California ranked 46th in education

The "Education State Rankings" from Morgan Quitno Press has ranked the 50 states on education: States were graded on 21 factors, including student achievement and attendance, positive outcomes, strong student-teacher relationships and school district efficiency... number of high school graduates, reading, writing and math proficiency, percent of school-age kids in public schools, high school drop out rates, student-teacher ratios and class size.

I've never heard of that Press or their survey before, but I suspect there's some hidden agenda at work somewhere in it. Nevertheless, here are the top five:

1. Vermont
2. Connecticut
3. Massachusetts
4. New Jersey
5. Maine

New Jersey? These top rankings might have something to do with the way their school districts are structured, by city rather than by county. Or, perhaps it's all that snow. Anyway, here are the bottom ten:

41. Tennessee
42. Hawaii
43. Alabama
44. Alaska
45. Louisiana
46. California
47. Nevada
48. New Mexico
49. Mississippi
50. Arizona

Note that while California lost out to Alabama, at least we're still ahead of Mississippi. Whoo! And, note also that four out of the five worst states have something in common: they're destinations for huge numbers of illegal aliens.

That, of course, has something to do with it; without them California would probably be near the top. Of course, you will never hear any liberals talking about that. Better to be worse than Alabama than to be called "mean-spirited".

Comments

I think that some of the study is biases. New Jersey spents the most money but a lot of states have more people finished high school as a precentage of the population. I think that both New York and New Jersey poor badly for the money they spend. And New Jersey has some very poor performing black cities like Camden and Nework and the illegals have increased more as a percentage the past 5 years there than in Ca.

These sort of results are like an air raid siren signalling the destruction of civilization. Taking CA from the top 10% to the bottom 10% of state's school performance, in only 40 years, is damage unprecedented in the history of the world, to the quality of population of a jurisdiction of tens of millions. The psychometrician, L. Gottfredson, said:"No culture can sustain new practices... beyond the capacity of its large cognitive middle". A society without new practices, without new technoogy, is what those who fail to raise the alarm over this degradation of population quality are working towards. Technology and living standards are not guaranteed to move forward, they can easily roll back, as in Africa.

Does anyone else think it odd that the majority East Asian state of Hawaii ranks near the bottom? East Asians were long touted as the "model minority" (though that language has disappeared over the last ten or so years, presumably offensive to non-whites in general) and have higher averge IQ's than whites. Maybe multiculturalism, in the long run, is somehow destructive even to East Asians.

Unquestionably the biggest factor in these rankings is measured "outcomes". And for that, I think the fact that some of the problem kids are here illegally has something to do with it because they are English learners. But an honest analysis of the data clearly shows that a big population of Hispanics -- most immigrants are Hispanic, certainly most illegals -- will pull a state's ranking down, whether they are here illegally or not, whether they are English learners or not; it's only a matter of degree. And this shows what is one undeniable aspect of immigration to America today, immigration which if unchanged will someday, probably late this century, make America over to be a majority Hispanic country -- America is becoming dumber. And THAT ought to concern any intellectually honest person.