Stan Liebowitz and Matthew L. Kelly
State education rankings published by U.S. News & World Report, Education Week, and others play a prominent role in legislative debate and public discourse concerning education. These rankings are based partly on achievement tests, which measure student learning, and partly on other factors not directly related to student learning. When achievement tests are used as measures of learning in these conventional rankings, they are aggregated in a way that provides misleading results. To overcome these deficiencies, we create 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 our 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, we create 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. Finally, our regression results indicate that unionization has a powerful negative influence on educational outcomes, and that, given current spending levels, additional spending has little effect. We also find no evidence of a relationship between student performance and teacher-pupil ratios or private school enrollment, but some evidence that charter school enrollment has a positive effect.
Stan Liebowitz is the Ashbel Smith Professor of Economics and director of the Center for the Analysis of Property Rights and Innovation at the Jindal School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas; he is also an adjunct fellow at the Cato Institute. Matthew Kelly is a graduate student and research fellow at the Colloquium for the Advancement of Free-Enterprise Education at the Jindal School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas