Quality and Proficiency in Our Public Schools

In Lost Opportunity, the Schott Foundation for Public Education uses a single common yardstick to measure the quality of education in the United States and another to measure equity—the chance that a student from a disadvantaged group will have access to a quality education. Unfortunately, neither “quality” “nor equity” are often measured when it comes to public education, at least not not in combination and not on a state-by-state basis.

Lost Opportunity looks at each state and its success in getting ALL students academically proficient. Using NAEP as the yardstick, Lost Opportunity uses the percentage of students scoring proficient or better on the eighth grade NAEP exam as the measure of overall quality achieved by a state’s public schools.

States Sorted by 8th Grade NAEP Proficiency (Percentage of all students at or above proficient)
Rank	Jurisdictions	All Students at or Above Proficient
	National Public	29%
1	Massachusetts	43%
2	Vermont	42%
3	Montana	39%
3	New Jersey	39%
5	Maine	37%
5	New Hampshire	37%
5	South Dakota	37%
5	Minnesota	37%
5	Connecticut	37%
10	Iowa	36%
10	Pennsylvania	36%
10	Ohio	36%
13	Nebraska	35%
13	Kansas	35%
13	Colorado	35%
16	Oregon	34%
16	Washington	34%
16	Virginia	34%
19	Wyoming	33%
19	Maryland	33%
19	Wisconsin	33%
22	Idaho	32%
22	North Dakota	32%
22	New York	32%
25	Missouri	31%
25	Delaware	31%
25	Indiana	31%
28	Utah	30%
28	Illinois	30%
30	Florida	28%
30	Kentucky	28%
30	Texas	28%
30	North Carolina	28%
30	Michigan	28%
35	Alaska	27%
35	Rhode Island	27%
37	Oklahoma	26%
37	Georgia	26%
37	Tennessee	26%
40	Arkansas	25%
40	South Carolina	25%
42	Arizona	24%
43	West Virginia	23%
44	Nevada	22%
45	California	21%
45	Alabama	21%
47	Hawaii	20%
48	Louisiana	19%
49	Mississippi	17%
49	New Mexico	17%
51	District of Columbia	12%

One important point that should not be missed by anyone seeking to improve the quality of K-12 education in the United States: even in the most-proficient state in the nation – Massachusetts – only 43 percent of eighth graders are scoring proficient or better on the reading NAEP. That means that, for now, quality is defined by having a two-in-five chance of reading at grade level by junior high school. We still have miles to go before we are providing all students a true opportunity to learn, and expecting all students to be academically proficient.