Hawaii No. 1 in Wellbeing, W.Va. Last

For Fourth Year, Hawaii No. 1 in Wellbeing, W.Va. Last

Wellbeing in the nation and across states in 2012 mostly unchanged from 2011

by Alyssa Brown

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Hawaii residents have the highest wellbeing in the nation for the fourth consecutive year, with a Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index score of 71.1 in 2012 -- up from 70.2 in 2011. Colorado, Minnesota, Utah, and Vermont rounded out the top five states with the highest wellbeing scores last year. West Virginia residents have the lowest overall wellbeing for the fourth year in a row, with a Well-Being Index score of 61.3 in 2012 -- slightly lower than the 62.3 in 2011. Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas also had among the five lowest wellbeing scores in the country.

Overall, there were few changes from 2011 to 2012 in the states with the highest and lowest wellbeing scores. Seven states with the 10 highest wellbeing scores and eight states with the 10 lowest wellbeing scores in 2012 held those same distinctions in 2011. Vermont, Massachusetts, and Iowa joined the top 10 highest wellbeing states in 2012. Louisiana, Indiana, South Carolina, and Oklahoma newly rank among the bottom 10 states this year.

Explore complete state data >

These state-level data are based on daily surveys conducted from January through December 2012, including interviews with more than 350,000 Americans nationwide and at least 1,000 residents in each state except Alaska and Hawaii. The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index summarizes more than 50 different wellbeing items and is calculated on a scale of 0 to 100, where a score of 100 represents ideal wellbeing.

Western and Midwestern states earned seven of the 10 highest overall wellbeing scores, while New England states held the other three spots. Southern states had the six lowest wellbeing scores, and eight southern states were within the 10 lowest wellbeing scores. This regional pattern in wellbeing has remained consistent over the past five years.

Well-Being Index, 2012

State: NationAlabamaAlaskaArizonaArkansasCaliforniaColoradoConnecticutDelawareFloridaGeorgiaHawaiiIdahoIllinoisIndianaIowaKansasKentuckyLouisianaMaineMarylandMassachusettsMichiganMinnesotaMississippiMissouriMontanaNebraskaNevadaNew HampshireNew JerseyNew MexicoNew YorkNorth CarolinaNorth DakotaOhioOklahomaOregonPennsylvaniaRhode IslandSouth CarolinaSouth DakotaTennesseeTexasUtahVermontVirginiaWashingtonWest VirginiaWisconsinWyoming

Well-Being Index: 66.7

61.3

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71.1

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In U.S., Overall Wellbeing in 2012 on Par With Prior Years

The Well-Being Index score for the nation was 66.7 in 2012, similar 66.2 in 2011 and 66.8 in 2010. The six sub-index scores also remained similar in 2012 to 2011. The sub-index scores have not shown significant improvement over the past five years.

Top and Bottom States in Six Key Areas of Wellbeing

Hawaii residents earned the highest scores in the nation on the Life Evaluation, Emotional Health, and Work Environment Indexes, which contributed to Hawaii maintaining its top position in overall wellbeing. In addition, Hawaii residents were most likely to rate their lives highly enough to be "thriving," earning them the highest Life Evaluation score in the nation. Residents living in Hawaii were most likely to experience daily enjoyment and least likely to have daily worry or stress, which contributed to their high emotional health.

Hawaii workers also reported having the most positive work environments in the nation, while Rhode Island employees reported having the most negative work environments. The Work Environment Index measures workplace issues such as whether a worker has a trusting and open work environment and whether an employee is able to use his or her strengths to do what he or she does best every day.

West Virginians were the least likely to be thriving, as was the case in 2011. Also, West Virginians had the worst emotional health in the nation and were more likely to report being diagnosed with depression than residents of any other state.

Residents in West Virginia also had the lowest score on the Physical Health Index, which includes having the highest percentage of obese residents in the nation. Colorado residents scored the highest on the Physical Health Index, partially a result of having the lowest percentage of obese residents in the U.S.

Vermont residents had the healthiest behaviors in the nation, including the highest percentage of residents who ate five or more servings of fruits and vegetables at least four days per week. The Healthy Behaviors Index also measures the percentage of residents who smoke, exercise frequently, and eat healthy daily. Kentucky ranked last on this index, with the lowest percentage of residents in the nation saying they ate healthy all day "yesterday."

