If Social Security is the “third rail” of national politics, public education is definitely the “third rail” of local politics. Nothing can get people all riled up quite like a good old-fashioned debate about public schools.

It’s a funny thing, though. While most of us think that our nation’s public education system as a whole has serious problems, we also love our kids’ teachers and think our local schools are the best in the world.

To us, it’s the other folks who have the problems.

When U.S. students consistently score lower than their counterparts throughout the world in science and math, we have a tendency to discount the importance of that fact, noting smugly that we were the first country to land a man on the moon — 35 years ago.

When our local school’s valedictorian has a hard time even getting into the flagship state university because of low test scores, we refuse to acknowledge a problem that is staring us in the face.

As a result, a large percentage of our children will enter adulthood unprepared to become full and active participants in the American Dream. When we fail to ensure that our children receive a decent education, it really doesn’t matter whose fault it is. And when I say “we fail,” I do mean “we.”

Not only does that uneducated youngster pay a stiff price for the rest of his or her life, so does the local community. That’s because, while most of us tend to look at public education on an individual, personal level (i.e., how well our own children or grandchildren are doing), local businesses look upon it as the training ground for their future employees.

For the business community, education is more than just a local issue that compels otherwise mild mannered people to run for the school board. It is, above all else, the source of its future work force, and how well that district performs will go a long way in determining whether that company will remain in that city — or if it even remains in business at all.

That’s why successful businesses are absolutely ferocious when it comes to controlling costs and, for most of them, employee-related costs represent a huge chunk of their expenses.

Productivity gains (e.g., more output with fewer employees) are the hallmark of most businesses, not because they are greedy and hate their workers (although that might be true for a few), but because they need to do that in order to remain competitive.

The major driver of productivity gains is technology, which allows us to further automate functions that previously required many people. While this saves the company money, it also means that the remaining workers need to be smarter in order to operate the new technology. More and more, even basic manufacturing jobs require at least some college, and many now require a bachelor’s degree. Gone are the days when high school dropouts could reasonably expect to enjoy a comfortable middle class lifestyle.

Companies are now taking an even harder look at the local public education system before they decide whether to locate a new manufacturing facility in a particular community.

These days, corporate executives understand that the public school system is the basic training ground for a region’s labor pool, and if the schools aren’t very good, their employee training costs will be considerably higher in that location.

There was a time when Sun Belt states were able to market themselves as a low-cost alternative to the industrial Northeast and Midwest. Nowadays, those same states are facing stiff competition from abroad, and any U.S. community that thinks it can compete as a low-cost alternative to Mexico, China or India has clearly lost its mind.

No, for us to continue to enjoy our present standard of living, we need to remain at the forefront of innovation, never losing sight of the fact that today’s high-tech, high-margin products are tomorrow’s low-margin commodities, destined for production facilities somewhere in the Third World.

That requires a first-class public education system.

For those communities with outstanding public schools, the future is very bright. On the other hand, for those with poor public schools, the future is exceedingly dim.

As a way of providing our readers with a means to compare the work force in various communities throughout the United States, Expansion Management, for the 14th consecutive year, presents its Education Quotient™ (EQ) ratings of secondary school districts nationwide.

HOW WE SELECTED THE DISTRICTS

This year’s EQ includes all high school degree-granting secondary school districts in the United States that have an enrollment of at least 3,300 students. Enrollment figures used to determine eligibility were taken from the U.S. Department of Education’s Common Core of Data.

This year’s study includes slightly more than 2,800 school districts with a combined enrollment of 34.5 million students. For reasons of space, we are only able to publish about 1,000 of those districts in this issue.

Any research project of this magnitude obviously relies upon the cooperation of many people, and we would like to thank the many state and local education officials upon whom we relied for much of the data. We were able to gather all of the data we required for 94.2 percent of the school districts that met our enrollment criteria.

For whatever reason, 163 districts (accounting for 2.3 percent of the survey population) declined to provide us with district-wide college board data despite multiple requests, and their districts, therefore, were not included in the study results.

While this constitutes a relatively small number, it is still disappointing. For a profession that lives and breathes on research studies, we only hope that these few educators receive better cooperation when they conduct their own research studies than they were willing to provide us.

