State STEM Education Rankings

This week's issue of Southern Compass, the electronic newsletter published by the Southern Growth Policies Board, suggested its readers check out the March 27, 2008, edition of Education Week, which is dedicated to examining what states are doing to improve science, technology, engineering and math education (STEM). STEM education is considered one of the highest priorities by many groups for the U.S. to maintain its global leadership in innovation and competitiveness.

The online Education Week is dedicated to the Technology Counts report, which looks at the states' STEM progress in the three areas of student access to technology, use of technology in student education, and institutional and teacher capacity to use technology. A joint project of Education Week and the Editorial Projects of the Educational Research Center, Technology Counts 2008 is the 11th annual assessment conducted to benchmark states against each other and the national average on 14 indicators, such as test scores, standards and policy inputs toward improving STEM education.

While Technology Counts 2008 marks significant progress in several areas nationally - such as the number of states requiring at least three years of math or science before awarding a high school diploma (which has grown to 38 and 35 states, respectively) - the individual grades states received reflect the challenges still ahead. Only the District of Columbia, Iowa and Mississippi have not prepared technology standards either as stand-alone documents or as integrated elements of the English, math, science or history curricula.

The report's grading of states may remind Digest readers of some of their tougher high school teachers: Only three states - West Virginia, Georgia and South Dakota received an overall grade of A or A- (90 points or higher on a 100 point scale). On the other hand, while none of the states were found failing, seven received overall marks of D+, D or D-: California, Delaware, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia. Because of changes to the measures, comparison to the grades of previous years is discouraged, Education Week advises.

Grading is based on both quantitative and qualitative measures. The four Access indicators included: percent of students with access to computers in fourth grade, percent with access in eighth grade, number of students per instructional computer and number of students per high speed Internet-connected computer. Use and capacity measures were based on the presence of policies and standards the Education Research Center deemed important for improving STEM education, such as whether or not a state had a virtual school, if it offered computer-based assessments, or whether or not a state required teachers to pass technology requirements at hiring and recertification points.   

In addition to the detailed state reports, interactive maps and tables charting scores and trends, Technology Counts includes articles profiling examples of successful STEM initiatives and some of the challenges measuring the impact of federal initiatives to improve STEM. Technology Counts 2008 is available at: http://www.edweek.org/ew/toc/2008/03/27/index.html