Warning About 'Report Cards' on State Education Policy

Be careful about putting too much weight in the "report cards" various organizations issue about state education policies. A new analysis from the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder has found that the grades are fairly predictable, based on the ideology of the group doing the evaluations. As a result, every state has earned a D or F on at least one of the report cards in recent years. An almost every state has earned an A or B on one of the report cards. The analysis was prepared by Sherman Dorn, an education professor at the University of South Florida, and Ken Libby, a doctoral student at Boulder.