HOW WE EVALUATED THE SCHOOL DISTRICTS

A school district’s EQ rating is broken out into three major categories.

The Graduate Outcome (GO) index is the most important component of the EQ and attempts to measure the results of the district’s educational efforts in comparison to the other 2,800 districts nationwide. It consists of the district’s average college board score — ACT or SAT — as well as its graduation rate.

For us, the bottom line is about results. After all, the primary function of our schools is to educate our children.

Why do we use college board scores as a way of comparing how much students in a particular district learned? Because they are still the only common test that high school students around the country take.

While there may be other, better tests taken by high school students, those tests are generally limited to a particular state or states and, consequently, are not comparable nationwide.

The GO also includes the district’s graduation rate. The armed forces have long used graduation from high school as a predictor of future success, not because it means that high school graduates are rocket scientists, but rather because it demonstrates that they finish what they start. This is a highly valued characteristic among employers, for whom the reliability of their workers is a non-negotiable standard.

Since there is no established standard to calculate a district’s graduation rate, it was necessary for us to establish our own definition in order to ensure comparability when we examined districts across the country.

Therefore, we compared a district’s 11th grade students in the fall semester of the 2001-02 school year with the number of students who graduated in the spring semester of 2002-03 school year.

Finally, because it is at the core of what our public schools are all about, the GO is by far the most heavily weighted component of the EQ.

The second major category is the Resource Index (RI) , which attempts to measure a community’s financial commitment to public education.

The RI includes such things as per-pupil expenditures and the student-teacher ratio, as well as the beginning and average teachers’ salaries. We were able to gather this data for all 2,800 districts that met our established enrollment criteria.

The final category, which we use primarily as a benchmark for sociological observations, is the Community Index (CI) . The category looks at the educational and income levels of the adult population and accounts for only 5 percent of the overall EQ score.

The CI includes the percentage of the adult population in the district with at least a high school degree, the percentage of the adult population with at least a college degree, the average household income in the district, and the district’s childhood poverty level.

The overall ranking is called the Education Quotient (EQ) , and is a weighted combination of the above three categories.

WHAT THE SCORES MEAN

In calculating the final EQ score, each school district was compared against the other 2,800 districts (i.e., ranked 1 to 2,800) in each component (i.e., college board scores, graduation rates, per-pupil expenditures, etc.) in order to come up with a ranking for that component. The components were then grouped together in their appropriate category — graduate outcome, resource index and community index — and compared against the other 2,800 districts in order to come up with an overall ranking.

These rankings were then converted into percentile rankings — 99 being the highest, 1 being the lowest — to show how that district compares to other districts nationwide within that category.

Finally, for ease of comparison, the districts are divided into five groups according to their final EQ score.

School districts ranking in the upper 16 percent were awarded Gold Medals, while districts ranking in the upper one-third were awarded Blue Ribbons. These are the most outstanding school districts in the United States.

On the opposite end of the scale, school districts that ranked in the bottom 25 percent were given a Yellow Light, while districts in the bottom 10 percent received a Red Light designation.

The remaining school districts — accounting for 42 percent of all districts surveyed — were given a Green Light designation. These districts can be considered average.

LESSONS LEARNED

With all of the data we collected for this study, there is always the temptation to draw some conclusions and, not surprisingly, we succumbed to that temptation.

For us, the most important thing to try to get a handle on is the importance of spending on the overall success of a school district, as well as the impact of the local adult community on that success or failure.

Were there any insights to be gained?

In order to do this, we divided the school districts into five groups (quintiles) according to their graduate outcome (average college board score and graduation rate) score. Then we calculated the group’s average in each of the various spending and demographic subcategories to see if there were any trends we could identify.

Minimum Teacher’s Salary. The two highest achieving groups (quintiles 1 and 2) of districts — at $32,113 and $30,121 respectively — had the highest average starting salaries for teachers, followed by the lowest achieving group (quintile 5), at $29,910.

Average Teacher’s Salary. The three top performing groups of districts also ranked 1, 2, 3 in terms of their average teacher’s salary. Once again, the quintile 5 group had a higher average salary for its teachers than did the quintile 4 group of districts.

