Quality Counts 2013, released by the weekly newspaper Education Week and the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, grades states on a variety of indicators, including school spending, overall student performance, and college readiness.

It didn’t come as a surprise to most policy makers and educators that Mississippi posted one of the nation’s lowest overall scores, a C-minus, or 71 on a 100-point scale. As the Hechinger Report has reported this school year, Mississippi routinely rates low when it comes to child welfare and education indicators, despite some promising programs and pockets of success.

Mississippi fared particularly poorly in three categories: K-12 achievement, support capacity for teachers, and education spending. However, the state earned an A for its standards and accountability structures, which include issuing annual letter grades to school districts. Districts that repeatedly perform poorly can be taken over by the state.

Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York were the top three rated states in the annual survey.

Students at Akili Academy, a charter school in New Orleans. (Photo by Sarah Garland)

Overall, charters enrolled more than two million students in 41 states and the District of Columbia during the 2011-12 school year; that amounts to about 5 percent of public school enrollment nationally.

In only one community, New Orleans, did charters serve more than half of the public school children last year. But the data suggest that within the next few years, charters will likely educate a majority of students in other communities as well. For instance, charters enrolled 41 percent of students in both Detroit Public Schools and the District of Columbia Public Schools in 2011-12. Seven other communities experienced growth greater than 25 percent in charter-school enrollment between 2010 and 2011.

Apart from New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and a few other Southern cities, Midwestern towns dominated the top 10 list.

The report cites parent demand as a major explanation for charters’ growth. But President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top program also motivated some states to lift or eliminate their caps on the number of charter schools allowable under state law.

For more background on the history and politics of charter schools, please see this Education Writers Association guide.

Districts serving the highest percentage of charter school students (2011-12):

New Orleans Public Schools (Louisiana), 76 percent

Detroit Public Schools (Michigan), 41 percent

District of Columbia Public Schools, 41 percent

Kansas City, Missouri School District (Missouri), 37 percent

Flint City School District (Michigan), 33 percent

Gary Community School Corporation (Indiana), 31 percent

St. Louis Public Schools (Missouri), 31 percent

Cleveland Metropolitan School District (Ohio), 28 percent

Albany City School District (New York), 26 percent

Dayton Public Schools (Ohio), 26 percent

San Antonio Independent School District (Texas), 26 percent

Indianapolis Public Schools (Indiana), 25 percent

Roosevelt School District 66 (Arizona), 25 percent

Toledo Public Schools (Ohio), 25 percent

Youngstown City Schools (Ohio), 25 percent

Adams County School District 50 (Colorado), 23 percent

Grand Rapids Public Schools (Michigan), 23 percent

The School District of Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), 23 percent

Milwaukee Public Schools (Wisconsin), 22 percent

Phoenix Union High School District (Arizona), 22 percent

For more than a decade the study tracked students who received privately-funded vouchers in the late 1990s. African-American students in that group were 24 percent more likely than those in a control group to attend college and 58 percent more likely to attend private four-year colleges. Hispanic students who received vouchers were also more likely to enroll in college, but only by a small, statistically insignificant, amount.

The study’s authors—Brookings’ Matthew M. Chingos and Harvard’s Paul E. Peterson, a voucher advocate—compared the college matriculation rates of about 1,300 students who received a voucher to a similarly-sized control group who did not win vouchers in a lottery. The study is unusual in that it focused on long-term educational attainment rather than short-term test-score trends.

Vouchers have resurged in popularity over the last two years, but it’s unclear whether the New York study has much relevance for states like Indiana, Wisconsin, and Louisiana, which have recently expanded or created voucher programs. The designs of those states’ programs, as well as the overall quality of their private-school sectors, vary significantly.

The study’s authors argued their research illustrates the promise of vouchers in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. But Rutgers professor Bruce D. Baker critiqued the study in a blog post, saying other factors—apart from vouchers—could have contributed to the higher college-going rates for African-Americans at the private schools.

More information and context about vouchers can be found in a recent Hechinger Report article.

The exchange prompted me to think more explicitly about language as I wrote about education in the decade that followed. Some days, the pressure of deadlines made me negligent; and at least a few times I let simplistic, misleading, or jargon-laden language slip into my writing out of sheer laziness. But overall I believe Jamaal’s comment helped make me a more deliberate and considerate writer.

I was reminded of the importance of language during a recent virtual discussion among reporters about the overuse, and misuse, of the term “reform” in education writing. Several journalists pointed out that labeling a change in policy or approach a “reform” (or an advocate of such change a “reformer”) carries a positive connotation since the word means improvement. They expressed concern that journalists who use the term implicitly express support for a controversial education agenda—including charter schools and linking teacher pay to student test scores.

Journalists should certainly strive to ensure they don’t unthinkingly support a given political agenda through the appropriation of its rhetoric. But as the political debate surrounding public education grows more heated, I worry that we all—journalists, educators and policymakers included—are missing the point when it comes to our words. The main reason we should be more scrupulous in using terms like “reform,” “inner-city,” “value-added,” “at risk,” “learning deficit” or “overage” is not to avoid appearing complicit with a given agenda. We should eschew such terms because they undermine and devalue the primary mission of public education and the journalism that documents it: communicating with children and parents.

No thoughtful person would tell a mother: Your at-risk, overage child’s failing school will be reformed, and value-added testing introduced, because of the students’ many deficits. Yet the sum of our worst, laziest rhetoric can have that same effect. At best, such misguided language confuses families, leaving them disengaged. At worst, it offends and alienates families, leaving them enraged. Almost always, it erodes trust with public education’s core constituency.

Just weeks before I had the conversation about the term “inner-city,” I wrote about a national effort to overhaul high schools by making them smaller. I decided to follow over the course of a year a struggling Milwaukee high school called North Division, the first in that city to be broken into smaller schools. In the first installment of the series, I wrote that students and teachers at North Division were “guinea pigs” in a nationwide push for smaller high schools. I thought nothing about the term until I learned, weeks later, that I had deeply offended many people in the North Division community by likening them to animals.

I had used “guinea pigs” as a figure of speech countless times. But through conversations with students and staff at North Division, I realized they viewed the term very differently: What I thought of as a flip cliché was to them yet another denigration of a school and community that had, for generations, been unfairly and sweepingly labeled as “violent,” “failing,” “notorious,” “out of control” and  “dangerous.” What’s more, it conjured up a painful, not-too-distant history in which poor, black people were literally used as human subjects in unethical science experiments. I could rationalize forever about what I had meant—and not meant—by the words. But in the end, all that mattered was how they had been received.