Review of State Policy Report Card | National Education Policy Center

http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-Students-First-Grades

Last month when StudentsFirst assigned letter grades to states for their education policies, it didn't take a genius to figure out that the grades had more to do with aligning to StudentsFirst's agenda, and less to do with current student outputs and experiences. Still, it's welcome news that my colleague Ken Libby and +Sherman Dorn have given StudentsFirst's report a scholarly treatment, digging past the PR efforts to examine StudentsFirst's sources, methods, scoring criteria, and accuracy. While Libby and Dorn found, overall, the report card usefully identified states with policies that StudentsFirst favors, "there is no independent reason to find value in the report as an accurate guide to the effectiveness of the rated state policies" (p. 6).