Southern states improve education policies

Education Week released its annual Quality Counts assessment about the state of education in America, and several Southern states were found to have made marked improvement in their education policies. Of the thirteen states in the top tier of rankings, six are in the South (Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Arkansas, South Carolina and Georgia).

As part of the analysis, states were graded on their efforts to align K-12 schooling with earlier and later stages of education and the workplace. According to the report, Arkansas, Georgia, Maryland, Tennessee, and West Virginia were among the states that made the greatest strides in this area by implementing at least 10 of the 14 alignment policies tracked in this year’s survey.

South Carolina earned the highest grade in the teaching profession category (followed by Arkansas), for its efforts to institute "state accountability for quality, incentives to attract and keep talent and allocate it equitably across schools, and efforts to build and support teaching capacity." Arkansas, Florida, and Georgia were among only five states that "require all schools to notify parents when their child is in a class taught by a teacher not qualified in that subject." Only North Carolina and South Carolina "reduce the workload during a teacher’s formative first year," and along with Rhode Island, they are also the only states that "publicly report school-by-school information about working conditions or school climate based, in part, on teacher surveys."

Mississippi is the only Southern state ranked in the lowest tier.