Endangering Prosperity by Hanushek Eric A.;Peterson Paul E.;Woessmann Ludger;Summers Lawrence H.;

Author:Hanushek, Eric A.;Peterson, Paul E.;Woessmann, Ludger;Summers, Lawrence H.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press

Source: Authors’ calculations; see appendix A for methodology.

Comparisons among States

Progress was far from uniform across the United States. Indeed, the variation across states was about as large as the variation among the countries of the world. Maryland won the gold medal by having the steepest overall growth trend since 1992. Coming close behind, Florida won the silver medal and Delaware the bronze. The other seven states that rank among the top-ten improvers, all of which outpaced the United States as a whole, are Massachusetts, Louisiana, South Carolina, New Jersey, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Virginia. See figure 6-2 for an ordering of the forty-one states by rate of improvement.

Iowa shows the slowest rate of improvement. The other four states whose gains were clearly less than those of the United States as a whole, ranked from the bottom, are Maine, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Nebraska. Note, however, that because of nonparticipation in the early NAEP assessments, we cannot estimate an improvement trend for the 1992–2011 time period for nine states—Alaska, Illinois, Kansas, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota, Vermont, and Washington.6

Cumulative growth rates vary widely. Average student gains over the nineteen-year period in Maryland, Florida, Delaware, and Massachusetts, with annual growth rates of 3.1 to 3.3 percent of a standard deviation, yielded gains of about 60 percent of a standard deviation over the entire time period, or better than two years of additional learning. Meanwhile, annual gains in the states with the weakest growth rates—Iowa, Maine, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin—varied between 0.7 percent and 1.0 percent of a standard deviation, which translate over the nineteen-year period into learning gains of one-half to three-quarters of a year. In other words, the states making the largest gains are improving at a rate two to three times the rate in states with the smallest gains.

Had all students throughout the country made the same average gains as those in the four leading states, the United States would have been making progress roughly comparable to the rate of improvement in Germany and the United Kingdom, bringing the United States reasonably close to the top-performing countries in the world (as long as those nations did not also improve).

Figure 6-2. U.S. States: Changes in Student Achievement, 1992–2011

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