What observations can we draw from salaries? Clearly, for the top 60 percent of school districts, their teachers, on average, earn higher salaries than do teachers in the two lowest quintiles. It is also clear that teachers in the lowest quintile earn more than do teachers in the next higher group (quintile 4) and, when it comes to starting salaries, they tend to earn more than do teachers in either quintile 3 or quintile 4.

One problem with comparing salaries in the abstract is that it doesn’t take into consideration the differences in living costs in various communities throughout the United States. Interestingly, when we compared the average teacher’s salary with the median household income of families residing in that district, we found that, in roughly half the districts (49.1 percent), the average teacher’s salary was actually higher than the median household income for the adults residing in that community.

Student-Teacher Ratio. When it comes to the student-teacher ratio, what we found was almost the inverse of conventional wisdom, with the lowest performing districts having the lowest — and therefore most favorable — ratio of students to teacher, while the highest performing districts had the highest, and least favorable, ratio.

While it would be counterintuitive to argue that larger classes are better than smaller classes, it is also clear that basing a strategy for improving a district’s performance by focusing on class size is probably not the path to success, either.

Per-Pupil Expenditures. Once again, the results show that the two highest-achieving groups spent more money, on average, per pupil than did the other three groups. Similarly, the lowest-performing group ranked third in spending, followed by the districts in quintiles 3 and 4.

Clearly, a community’s financial commitment to education (Resource Index) seems to have an impact on the success of the top 40 percent of districts. However, for the districts that ranked in the bottom 20 percent, higher public spending on education alone does not seem to guarantee success.

In fact, what is clear is that, while increased spending on education probably makes good schools better, it clearly does not appear to make bad schools good.

However, it is abundantly clear that the income and education levels of the parents and other adults seem to have a direct correlation to the success of the students in a public school district.

Districts that finished in the top 20 percent (quintile 1) had the highest percentage of adults in the community with at least a high school degree, followed in order by the districts in quintiles 2, 3, 4 and 5. The same is true when you look at adults in the community with college degrees and household incomes.

In fact, the only community index subcategory that the districts in the lowest quintile have a lead is in child poverty. For these districts, the average child poverty rate is 21.8 percent, compared with 16.3 percent for quintile 4 districts and 7 percent for quintile 1 districts.

However, there is are two exceptions to the almost direct correlation between the income and education level of the parents, and the achievement level of the students. One is found in the rural school districts throughout the Midwest, and the other exception is found in schools run by the Department of Defense for the children of military service members. Among these school districts, student achievement levels rival those of their counterparts in highly affluent suburban school districts, while the education and income level of their parents are generally well below the national average.

Why is that? What do "farm kids, rich kids and military brats" have in common? Our hunch is that it has an awful lot to do with the disciplined environment in which they grow up.

THE BOTTOM LINE

So what does all this tell us about what makes for a high-achieving school district? First, it tells us that communities with the most successful districts spend more money on their public schools.

Their teachers start out at slightly higher salaries and they continue to earn more money than do their counterparts in the lower rated districts. Successful districts, on average, also spend more money per pupil. That’s a pretty clear picture, at least for those districts that ranked in the top 40 percent.

After that, however, the relationship between spending and achievement gets considerably more muddled, particularly at the bottom end of the scale. In fact, for some of our country’s worst performing school districts, no amount of money seems to be able to turn the tide.

On the other hand, the data shows clearly that there is a direct correlation between the education level of the parents and the success of the students.

Why? Probably because people with higher formal education tend to place a greater value on it than do people who do not have the same level of education, and they tend to pass that attitude on to their children.

Likewise, children from families with a higher household income tend to do much better in school than do children from families with lower incomes. In a country where education and hard work generally translate into higher lifetime earnings, it’s hard to separate the two.

On the opposite end of the scale, communities with lower performing school districts tend to be characterized by adults with lower income and education levels, and higher levels of child poverty.

The real question is: What are we going to do about it? How are we as a society going to fix the problem?

Unfortunately, the debate seems to revolve almost entirely around money. While money certainly is important, if we don’t also address it from the “family” side by creating an environment where kids understand, and truly believe, that how well they do in school will determine what kind of a future they have, the gap between the “haves” and the “have nots” will only widen.

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Bill King is the chief editor of Expansion Management magazine and can be reached at BillKing@Penton.com. Michael Keating is the senior research editor of Expansion Management magazine and can be reached at mkeating@Penton.com.