Massachusetts residents were most likely to report having access to basic necessities, as they were in 2010 and 2011. This top score is partly a result of having the highest percentage of residents with health insurance in the nation. The Basic Access Index also measures residents' access to other health essentials, including enough money for food, shelter, and medicine; a safe place to exercise; and clean water. Mississippi performed the worst on this metric -- as it has every year since 2008 -- partly a result of having the highest percentage of residents unable to afford food at some point in the past year for themselves or their families.

Bottom Line

Overall wellbeing in the U.S. and within states has remained mostly unchanged from 2008 to 2012, despite some signs of an improving economy in 2012. The lack of progress among the states with the lowest wellbeing scores may be related to low household income levels in these states. Nearly all of the states with the lowest wellbeing scores in 2012 are also states with the lowest median household incomes.

Certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act -- requiring all individuals to have health insurance or to risk paying a penalty -- may help low-income individuals improve their wellbeing, if they aware of and take advantage of them. Under the Affordable Care Act, all adults with an insurance policy beginning on or after Sept. 23, 2010, are entitled to an obesity screening and counseling, a tobacco screening and cessation intervention, blood pressure screening, and depression screening at no cost. Adults at high risk for certain chronic diseases are also entitled to a free cholesterol screening, Type 2 diabetes screening, and diet counseling. Public education efforts about these initiatives, particularly those targeting low-income Americans, may be essential to helping the states with the lowest wellbeing to make significant year-over-year improvements.

The private sector can also take steps to help individuals improve their overall wellbeing. Gallup research shows that physicians in the U.S. are in better health than are other employed adults and Americans who are engaged in their work are more likely to report having a healthier lifestyle. Therefore, physicians can set a positive health example for their patients and employers can focus on creating an engaged workplace to help reduce the economic costs of low wellbeing. Employers can also establish incentives and policies that encourage their employees to practice healthy behaviors.

For more state Well-Being Index findings, please visit http://www.healthways.com/default.aspx.

Gallup's "State of the States" series reveals state-by-state differences on political, economic, and wellbeing measures Gallup tracks each day. New stories based on full-year 2012 data will be released throughout the month of February.

About the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index

The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index tracks wellbeing in the U.S. and provides best-in-class solutions for a healthier world. To learn more, please visit well-beingindex.com.

Survey Methods

Results are based on telephone interviews conducted as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index survey Jan. 1-Dec. 31, 2012, with a random sample of 353,564 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, selected using random-digit-dial sampling.

For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the margin of sampling error is ±1 percentage point.

The margin of sampling error for most states is ±1 to ±2 percentage points, but is as high as ±4 points for states with smaller population sizes such as Alaska, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, and Hawaii.

Interviews are conducted with respondents on landline telephones and cellular phones, with interviews conducted in Spanish for respondents who are primarily Spanish-speaking. Each sample includes a minimum quota of 400 cellphone respondents and 600 landline respondents per 1,000 national adults, with additional minimum quotas among landline respondents by region. Landline telephone numbers are chosen at random among listed telephone numbers. Cellphone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods. Landline respondents are chosen at random within each household on the basis of which member had the most recent birthday.

Samples are weighted by gender, age, race, Hispanic ethnicity, education, region, adults in the household, and phone status (cell phone only/landline only/both, cell phone mostly, and having an unlisted landline number). Demographic weighting targets are based on the March 2010 Current Population Survey figures for the aged 18 and older non-institutionalized population living in U.S. telephone households. All reported margins of sampling error include the computed design effects for weighting and sample design.

In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

For more details on Gallup's polling methodology, visit http://www.gallup.com/.

New Testing Scandals

New Testing Scandals and Novice Teachers

Jonna Perrillo 

Testing scandals to date have raised questions about the pressures struggling schools face. Yet there is a related factor that allows corruption to flourish and that few discuss: the near-constant partnering of the nation’s most vulnerable students with the nation’s most vulnerable teachers. This piece reveals how the concentration of impoverished ELL students and novice teachers in several schools in El Paso, Texas contributed to the nation’s latest and most tragic testing scandal, and it outlines what reforms are required nationally. 

