NOTE: The results for only about 450 school districts (out of the 2,800 rated in the 2006 Education Quotient™ study) are included on this site. The complete results for all 2,800 school districts are available at www.RelocationToolkit.com. Click here for a complete list of school districts included in the EQ study.
According to Edmund Schweitzer, president and CEO of Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL), improving the quality of the math and science education our children receive is absolutely critical to the continued success of technology-based companies.
Schweitzer is deeply concerned about the ability of our schools to provide enough highly trained engineers in the future to sustain companies like his. Pullman, Wash.,-based SEL, which introduced the world’s first digital relay back in 1984, is a global engineering company that employs more than 1,200 people in 50 countries around the world. The company’s products are sold in more than 110 countries.
| Schweitzer is most concerned about the depth of the engineering talent pool in the United States.... he firmly believes that waiting until a person is 18 to interest him or her in science and engineering is too late. |
Schweitzer worries about the decades-long trend among American students to shy away from math and science courses, which in turn causes technology-driven companies to look globally for talent. He also believes that it is too late to wait until a person is in college to spur their interest in math and science. To him, the time to nurture and develop that interest is when kids are still in their academic formative years: high school, middle school and, even better, in elementary school. (Here’s Something Productive for School Boards to Focus On)
What distinguishes Schweitzer from many other CEOs, though, is that he is willing to put his money where his mouth is and, not surprisingly, much of his efforts are directed towards engineering course at the university level. During the past five years, SEL has donated equipment and materials to 67 academic institutions totaling $636,000.
Schweitzer’s interest in education runs deep. Earlier in his career, he served as a professor at Ohio University and at Washington State University, and continues to teach short courses in power engineering around the world while leading a global company. Course locations include the Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon in Monterrey, Mexico, the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and at the Southern African Power System Protection Conference in Johannesburg, South Africa.
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Visit www.RelocationToolKit.com for details and prices. |
Schweitzer strongly believes in the importance of practical experience for students. He has donated more than $185,000 in equipment required to upgrade protective relays, metering and communications for the electrical distribution system at the Washington State University Power Plant and East Campus Substation in Pullman. This, in turn, has provided opportunities in “real world” application for electrical engineering students attending the university.
Still, Schweitzer is most concerned about the depth of the engineering talent pool in the United States. Despite his focus on helping university students gain practical experience, he firmly believes that waiting until a person is 18 to interest him or her in science and engineering is too late. By that age, the pool of likely candidates has shrunk dramatically. For him, the best time to pique a person’s interest in science and engineering is when they are much younger, say in high school or even middle school.
It was for that reason that he established, in cooperation with the Pullman School District, a basic electronics course for local high school students. For its part, SEL hired an instructor who developed the curriculum, established a classroom and equipped the laboratory.
Classes began in August 2000 and now include not only basic electronics, but also a robotics course and a pre-engineering course. The Pullman School District offers physics credits for the pre-engineering course.
Until this year, the district bused the students to the SEL classroom each day. Now, the courses are taught at Pullman High School and will continue to be funded by SEL.
This is just one of many learning opportunities Schweitzer has created for students of all ages to learn more in the field of science. Several years ago, his dream of a science center became a reality when SEL donated 11,000 square feet of space for displays, activities and programs.
The Palouse Discovery Science Center (PDSC) offers programs to children from toddler-age through high school, as well as for adults. An executive director, an active board and many volunteers direct the activities of PDSC, the only science center in Washington east of the Cascade Mountains. School children from Washington and Idaho enjoy the benefits of this operation.
| By itself, will Schweitzer's partnership with the local school district change the world? Of course not. But what if hundreds, or even thousands, of CEOs like Schweitzer, all around the country, decided to adopt similar programs? The change would be almost revolutionary, particularly five or 10 years down the road. |
This is just an example of what can be accomplished when businesses take an active interest in promoting educational opportunities for young students.
By itself, will Schweitzer's partnership with the local school district change the world? Of course not. But what if hundreds, or even thousands, of CEOs like Schweitzer, all around the country, decided to adopt similar programs? The change would be almost revolutionary, particularly five or 10 years down the road.
In today’s technology-driven economy, growing companies that are expanding and opening new facilities around the country are using a prospective community’s public education system as an indicator of the type of work force they would likely encounter should they choose to open a manufacturing or distribution facility there.
That’s why Expansion Management has evaluated secondary school districts around the country for the past 15 years. After all, today’s students are tomorrow’s work force.
This year’s Education Quotient™ (EQ) includes all high school degree-granting secondary school districts in the United States with an enrollment of at least 3,300 students.
In all, we evaluated more than 2,800 districts nationwide, with a combined enrollment of more than 36 million students. Click here for a complete list of school districts included in the EQ study.
