Be honest. When you think of Washington, D.C., or Phoenix or Baltimore or Philadelphia or Kansas City, Mo., do you think of good public schools? Me neither.

In fact, those cities have been fighting the perception of poor schools for decades, and the reputation of their public schools clearly has an impact on companies deciding where to place a new manufacturing facility or distribution center.

For the executives of these expanding companies, it’s not so much a concern over where their own children will attend school. For them, there’s always the private school option. No, their concern is about the quality of their future work force, most of which would be a product of those public schools.

Most metros of any size are usually characterized by an underperforming urban school district surrounded by a ring of good-to-excellent suburban school districts. The underperforming school district is almost always the namesake school district and is characterized by low graduation rates and even lower test scores. Unfortunately, those school districts have a negative impact on the reputation for the entire metro area.

What we at Expansion Management have consistently found during the past 15 years of ranking public schools throughout the United States is that those broad brush reputations are unfair and, even more important, inaccurate. To fully evaluate the quality of the public schools, you have to look well beyond the namesake urban district.

In fact, when you consider all of the suburban districts, as well as the main urban school district, the results often fly in the face of common [mis]perceptions.

What do I mean by that?

I hope you’re sitting down for this bit of news because, among large metro areas with more than 250,000 public school students, the Washington, D.C., metro ranks No. 1, followed by Phoenix, Baltimore, Minneapolis and Philadelphia.

Among mid-size metros, Raleigh-Cary, N.C., ranks No. 1, followed by Austin, Texas; Richmond, Va.; Honolulu; and Bridgeport, Conn.

Not surprisingly, the top 37 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) are all smaller metros, and almost all of them are home to a major research university. That fact is just one more reason why university cities will be the economic powerhouses of the future. [NOTE: Click here to read the 2006 Knowledge Worker Quotient .article, “College Towns Are at the Heart of the Knowledge Sector Economy.”

A Look Behind the Numbers

The primary research behind our metro area rankings comes from the 2006 Education Quotient ranking of every school district in the U.S. with at least 3,300 students. The most recent EQ, conducted annually by Expansion Management’s award-winning Research Department, was published in our December 2005 issue.

[The article, “How Well Are We Educating our Future Workers?” can also be found at www.ExpansionManagement.com, under “Research Studies.”[

Using the data from this study, we grouped school districts according to their particular MSA, and weighted each district’s scores according to its total enrollment as a percentage of the metrowide total student enrollment.

The same basic dynamics also apply to all of the large metros that made our Top 10 list. The top 20 percent of all Metro Areas (there are 362 MSAs, plus eight in Puerto Rico) were designated as “ 5-Star Public Schools Metros “ .

What Does This Mean for Expanding Businesses?

Clearly, the quality of the public schools is a pretty good indicator of the type of manufacturing work force a company is likely to encounter in a particular community.

In fact, if anyone on your company’s site location team tells you that schools are not an important factor in your decision-making process, my suggestion is that you find something else for them to do because they don’t understand what they’re talking about. They’re probably focusing on where management will send their kids to school, rather than on how well educated your future workers are.

Look at it this way: 28 percent of adults in the United States have a college degree, which means that 72 percent do not — and most of your manufacturing and distribution workers will come from that pool of workers.

It’s not enough to determine where the best individual school in a particular metro, because the site location process is not really about where you or your transferring executives will send your own kids.

Rather, in the site location process, you need to remember that the public schools are the institutions that are producing your future work force. How well they do their job in educating your future workers will, in a very real sense, determine how successful your operation will be in that location.

That’s the real reason why public schools are an important site location factor.

NOTE: Detailed results of the 2006 Metro Area Public Schools Quotient™ are available for all 362 MSAs on our Relocation Toolkit web site at www.RelocationToolkit.com For a FREE subscription to Expansion Management, click here.

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