Indiana receives B-minus on education report card

INDIANAPOLIS – A new report ranked Indiana among just 10 states where teacher salaries were equal to or higher than pay for comparable jobs and gave the state higher overall marks in education than the national average.\nIndiana received an overall grade of B-minus, while the nationwide score was C, according to the “Quality Counts 2008” report by Education Week and the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center.\n“The report reflects our relentless push to set the right expectation for Indiana’s students and schools through high academic and accountability standards,” said Suellen Reed, Indiana’s superintendent of public instruction.\nThe annual report ranks states in several categories, including performance from kindergarten to 12th grade, school finances, teacher quality and education standards. This year, a new section of the report compared teacher pay to the salaries of workers in 16 other fields, including counselors, nurses, computer programmers and accountants.\nThe report found that public school teachers nationwide made 88 cents for every dollar earned by workers in the other fields. In Indiana, however, teachers made $1.02 for every dollar earned in the other fields studied.\nIndiana teachers may do better than those in other states when it comes to pay equity, but the state is still losing some would-be teachers to higher-paying jobs – especially in special education, speech pathology and other technical fields, said Dan Clark, deputy director of the Indiana State Teachers Association.\n“It doesn’t resolve the question of how do we compete with higher-salary professions,” he said.\nThe Quality Counts report also found that nationwide, teachers’ salaries were more compressed than other professions, meaning they had less of a chance than workers in other areas to earn above-average salaries.\n“Quality teaching matters more to student learning than anything else schools do,” said Research Center director Christopher B. Swanson. “Yet the importance of teachers is not adequately reflected in either their salaries or their career trajectories over time, and it is clear that states could be doing far more to address the issue.”\nIndiana received its highest grade, an A, in the category of standards, assessments and accountability. Indiana’s education standards, which outline exactly what students in each grade should learn, have been honored before.\nThe 2007 Quality Counts report ranked Indiana first in the nation for quality standards, assessments and accountability. In 2005, Indiana was one of only three states that received an “A” rating for standards in both math and English, according to the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, an education reform group.