Dive Brief:
- WalletHub’s 2016 ranking of state school systems is the latest to find Massachusetts at the top, followed by New Jersey and Connecticut — while Louisiana, New Mexico, Alaska, Arizona and the District of Columbia round out the bottom.
- The personal finance website considered 17 metrics, assigning 80% of a state’s grade based on measures of school quality like dropout and graduation rates, student-teacher ratio, test scores and U.S. News & World Report ranking, with the remaining 20% based on measures of school safety, including rates of disciplinary incidents, bullying and youth incarceration.
- Schools in Alaska are outliers when it comes to school spending and performance — they, along with schools in DC, spend far more than average for little return, while schools in Maine and Indiana spend relatively little but have strong school systems, according to the WalletHub analysis.
Dive Insight:
School rankings can provide a general picture of how a state system does, but they inevitably obscure important details. Massachusetts is frequently recognized at the top of state rankings, yet many families move out of Boston to avoid its school system, which is plagued by the same problems many urban districts face. The school system quality metric is based heavily on test scores, including those on math and reading tests and college entrance exams. Critics, however, have said these tests discriminate against black and Latino students as well as others.
When it comes to school safety, WalletHub uses reports of bullying incident rates and the percentage of public school students in high school who say they have been threatened or injured by a weapon on school property. Obviously in both metrics, which get double weight in the methodology, there is reporting error. Some schools have a culture in which reporting is explained thoroughly and encouraged, while others do not. Cases of bullying, especially, are surely undercounted.