The States with the Best Schools
As of 2011, total spending for all public elementary and secondary education in the United States surpassed $630 billion per year, more than $12,300 per student. The vast majority of that funding, roughly 88%, came from state and local governments. State governments have an especially important role: they maintain standards for curriculum, make sure that school districts with faltering local tax bases are adequately funded and assess the efficacy of public schools by administering statewide achievement tests.
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So which states are doing the best job of maintaining strong public school systems? To answer that question, SmartAsset looked at ten across-the-board metrics of education, placing a special emphasis on how well states are preparing students for college. For each state, we considered the percentages of students taking the SAT, ACT and AP tests, and the average scores for those tests. We also looked at the state-level funding-per-student, the student-teacher ratio, the high school dropout rate and the percentage of high school graduates attending college after graduation (read more about our methodology below).
Key Findings
Good schools in the northeast. Led by Connecticut, each of the top four states in our study is located in the northeast, and seven of the top ten are on the east coast. Most notable among these states was the high rate of college-attendance. In New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Connecticut, over 70% of high school graduates attend college within 12 months of graduating.
The west can do better. The west is home to all four of the lowest-grading states in our study, and six of the eight states that received an overall F are west of the continental divide. Washington, Arizona, Oregon and Nevada all have below average college-attendance rates, below average per-student spending levels and higher-than-average student-teacher ratios.
Data & Methodology
To assess the quality of state k-12 public education, we looked at data from the College Board, the ACT, the National Center for Education Statistics, the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Education Association. Specifically, we looked at the following ten metrics:
- High school dropout rate (double weight).
- Percent of high school graduates who attend college within 12 months of graduation (triple weight).
- Funding per student (full weight).
- Student-teacher ratio (double weight).
- Percent of high school juniors taking either the ACT or the SAT (double weight).1
- Percent of high school juniors taking a second admissions test (half weight).
- Average SAT scores (quarter weight).2
- Average ACT scores (quarter weight).
- Number of students taking at least one Advanced Placement exam as a percentage of high school seniors (full weight)
- Average A.P. test score (quarter weight).
For each of those ten metrics, we ranked all fifty states and applied a score from 0-100 based on that ranking. A school ranked first would receive a 100, while a state ranked last would receive a zero. After applying the weights listed above, we calculated an average score for each state. Grades were assigned on a curve, based on the percentile of each school’s raw score.
