Author(s): The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation
Published: Sept. 11, 2014
Report Intro/Brief:
“Like leaders of large and complex organizations, state policymakers need actionable data. To address this need, in 2007 the U.S. Chamber of Commerce launched an effort to dig into national statistics and available rankings of state policy environments to see who were the national leaders in educational performance—and who were the laggards. The resulting report, Leaders & Laggards: A State-by-State Report Card on Educational Effectiveness, ranked states on nine indicators. A second iteration of Leaders & Laggards was released in 2009, which focused on the states that led the way in educational innovation. These two reports produced findings that influenced subsequent discussions around K–12 education policy.
Leaders & Laggards 2014 updates and enhances earlier iterations of the report, shining a light both on areas of improvement as well as areas that continue to fall short. We also added new metrics, including measures of parental choice, international competitiveness, technology policy, and fiscal responsibility. In addition, for the first time, we show change over time in student scores between the first Leaders & Laggards report in 2007 and this edition.”
