STATEN ISLAND, NY — Choosing the right school is the first step in a child’s academic success, but it can be difficult for parents to decide where to enroll their young child.
WalletHub, a personal finance website, set out to identify the top-performing school systems in the U.S. by comparing the 50 states and Washington, D.C., on 32 key metrics. Unlike other studies that focus primarily on academic outcomes or school funding, this analysis also takes into account performance, funding, safety, class size and teacher qualifications.
Each metric was then rated on a 100-point scale, with 100 representing the highest quality of public K-12 education. WalletHub took the weighted average of all of each state’s metrics to calculate the overall score and ranking.
And New York State has one of the best school systems, according to the report.
With a score of 58.25, the Empire State ranked eighth as the best school system in the United States.
It ranked ninth in terms of quality, which includes factors such as graduation rates, dropout rates, test scores, mean SAT and ACT (college entrance exam) scores, Advanced Placement (AP) scores, and student-teacher ratio.
The school was ranked 16th in terms of safety, with assessments based on the following categories: presence of a digital learning plan, school access to educational materials, accessible technologies, sharing information about threatened/injured students, violence, access to medication, frequency of bullying, and more.
New York State also ranked first for having a distance learning program, fifth for having the highest average ACT (a college entrance exam) scores, and sixth highest student-teacher ratio.
Here’s how it performed in other categories, according to WalletHub:
- 22. – Reading test results
- 27. – % of state-certified teachers in elementary schools (K–12)
- 24. – Abandonment rate
- 20. – Frequency of bullying
- 34th place – % of high school students threatened/injured
These are the top 10 school systems in the U.S., according to WalletHub’s latest report:
- Massachusetts
- Connecticut
- Maryland
- New Jersey
- Wisconsin
- New Hampshire
- Nebraska
- new York
- Virginia
- North Dakota
These are the ten worst school systems in the US, according to WalletHub’s latest report:
- New Mexico
- Oklahoma
- Arizona
- Alaska
- Louisiana
- West Virginia
- Oregon
- Alabama
- Mississippi
- Nevada
