A new report from WalletHub, a website that reviews and surveys companies, services, and financial products, has ranked New York’s schools twentieth in overall quality nationwide.
The report ranked each state’s schools using two categories. The first, School System Quality, ranked schools using criteria like the presence of a state’s public schools on other national rankings, remote learning opportunities like online public schools, dropout rates, percentage of students who repeated grades, student to teacher ratios, and test scores.
The second category, Education Output and Safety, looked at the percentage of public school students in grades 9-12 who reported being threatened or injured with a weapon at school, bullying incident rates, percentage of people over 25 with a bachelor’s or graduate degree, and the state’s Champlain University High School Financial Literacy Grade.
New York State was ranked a less-than-average twenty-seventh nationwide in school system quality, but ranked much more favorably in the second category, clocking in at the seventh best for outlook and safety at school.
While the news of New York school’s safety will likely please Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who worked student safety into his signature gun control legislation the NY SAFE Act, New York’s overall ranking was still lower than any northeast state other than Rhode Island, which ranked a lowly thirty-first. New Jersey was ranked fist overall (bragging rights to Gov. Chris Christie, who is almost certain to make use of them), Massachusetts second, Vermont third, New Hampshire fourth, Pennsylvania tenth, Connecticut thirteenth, and Maine (tied with Illinois) came in at seventeenth.
While New York’s overall score has plenty of room to improve, Westchester County can point to some impressive numbers regarding its local schools. Earlier this year, U.S. News & World Report found that 10 Westchester schools were in the states top 50. The Washington Post found some Westchester schools were among the most challenging in the state, and even in the nation.
You can read the full report with more in-depth discussion of the methodology and categorical rankings on WalletHub.com.
