Search for:

Data To Support My Educational Claims

The other day Amoeba, totally frustrated and furious with the UH powers-that-be and Hawaiian government spending in general, said he was going to write a post a day and fly it on my blog telling people why they shouldn’t come to Hawaii and why those here needed to flee from the state.  I told him that if he did so, that in no time I would have no readers whatsoever — yet here is my second post on the topic today!

I was looking for the stats to uphold my claim that Hawaii is one of the lowest scoring states in the nation. I remembered seeing them when I was checking out online degrees. I think the graph on the website pretty well sums it up:

I think the graph also clarifies the State of Hawaii educational strategy. Please note, Hawaii ranks in the middle of the bottom five. Since they’re way out of the league of competing with Iowa for first place, they’ve decided to give Washington D.C. a run for last place. I’ll be they make it in notime flat!

7 Comments

  1. Well, my suspicion would be that apart from old home Iowa, all the states that ever spent money on education have bad budgets so I’m not sure Hawai’i is going to fare that badly comparatively. I think it’s mostly states like Texas that aren’t slashing their budgets.
    .-= Doug´s last blog ..New Year’s Resolution =-.

  2. The College Board (authors and providers of the SAT) says this about such rankings.

    Media and others often rank states, districts and schools on the basis of SAT scores despite repeated warnings that such rankings are invalid. The SAT is a strong indicator of trends in the college-bound population, but it should never be used alone for such comparisons because demographics and other nonschool factors can have a strong effect on scores. If ranked, schools and states that encourage students to apply to college may be penalized because scores tend to decline with a rise in percentage of test-takers.

    In fact, I seem to recall some years ago that the midwestern states that rank so highly in this graph rather severely restrict access to the SAT, while other states (I suspect Maine belongs in this category) have more “open” participation policies. Thus, the numbers in the graph are meaningless without, at the very least, accompanying stats showing the percentage of 18-year-olds who are graduating from high school, and the percentage of the graduates who have taken the SAT.

    This is not to say that the school system in Hawai‘i is not (ahem) challenged, particularly if one excludes the private-school indoctrinates. Just that one has to be more careful about measuring those (lack of) outcomes.

  3. I’m really surprised that the school system is doing so badly in Hawaii. I’m still in shock about the furlough days and the amount of teacher planning times they have in Hawaii. I wrote a bunch here but erased it because I don’t know enough to make an informed judgement. It just seems rather different from what we do in Illinois.
    .-= musings´s last blog ..Why He Likes Being Married to Me! =-.

  5. Yea…. I don’t know where Maryland places within that dark orange… but I do know we “encourage” ALL students to take the SATs. They don’t all do it… but they are all encouraged too. I’m sure our percentages are pretty high.
    .-= Melli´s last blog ..Random Dozen #18 =-.

  6. Wow, Quilly! That map is discouraging! I thought VA was doing better than that. I know you were talking about Hawaii, but don’t we all look at our own state first!

    Thanks for reading “deep” in my random dozen today; ‘preciate it!
    .-= Angie´s last blog ..Random Dozen 2010! =-.

Comments are closed.