In El Paso, Texas, the nation’s latest and most tragic scandal around standardized testing is coming to light.  From 2006 to 2010, high school sophomores predicted to perform poorly on the tenth-grade exam—the state’s barometer for school funding—were denied enrollment or dropped from school rosters.  At Bowie High School, the sophomore class dropped by over 200 students, or 55%, in a year.  At Austin High School, it dropped by 291 students, or 45%.  Locally, the students have become known as “los desaparecidos,” the disappeared.

Testing scandals to date have raised questions about the pressures struggling schools face.  Yet there is a related factor that allows corruption to flourish and that few people discuss: the near-constant partnering of the nation’s most vulnerable students with the nation’s most vulnerable teachers, its novice ones.

Across the nation, Hispanic students are approximately 50% more likely than white students to enter into classrooms led by teachers with three or fewer years of experience on the job.  In El Paso, where 81% of the city’s 63,000 public school students are Hispanic, wealth and language fluency serve as important dividing lines between the privileged and underprivileged. At Bowie, 95% of students are low-income and 39% are limitedly proficient in English.  36% of Bowie teachers have taught for five years or less.  At Austin, 77% of students are low-income and 23% are limitedly proficient.  39% of Austin teachers have taught for five years or less.  At both schools, where students were easily disappeared, the percentage of novice teachers surpasses the city average.  In contrast, at Silva Magnet High School, where 56% of students are low-income and only 1.3% are limitedly proficient, just 15% of teachers have taught for five years or less.  Based on its students’ consistently high test performance, Silva is ranked by the state as “Exemplary.”

The disappearing of public school students has historical roots in Texas.  As Linda McSpadden McNeil’s work documents, a similar scheme took place in Houston a decade ago, though with much reduced penalties doled to its executors.¹ Today, former school El Paso school superintendent Lorenzo Garcia is serving three and a half years in federal prison.  In a city in which the median high school teacher salary is approximately $45,000, Garcia earned $56,000 in testing-related bonuses over an annual salary that topped $280,000.  And yet while Garcia’s arrest and additional anticipated arrests mark an important and necessary attempt at remediation, they do little to change the pervasive problems of school culture that allow top-down corruption to flourish.

As recent scandals in Atlanta and Chicago attest, all cases of testing fraud, whatever form they take, depend on widescale participation.  The disappearance of so many El Paso youth could not have taken place without a range of accomplices, including other district officials and school administrators and counselors.  Like Garcia, some of these accomplices profited financially from improved testing performance.  Teachers played little role in school enrollments, but they were essential to a parallel scheme to promote students out of the tenth grade through “minimesters” designed to cover a semester’s worth of work, sometimes in just a few hours.  Teachers from Bowie, whose principal was recruited to the district by Garcia, offered model lessons to other district teachers in the “Bowie method.”

School statistics tell us that across the nation students who are best equipped to learn effectively and test well have many advantages, including more professionally and politically empowered teachers.  In El Paso, other high schools were pressured to conform to the Bowie method.  Whether or not they did depended on principals’ ethics and ability to persevere against a superintendent who ruled by threat and a state education agency that did nothing to respond.  But corrupt administrators depend on teacher support, willing or coerced.  And, simply put, novice teachers are easier to coerce.  

New teachers lack tenure and, in many cases, the political know-how to respond to situations in which their own superiors are at fault.  The whistleblower in El Paso was a 16-year counselor at Bowie, Patricia Scott.  After she raised questions about 77 student transcripts, Scott was harassed and evaluated poorly until she transferred to another school.  A newer teacher may simply have been terminated.  In addition, many novice teachers were raised and trained in the era of high-stakes testing.  We might hope they could identify that a one-week minimester focused on particular skills cannot substitute for months of contextualized study.  In fact, many may not, given that in so many urban school districts, teaching to the test—divorced from any intellectual context—has become a longstanding routine.  

To be sure, all teachers can feel pressured to cheat youth by one form or another in districts and schools where mandates to do so come from the top.  In Atlanta, for example, teacher experience appears to have been of little consequence.  According to statistics from the Civil Rights Data Collection, the percentage of novice teachers at the three top schools of the 44 flagged for testing corruption matched or fell below the city average.  In some of these schools, veteran teachers orchestrated and enabled fraudulent test-administration and assessment procedures with little apparent reservation.  Other experienced teachers testified that they felt victim to a culture of intimidation and threats, even with tenure.

