By Gene Meyer | Kansas Reporter

TOPEKA — A new, highly critical evaluation of the U.S. education system turned up an unexpected bright spot in Kansas.

Math students in the tiny Weskan High School, at the south end of a small, five-block long, four-block wide unincorporated farming community, outscored more than four-fifths of fellow students in the United States and 25 other countries, according to a new Global Report Card put online last week by the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas.

That puts the school in 40th place among the nation's 60 top performing high schools among 14,000 in the nation, according to the institute, which is affiliated with the George W. Bush Presidential Center. The institute advocates for education reform, global health, freedom and economic growth.

"Several years ago, we wouldn't have made that list," said Dave Hale, Weskan's superintendent, who learned of the results Wednesday, about the school only five miles from the Colorado-Kansas state line.

"But we've got a terrific math teacher, Kristen Tupps, and a good percentage of some very sharp math students in our 40 student high school," Hale said. "Plus, we tweaked the curriculum a bit awhile ago. That all bumps up our percentage."

Only one other Kansas high school, Hoisington, made the institute's list, coming in 54th on the new Global Report Card. The institute researchers designed the website to compare every school district’s results in the United States with others nationwide as well as 25 countries where students take similar assessment tests.

The numbers are based on  results of the  U.S. Education Department's standardized National Assessment  of Educational Progress, or NAEP, tests given between between 2004 and 2007, the latest available. NAEP tests are one of the department's primary tools for comparing widely diverse school systems across the United States.

Those results are not pretty, said Jay Greene, a Bush Institute  fellow in educational policy.

"Even our most elite suburban school districts often produce results that are mediocre when compared with those of our international peers," Greene said.

Only 820 of the nearly 14,000 schools for which results were gathered achieved scores that would place them in the top third of classes globally. More than 9,400, or 68 percent, landed in the bottom half.

Posh suburban schools in places such as Beverly Hills, Calif., Shaker Heights, Ohio, or Evanston, Ill., home to Northwestern University, look good compared to bigger urban schools nearby, Greene said, "but students are increasingly competing with students from outside the U.S. ... and a meaningful assessment of student achievement requires a global comparison."

Kansas scores and comparisons on the website broadly mirror those for the entire United States.  

Of the state's 20 largest districts, home to 52 percent of all students enrolled in Kansas, only 10 are solidly in the top half of their class globally and only four make the top third.

Wichita Public Schools, the state's largest district, landed near the edge of the bottom third.  Kansas City’s predominately inner city district, the state's third largest, and Topeka, the state capitol's district, also fell in or near the bottom third for math scores, reading scores or both.

"Only six of the 20 districts had math numbers above 50 percent, and one, Manhattan, was at 50," said John LaPlante, a public policy specialist and education fellow at the Kansas Policy Institute in Wichita. The not-for-profit research organization advocates low taxes and free market solutions for policy issues.

Kansas' best performing schools tend to be concentrated in the Johnson County suburbs and office parks southwest of Kansas City, Mo., LaPlante said.

Kansas education officials, meanwhile, are considering changing how they measure classroom success to standards different from the ones Bush Institute researchers used.

The Bush researchers said many results on the global report card partly reflect schools' performance under the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind Act programs, according to the report card website.

Kansas, like many states, had pledged under the No Child Left Behind Act that all of its students' reading and math scores would meet those federally required 100 percent proficiency levels this year.

Now the Kansas State Board of Education is considering whether to seek a waiver from hitting those promised targets, said Kathy Toelkes, communications director for the board and the Kansas State Department of Education. Kansas applied once and was rejected

President Barack Obama last month said the federal government would agree to waivers for more states, if the states agreed to be held more accountable for whatever educational progress students and schools actually achieved.

Board members haven't voted on whether to apply again for a waiver, "but in the discussion so far, it seems to make sense," Toelkes said.

"We want to be accountable, which is what the president's proposals appear to call for, but we don't want to be required to hit specific big targets that don't reflect progress we've made," she said.

The decision is a tough call, LaPlante said.

"On the one hand, the current law has been valuable in focusing our attention on the question of student performance," he said. "On the other, this is yet another mandate in a line long line of mandates that state officials — and later federal ones — put onto our schools."