Quality Counts 2020: Chance for Success. Education Week. Volume 39, Number 19

Education Week. Available from: Editorial Projects in Education, Inc.. 6935 Arlington Road Suite 100, Bethesda, MD 20814-5233. Tel: 800-346-1834; Tel: 301-280-3100; e-mail: [email protected]; Web site: http://www.edweek.org/info/about/

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Public Education; Success; Educational Indicators; Outcomes of Education; Educational Improvement; Educational Change; Early Childhood Education; Elementary Secondary Education; English Language Learners; Language Fluency; Parents; Educational Quality; State Action

District of Columbia; New Mexico; Massachusetts; New Jersey; Louisiana; Mississippi; Tennessee; Delaware; Maryland

This document presents the opening chapter of Quality Counts 2020, Education Week's annual, comparative examination of the nation's public education system based on a wealth of academic, financial, and socioeconomic factors analyzed by the EdWeek Research Center. This January installment--Chance for Success--is the first of three Quality Counts reports this year, and the one with perhaps the most personal connection to policymakers, educators, and parents. It focuses on the underlying conditions in states, schools, and households that affect whether children get what they need to become successful adults as they move through the educational pipeline into the post-school phase of their lives. Collectively, the Chance-for-Success Index's 13 indicators--all drawn from the most-recent federal and other data sources--offer a kind of body scan of states' strengths and challenges in their quest to ensure what the EdWeek Research Center calls positive outcomes from cradle to career. This includes evaluating the nation and the states on family, school, and socioeconomic markers, from the early years and K-12, into adulthood and the working world. The Chance-for-Success Index offers policymakers in each state data they need to make decisions about how to build on what they're doing right, offer support in strategic areas, and troubleshoot where needed. Complementing that data is a package of articles with takeaways from this year's index. They offer lessons from the top- and bottom-performing states; what's behind the District of Columbia's steady pattern of improvement in this area over more than a decade's time; and a close-up look at "linguistic integration," or parental fluency in English, and its significance in the overall array of indicators. Articles in this issue's Quality Counts report include: (1) Scant Progress, Persistent Challenges in Assuring Bright Prospects for All (Sterling C. Lloyd and Alex Harwin); (2) A Long, Slow Climb to Improvement Gains Momentum (Madeline Will); (3) State Seeks Ways to Turn the Page on Weak Showing (Andrew Ujifusa); (4) Leading State Confronts Soft Spots in Its System (Arianna Prothero); and (5) English-Fluency in the Home: Why Does It Matter? (Sterling C. Lloyd and Corey Mitchell). The Chance-for-Success Index will be followed in June by top-to-bottom rankings and analysis of school finance, and in September by the K-12 Achievement Index and the annual summative ranking of the states and the nation, pulling together all the threads of Quality Counts for a definitive report card.

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