Celebrating Nebraska Public Schools

Below is some interesting information that compares Nebraska Public Schools to the rest of the United States.  Nebraska public schools are out performing the rest of the nation on the NAPE, graduation rates, percent of students taking the ACT, ACT composite scores, average class sizes, and teachers with 20-years or more experience in the classroom.  All of this data is good news for Nebraska students!

There are a couple of acronyms in the document that you may not be familiar with: 

NAPE: National Assessment of Educational Progress (Nation's Report Card)

STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics

Enjoy the read!

Information Provided By STANCE: Schools Taking Action For Nebraska Children's Education

Celebrating our SCHOOLS:

Nebraska schools perform substantially better on NAEP than US average in both 8th grade reading and mathematics.

Nebraska schools perform substantially better on NAEP than US average in both 4th grade reading and mathematics.

Nebraska is just one of 13 states in our nation that showed significant gains in 4th grade math performance on NAEP from 2011 to 2013.

Science / STEM NAEP: In 2011, the average score of eighth-grade students in Nebraska was 157. This was higher than the average score of 151 for public school students in the nation. The percentage of students in Nebraska who performed at or above the NAEP Proficient level was 38 percent in 2011. This percentage was greater than the nation (31 percent). The percentage of students in Nebraska who performed at or above the NAEP Basic level was 72 percent in 2011. This percentage was greater than the nation (64 percent). (https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subject/publications/stt2013/pdf/2014465NE4.pdf)

(Source: http://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading_math_2013/#/state-performance)

Graduates: in Nebraska, nearly 90% or 89.7% of all students earned a high school diploma; the latest national figure show Nebraska beats the national high school grad rate by nearly 10%. (80% national average).

College ready / College aspiring: 88% of Nebraska's seniors took the ACT. Nationally, just 59% did.

Nebraska 2015 seniors' average ACT was a 21.7, eclipsing the National average of 21.0.

In Nebraska, where a much higher percentage of seniors take the college-entrance exam, 43% of our seniors met all college-ready benchmarks on the ACT, while just 39% did nationally.

With 69.5% of Nebraska graduates going on directly to college, Nebraska has one of the highest college-going rates of HS graduates in the nation (7/50). (higheredinfo.org)

Highly credentialed professionals:

Over 95% of Nebraska’s high school teachers are certified in the subject areas in which they teach.

And the percentage of teachers’ with 20 or more years’ full time teaching experience in Nebraska (27.6%) is well above the national average (21.3%). [The link at NCES shows a range of teaching experience levels for all states and national averages.]

(http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d14/tables/dt14_209.30.asp)

Personalized learning environment:

Average class sizes are smaller in Nebraska than national averages

	Nebraska	Nation
Elementary	17.9	21.2
Secondary	23.5	26.8

State education data profile:

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/stateprofiles/sresult.asp?mode=short&s1=31

Notes on School SPENDING:

Nebraska schools average $11.5K in per pupil spending. The national average is $10.7K per pupil.

[Other notes for revision]: Quick Facts doc published by NDE 10-11 offers a nice synopsis of + data points: http://www.education.ne.gov/documents/QuickFacts10-11.pdf