Fixing the Bias in Current State K-12 Education Rankings. Policy Analysis No. 854

State education rankings published by "U.S. News & World Report," "Education Week," and others are based partly on achievement tests, which measure student learning, and partly on other factors not directly related to student learning. These rankings are aggregated in a way that provide misleading results by: (1) ignoring the substantial variation present in student populations across states; (2) including data that are inappropriate or irrelevant to the educational performance of schools; and (3) disregarding government budgetary constraints. To overcome these deficiencies, the authors created a new ranking of state education systems using demographically disaggregated achievement data and excluding less informative factors that are not directly related to learning. Using this methodology changes the order of state rankings considerably. Many states in New England and the Upper Midwest fall in the rankings, whereas many states in the South and Southwest score much higher than they do in conventional rankings. Furthermore, the authors created another set of rankings on the efficiency of education spending. In these efficiency rankings, achieving successful outcomes while economizing on education expenditures is considered better than doing so through lavish spending. These efficiency rankings cause a further increase in the rankings of southern and western states and a decline in the rankings of northern states. Lastly, the authors' regression results indicate that unionization has a powerful negative influence on educational outcomes, and that, given current spending levels, additional spending has little effect.