Education matters. It can drive your decisions behind where you choose to raise a family, if you enroll your kids in public school or private institutions and more. For those in Northern Virginia, they don’t have to look far to ensure their children are receiving a great education.
On July 29, WalletHub, a personal-finance website known for ranking states across a multitude of topics, using studies and statistics, released its annual ranking of the country’s best and worst school systems.
Virginia made the top ten, ranking in as the fourth-best public school system in America, with high marks for math and reading test scores, student-to-teacher ratios, SAT and ACT scores, low dropout rates, bullying rates and percentage of threatened/injured high school students.
To determine the rankings, WalletHub compared the 50 states, plus Washington, DC, across two dimensions: quality and safety. Using 29 metrics, each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the highest quality of public schools.
The metrics analyzed include graduation rates, dropout rates, math and reading test scores, SAT and ACT scores, Advanced Placement scores, how safe students feel at school, share of students participating in violence and more. You can see each metric for the study here.
Data used to create the rankings were collected from the U.S. Census Bureau; U.S. Department of Education; National Conference of State Legislatures; National Center for Education Statistics; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education; Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention; Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative; Education Commission of the States; U.S. News & World Report; College Board; Ballotpedia; ACT and Zendrive.
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