Are you tired of having business executives giggle uncontrollably every time you try to explain how your local work force is really among the best in the country, despite the fact that your local school district is widely regarded as being among the worst in the nation?
Imagine if you were in Kansas City and had not one but two school districts by that name — one in Missouri, the other in Kansas — that each rank in the bottom 10 percent nationally of all school districts. Or how about Washington, D.C., or Richmond, Va.? Or Pittsburgh or Phoenix or Dallas or Baltimore?
Each of these cities has long had to contend with a reputation for substandard public schools, an impression that has often caused businesses and entrepreneurs to look elsewhere. Yet, if you look at the public schools throughout the entire metro area of each of these cities, you’ll find that the overall quality of education offered by the public schools is, in fact, actually quite high.
You may want to be sitting down when you read this, but the Washington, D.C.-Md.-Va.-W.Va., MSA ranks No. 2 in the nation among metros with at least 100,000 students overall attending public schools. The Austin-San Marcos, Texas, MSA ranks No. 1.
In fact, each of the cities mentioned above ranks in the Top 15, with Phoenix at No. 7, Pittsburgh at No. 8, Richmond at No. 9, Kansas City at No. 11, Dallas at No. 13 and Baltimore at No. 14.
If you’re surprised, you shouldn’t be. Just about every metro area in the country is faced with the same situation: an urban public school system with a high dropout rate and low test scores, surrounded by high-achieving suburban public schools.
Whether it was just wishful thinking, most community leaders feel that, on balance, the quality of the public schools in their metro was outstanding.
The problem is that no one has really been able to quantify that fact — at least not until now.
How We Calculated an EQ for the Entire MSA
Using the data from our 2003 Education Quotient™ study, which compared 2,800 secondary school districts throughout the country, we grouped the individual districts according to their respective MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area). Every secondary school district with an enrollment of at least 3,300 students was included in the survey.
Expansion Management has published its EQ annually for the past 13 years. School districts throughout the country are compared against one another according to a variety of categories, such as college board scores, graduation rates, beginning and average teacher salaries, per pupil expenditures and student-teacher ratio.
College board scores and graduation rates, which measure the output of the education process, are most heavily weighted, while community and state spending on education is less important to the overall final (EQ) score.
EQ scores are calculated as a percentile compared with the other 2,800 school districts, with 1 being the lowest and 99 being the highest.
To determine an EQ score for the entire metro area, each school district’s relative contribution was weighted based upon its enrollment as a percentage of the total metro student enrollment.
Let’s use the Washington, D.C., metro as an example.
The namesake District of Columbia Public Schools, while ranked poorly in comparison to the rest of the nation’s schools, accounts for only 8.7 percent of the overall MSA public school student population.
On the other hand, the suburban Montgomery, Md., school district is twice as large, accounting for 17.5 percent of the overall MSA student population. Across the Potomac, the even larger suburban Fairfax County, Va., Public Schools makes up another 20.3 percent.
Both of these suburban districts are among the best in the country. In fact, 53.2 percent of all public school students in the D.C. metro attend school in Gold Medal districts. In order to receive a Gold Medal designation, a district must rank in the top 17 percent of all school districts nationwide, while Blue Ribbon districts rank in the top one-third.
The situation is much the same in Kansas City, where the Kansas City, Mo., school district (which ranked in the bottom 9 percent nationally) and the Kansas City, Kan., district (bottom 8 percent) combine to make up 25.5 percent of the overall metro student population.
On the other hand, 45.4 percent of the students in the Kansas City metro attend school in Gold Medal districts, while another 16.8 percent attend school in Blue Ribbon districts.
In other words, nearly two out of every three students in the Kansas City MSA are in districts that rank in the top one-third of all school districts nationwide. Unfortunately, one in four students in the metro attends school in a district that ranks in the bottom 10 percent nationally.
You can do the same analysis for each of the big cities on this list.
The important point is that a metro area is really one big labor market and, in order to get an overall picture of the quality of public education, you have to include the suburban and ring city school districts in your evaluation.
Whether you’re surprised with the results is a personal matter. But at least now you can make a more informed decision about the metro’s education quality.
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