Maryland schools rank third in the nation, behind New York and Massachusetts, according to a report released this week by Education Week.

Ed Week has been putting out its annual Quality Counts report for the past decade, but it has recently revamped the analysis to include more issues. It looked at a variety of categories from how well a child's chance of success in different states, as well as kindergarten to 12th grade achievement. In achievement the state ranked second.

The well-regarded education weekly particularly highlighted the teaching profession this year. An in-depth study compared teacher pay to 16 other similar occupations. The median income in the other occupations was $50,784 while the median income for teachers around the country is $44,690. What that means is that teachers earn about 88 cents for every dollar that those in comparable jobs earn. Maryland teachers are even farther from parity, earning 87 cents on the dollar.

Although it did well in other catagories, the state's schools didn't rank so well in several categories of teaching. For instance, Maryland is one of only three states that doesn't assign teachers an identification number. The number would allow a state to link student test scores to specific teachers. Some school districts are now rewarding teachers for their students' performance.

Maryland scored first on Education Alignment Policies. Say what? That means that Maryland has good policies in place that try to make sure that a student is prepared at every step of the way. So the standards for what students should learn in pre-school make sense in terms of what they will need to know when they reach first grade and so on as far as getting to college or into the workforce.

There is much more of interest on the report at Education Week.