education and organizations are increasingly closely linked in the same mission to develop intelligence in the small and large scale preformance. information and judgments about the quality of a country's education began in account for the more advanced next generation.
Education news publication Education Week has released the 15th issue of the annual report entitled Quality Counts 2011, which ranks countries according to education policy-making and performance. For the third year in a row, the state of Maryland appears above when scores in all six categories that make up the framework of Quality Counts collected.
The categories include the link between education and beneficial outcomes in the course of a lifetime, K-12 student achievement levels, school finance and spending patterns, teaching and various other policies and standards.
Each one of the 50 states in the study was awarded a summative letter grade to reflect the performance in all the categories and Maryland received a B-plus at number one position. The states of New York and Massachusetts, with B grades, were ranked second and third, respectively. Virginia, with a B-minus, was placed fourth. The nation as a whole earned a C which is the the same grade it had received in last year's report.
The report comes at a time when the American public education system is under the scanner for several perceived deficiencies in policy, programs and personnel that became especially more obvious following the results from assessment tests conducted under the OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).
These tests evaluated the competence of 15 year old students from various nations in math, science and reading and for 2009, found American students lagging significantly behind their peers in places like Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong.The system is under pressure to reinvent itself which is especially challenging given the deep fiscal anxiety faced by school districts and administrations in the wake of budget cuts and withdrawal of federal aid.