The American Legislative Exchange Council has recently issued its 2007 report card for the states. Among the conclusions: increases in student achievement have been "agonizingly slow and extremely expensive." According to one measurement, only 3 in 10 students in eighth grade can read or do math at grade level. (How many can do both? That will remain a mystery.)

You can download the entire report (144 pages) or download only the section for a specific state.

It’s chock-full of data that lawmakers and parents might wish to chew on. After three pages of introductory material (including an executive summary), the report plunges into a one-page snapshot for each state plus the District of Columbia. Each snapshot has data on achievement, spending, demographics, and charter schools.

After the snapshots come the data tables, and lots of them. Chapter 1 has 12 tables dealing with inputs dealing with staff (number, pay) and overall spending. Chapter 2 has 11 tables of variables measuring achievement. It’s an alphabet soup of scores on the ACT, SAT, and NAEP. Chapter 3 mashes the first two chapters together, correlating inputs with outputs. Chapter 4 contains some basic demographic information about student enrollment as well as a ranking of charter school laws and school choice programs.

The states are ranked for their effectiveness in providing education. The performance of each state is summarized in a composite index that relates each state to another. The index looks at where each state ranks on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the ACT and / or the SAT. The resulting values depend on how the states compare with each other, which has some limitations: Is the difference between state #10 and state #11 on the NAEP, ACT and SAT very different from the difference between state #11 and state #12? Are the differences among any of those states statistically significant? Despite this problem, the ranking does give you a sense of which neighborhood a state is in, if not which street address.

Likewise, the effort made by each state is calculated for various factors such as per-pupil spending. A regression analysis compares both inputs and outputs, which in turns provides a ranking for the states.