Education Week has come out with their latest Quality Counts report, which ranks state school systems in six categories, like teacher policies and school funding.

One new indicator in this year's report: a comparison of teacher salaries to pay in 16 jobs with similar skills/training, such as registered nurses and accountants. In 40 states, teacher pay was less than those other jobs. The worst offender:

North Carolina had the lowest comparable teacher pay, with just 78.8 cents to every dollar earned by other professions.

Arkansas was the only Southern state where teacher pay was in line with similar professions.

Southern states shined in other areas of the study, though:

Overall, however, Southern states ranked highest for their teaching policies, with South Carolina topping the list, followed by Arkansas, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia and Louisiana. Most of these states distinguished themselves by having teacher evaluations tied to student achievement, encouraging more professional development, and offering incentives to principals to work in hard-to-staff schools.

Another interesting indicator: Ed Week's "chance-for-success" index, which "rates a child's likelihood of succeeding in life." Virginia topped the list last year, but fell to number eight in this year's rankings.

The two states where youth face the greatest obstacles to success, according to the study? Mississippi and Louisiana, where long-standing school troubles were exacerbated by the slow recovery from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

View the state-by-state report cards here (requires Adobe Flash Player).

Labels: higher education, north carolina, schools

For the first time in more than four decades, the South* is the only region in the country where low-income children make up a majority -- 54 percent -- of public school students. That has critical implications for the South's future, since low-income students as a group lag behind their wealthier peers by most measures of educational progress.

These are among the alarming findings of a new report from the Southern Education Foundation, an Atlanta-based nonprofit that promotes excellence in education. Titled "A New Majority: Low Income Students in the South's Public Schools," the report was issued in honor of SEF's 140th anniversary.

Low-income students have constituted a majority of the South's public school children for the last three years, according to the report. In the 2004-2005 school year, 50 percent of Southern school children were eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. In 2005-2006 that number increased to 53 percent, and it climbed another percentage point the following year. (Click on map from the report at right for a larger image.)

The report attributes the disturbing trend to several factors. Demographically, many Southern states are experiencing a higher rate of population growth among Latino and African American children, who are statistically more likely than white children to be born into low-income households. Economically, many Southern states are struggling with high rates of underemployment and unemployment due to the outsourcing of good jobs to cheaper foreign labor markets. And historically, the Deep South and Southern Appalachia have experienced persistently high poverty rates.

But policy choices made by Southern politicians are also partly to blame for the problem, the report says:

The South's challenges are made even greater by the fact that Southern states provide the least educational resources to their low income students. The South has the lowest per pupil expenditures in the nation. In 2000, for example, Mississippi's highest per pupil expenditures did not even match many states' lowest student expenditure. That year, public school districts in Mississippi with the state's highest per pupil expenditures spent less per child than school districts in more than 20 other states spent in their lowest per pupil expenditures. Also, the South provides the nation's smallest amounts of need-based aid to assist the low income students who do graduate from high school and have a chance to attend college.

As the report concludes, how Southern states address this new majority in public school classrooms is the most important challenge the region -- and perhaps the nation -- will face this century.


* SEF defines the South much as we at the Institute do (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia), but unlike us it also counts Maryland and Oklahoma.

Labels: schools, southern history, Southern Politics

Danielle Super, a student at Smyrna High in suburban Nashville, Tenn., is suing her school district for denying her the right to wear to class a T-shirt emblazoned with the words "Free the Jena Six," the Associated Press reports.

Assistant Principal Jolene Watson reportedly told Super she couldn't wear the shirt -- which refers to a controversial case involving six black teens arrested on trumped up charges following a series of racially charged incidents in a small Louisiana town -- because it could "cause a problem."

James Evans, a spokesperson for Rutherford County Schools, told the AP that district officials "don’t believe the school is in the wrong, and we are confident this will play out in our favor."

According to the district's dress code, students are prohibited from wearing in school anything associated with criminal gangs or bearing slogans "that are about or suggestive of drugs, alcohol, sex, obscenities or prove to be a disturbing influence."

Super is seeking an injunction allowing her to wear the shirt as well as unspecified damages.

Labels: civil rights, jena six, schools, Tennessee

With Jena on the media radar, NPR did a story this week about the larger issue of re-segregation of U.S. schools. Citing a recent report from the UCLA-based Civil Rights Project, NPR notes that -- thanks to legal and political advocacy in the 1950s and 60s, the South had become the national leader for school integration.

But a series of Supreme Court decisions starting in the 1990s -- and most recently in the Louisville and Seattle decisions about desegregation orders -- have turned back the clock. As the UCLA report (pdf) notes:

Desegregation is often treated as if it were something that occurred after the Brown decision in the l950s. In fact, serious desegregation of the black South only came after Congress and the Johnson Administration acted powerfully under the l964 Civil Rights Act; serious desegregation of the cities only occurred in the l970s and was limited outside the South. Though the Supreme Court recognized the rights of Latinos to desegregation remedies in 1973, there was little enforcement as the Latino numbers multiplied rapidly and their segregation intensified.

Resegregation, which took hold in the early 1990s after three Supreme Court decisions from 1991 to 1995 limiting desegregation orders, is continuing to grow in all parts of the country for both African Americans and Latinos and is accelerating the most rapidly in the only region that had been highly desegregated—the South.

That's a critical backdrop to stories of race and schools like the Jena 6.

Labels: jena six, schools