HOW WE RATE SCHOOL DISTRICTS
A school district’s EQ score is composed of three major indices: the Graduate Outcome, the Resource Index and the Community Index.
| WHAT THE EQ CONSISTS OF
EQ......Overall Percentile Ranking
GO.....College Board Scores & Graduation Rates
RI......Teacher Salaries (Beginning & Average), Per Pupil Spending & Student-Teacher Ratio
CI.....Median Household Income, Adult Education Levels (HS & College), Child Poverty Rate
|
The Graduate Outcome (GO) measures the final output of a district’s schools and includes the college board scores and graduation rates. It is by far the most heavily weighted factor in our final calculations because, for employers and parents alike, that’s what school is all about.
The Resource Index (RI) measures a community’s financial commitment to public education and includes such things as teachers’ salaries, student-teacher ratio and per-pupil expenditures. While important, it has a lesser weight in the final calculations because we feel that school districts should be measured by their results, not by how much money they spend. (Just Spending More Money Won’t Fix our Schools)
The Community Index (CI), which measures the economic and education background of the adult population, has almost no weight in the final calculations. Rather, it is used as a benchmark for site selectors and other people engaged in evaluating a work force.
These three indices are each calculated on a scale of 1 (lowest) to 99 (highest), in order to come up with an overall score, which we call the Education Quotient.
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.
| WHAT THE RATINGS MEAN
Gold Medal......Top 17%
Blue Ribbon.....Top 33%
Green Flag......The Solid Middle
Yellow Flag.....Bottom 25%
Red Flag........Bottom 10%
|
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 Flag, while districts in the bottom 10 percent received a Red Flag designation.
The remaining school districts — accounting for 42 percent of all districts surveyed — were given a Green Flag designation. These districts can be considered average.
PARENTAL INFLUENCE ON HOW SCHOOLS PERFORM
It seems that any time there is a discussion about schools, the focus seems to always turns to teachers and money, as if that were the only solution to the problem of low achievement.
Year after year, though, we collect data on more than 2,800 secondary school districts, and that data consistently shows the same thing: Increased spending on education seems to make good schools even better, but it doesn’t appear to make bad schools good.
| Increased spending on education seems to make good schools even better, but it doesn’t appear to make bad schools good. |
That’s not to say that smaller class sizes and better-paid teachers are a bad thing. Of course not. What it does mean is that, if we want to improve an “underachieving school,” there is no reason to believe that we can simply buy our way out of that problem. After all, some of the most generous school districts, in terms of spending, are also some of the worst when it comes to academic results.
Instead, let’s look at the parents. In our study, we gather data on the income and education levels of the adult population within each school district. We call this the Community Index (CI) and we use it mainly as a reference. In other words, it doesn’t count for much in the final overall ranking of a school district, but it makes for a useful crosscheck on our results.
Of the 100 school districts with the highest Community Index, 96 of them were awarded Gold Medals (our highest award), a distinction only 17 percent of the school districts we evaluated received. Of the top 200 districts in terms of CI, 182 received Gold Medals. And remember, the CI is almost entirely a reference tool. At most, it might add one or two points to the final EQ score.
Clearly, parents’ income and education are strong indicators of academic success for their children. ( The Importance of Parents to a Child’s Education ) But yet we have Farm Belt schools in the Midwest where the children of parents with modest resources are achieving similarly high academic success.
Here we have two seemingly disparate groups, one with high adult education and income levels, the other with relatively low adult education and income levels. What do these two groups have in common?
Here’s my theory. I think it has to do with the parents, the work ethic they instill in their children and the countless hours they spend each day being involved in their kids’ schools and in their homework. Parental involvement is something money can’t buy.
You can say that having parents with above average income and above average education is the reason their children do well in school, but I believe that’s more a symptom than a reason.
| Here’s my theory. I think it has to do with the parents, the work ethic they instill in their children and the countless hours they spend each day being involved in their kids’ schools and in their homework. Parental involvement is something money can’t buy. |
After all, it’s the kids, not the parents, who take the college board tests and who stay in school long enough to graduate. Parents provide the environment in which the kids develop and learn.
It may sound trite to say that today’s schools are producing tomorrow’s workers, but it’s true. America’s future — and not just its economic future — depends upon how well we educate and train the next generation.
Just as we shouldn’t entirely blame teachers for underachieving schools, we also shouldn’t expect them to fix the problem by themselves. We can’t fix it by simply throwing money at it, but we can by throwing time — our time as parents and future employers.
Edmund Schweitzer of SEL is doing his part to effect change. Why not the rest of us? Let’s establish a partnership between parents, teachers and business, and let’s make sure that each group carries its own weight.
Our future depends on it.
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