized tests, like Hispanics and Native Americans. From what I gather, this was a norm-based survey where all positive factors were weighted the same, and all negative factors were weighted the same.
Amusingly, a negative factor that carries the same weight as in-school violence and dropout rates is "Percent of Public Elementary and Secondary School Staff Who are School District Administrators." In other words, the more administrators you have compared to the teaching staff, the less likely that anything useful gets accomplished.
Posted by kswygert at October 11, 2005 11:28 AM