Yet it still stands to reason that in schools with disproportionate numbers of novice teachers, school governance is all the more likely to be concentrated in the hands of a few and faculty are all the more vulnerable to pressure and intimidation. And as a result, political officials must address problems of funding and school culture that enable and reward fraud, including school staffing.  Rather than finance performance bonuses, state and federal funds should support the improvements that would make working at high-poverty schools a more compelling and productive experience for students and teachers: smaller classes, more support staff and programs, and greater teacher responsibility in school governance.  Across completely different districts and contexts, these are general improvements that inarguably make schools more rewarding places to work.

As scholars and teachers, we must better prepare the teachers we train to anticipate and respond to the pressures that all teachers of high-poverty students face, with or without corruption.  Often times and for good reason, we treat this aspect of professionalism as something prospective teachers will learn on the job.  Frequently, they don’t.  Even if disappearing children is not the norm—and it may be happening more than we know—the larger political and ethical failings that the El Paso schools illustrate have become too common.  

We must argue for these improvements in policy and consider how to best bring them about in the course of teacher preparation.  Without them, poor schools will remain institutions where students and teachers alike are too easily made invisible.

Notes

1. Linda McSpadden McNeil (2005). “Faking Equity: High Stakes Testing and the Education of Latino Youth,” Pp. 96-99 in A. Valenzuela (ed.), Leaving Children Behind: How ‘Texas-Style’ Accountability Fails Latino Youth. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Terry B. Grier to be Honored by the Houston Area Alliance of Black School Educators

HISD Superintendent Terry B. Grier to be Honored by the Houston Area Alliance of Black School Educators

The Houston Area Alliance of Black School Educators (HAABSE) will award HISD Superintendent Terry Grier its Presidential Award during the organization’s 26^th Annual Outstanding Teacher Awards and Recognition Ceremony. The Presidential Award is presented to educators who are pioneers in the education of Houston’s youth.   The HAABSE will also honor community activist Georgia Provost for her work in education, and will recognize exceptional teachers from greater Houston and surrounding areas.  Scholarships will be awarded to graduating high school seniors studying education.  The HAABSE’s primary mission is to enhance leadership in providing valuable professional services and strategies to institutions, agencies, and communities engaged in creating an environment in which students, particularly minority students, can achieve academic excellence.

All eyes on charter fallout

SARASOTA COUNTY - Tuesday a judge ruled the principal of Imagine School in North Port could keep his job. However, it looks as though it will be a long fight over the future of the school.

Wednesday we talked to school board and legal experts who say the case moving forward may just impact the future of charter schools across the country.

The future of a local independent charter school and educating more than 1,000 children in it was in a court room this week. "It is not a healthy situation." The judge now suggesting the local school district get more involved. Sarasota County School Board member Caroline Zucker says it's a gray area. "There is no clear cut understanding of who owns what and who is responsible for what."

The fight between the Imagine parent company and the local governing board it appointed will likely continue through the court system. It may also have a bigger impact then just here. "I would expect charter schools and school districts nationwide would be watching this case very closely. Mark Zimmerman is a local attorney who specializes in education law. He says this is what can happen when you mix public funding and profits. "Ultimately this is a contract dispute involving a business entity. That is what is difficult about charter schools run by a parent corporation. Particularly one that is out of state like Imagine is."

The local governing board wants to cut ties with the Virginia based organization. Their concern is roughly one-million dollars they pay for services they say they don't get.

"A million dollars a year going out of this community of tax payers money is not right." Zucker who sits on the state's K-12 Charter Task Force says she predicted such an issue long ago. With the popularity of charter schools growing she now hopes law makers are paying attention too. "I would hope that the state is looking at this issue and getting a better understanding of the impact it could have on a local community."

Zimmerman says the mess alone may already be playing a role. "The decision to put ones child in a charter school over a district school has implications. This case highlights that very clearly."

District staff members are making regular visits to the school to ensure the educational process is continuing as usual. The School Board plans to discuss Imagine at its next board meeting on March 5th.