Go to the Midwest, young families.
That's the overwhelming takeaway from our latest Best Schools for Your Housing survey, which found that the top-performing public school districts with affordable housing are in Ohio, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
That's not to say there aren't great schools elsewhere, but in most cases you'll have to pay to get your kids into them. New Canaan, Connecticut schools are superlative by any measure, ranking 22ndrd total among thousands of sites we reviewed. But a typical home in New Canaan costs $1.2 million, according to Zillowmore than seven times the national average house price.
For one-sixth the cost of living in New Canaan, you can move to Delano, Minn., home of this year's Best Schools for Your Housing.
A small town (pop. 5,541) on the outskirts of the Minneapolis metropolitan area, Delano is perhaps most famous as the location for the 1998 dark thriller, “A simple plan.” Like most of the districts that broke through the top of this year's rankings, Delano is within the orbit of a large city, but operates as an independent school district. At 30 miles west of Minneapolis, Delano is a long drive to downtown, but it attracts young families with parents who work in the suburbs.
“If you walked around downtown Delano and met new parents and asked them why they moved here, they would say the school district,” said Matt Schoen, Delano's superintendent of schools. “Over the years, we have built a tradition of academic excellence.”
To evaluate school districts, we started with a comprehensive database at SchoolDigger.com, a project of Seattle software engineer Peter Claar. Claar aggregates performance on standardized tests now required by the No Child Left Behind Act and calculates percentile scores for each school in each state. (We used data from this spring for consistency, though SchoolDigger has since updated many school districts, so current rankings on the site may not exactly match what's here.)
We wanted full-service school districts with large enough students, so we limited our universe to districts that provide K-12u degree and have more than 1,000 students. (This hurt rural states like Vermont, which has a number of high-quality, smaller school districts.)
We then adjusted the state-level scores to reflect the fact that each state uses its own standardized tests and that there are significant differences in performance across states as measured by nationally standardized tests such as the National Evaluation of Educational ProcessSAT and ACT.
Finally, we checked for cities and towns where the median house price, as calculated by Zillowit was less than double the national average ($174,000 when we compiled our data.) When Zillow didn't have a Zillow Home Value Index for a city, we used Zillow data from neighboring cities, average sales price, or data from Domes.
The spreadsheet work was performed by Christopher Denhart, a Forbes summer intern who is currently a senior studying economics and mathematical statistics at Ohio University in Athens. Denhart came up with a normalization formula that allowed us to compare school districts on a national basis.
This method gave an almost overwhelming advantage to states like Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Ohio, where average NAEP test scores were 14 percent or more higher than low-scoring Mississippi and the District of Columbia. It also gave the advantage to states with many smaller, independently run school districts. These areas can be magnets for attentive parents and their high-achieving children, although many of the top schools in our national and regional lists have significant low-income enrollments.
With this kind of ranking system, there is simply no way to fairly include large urban school districts. There are excellent schools within the sprawling Houston Independent School District, for example, but there is no easy way to identify them in a national, district-level survey.
High coastal home prices also gave the Midwest the upper hand. We provide regional lists below to highlight the areas below that are accessible by more local standards.
Given these caveats, we found a remarkable collection of school districts that share some striking similarities. Most are located in small towns within driving distance of major cities, as noted above. They also tend to have highly involved and devoted parents. Most have independent foundations to help defray school costs, the kind of financial perk that social liberals might frown upon, but which helps put computers in classrooms and music programs on the schedule without driving property taxes into the stratosphere.
The educational institution in Mequon, Wis., a suburb north of Milwaukee, pumps $250,000 a year into Mequon-Thiensville School District. “It's always the triple whammy,” said Desmond Means, superintendent of schools. “Great teachers, great students and great parents who support the schools.”
The lakeside community's schools are 80 percent white, but Mequon also buses 120 students from Milwaukee as part of a voluntary desegregation plan, Means said. However, house prices are rising quickly, so it's unlikely that Mequon will be on our affordable list next year.
Bedford, NH, No. 2 on our list, just got started with its founding. But the school district 50 miles north of Boston is growing rapidly, in part because of its longstanding reputation for high-performing schools.
“We were a very small town 20 years ago” of 10,000, said Superintendent of Schools Tim Mayes. “Now we are over 20,000.”
Some of the schools our screen identified are known in their states for providing high-quality education. Kentucky Fort Thomas Independent Schools, No. 4 on the regional list for the South, is a 2,600-student district just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati that has garnered top rankings in Kentucky for years. With a typical home price of $77,200, according to Zillow, Fort Thomas scores just below the pricey beach community of Guilford, Conn. nationally, however homes in Guilford cost an average of $345,000.
For fun, we also calculated a “Bang for the Buck” index by dividing the quality score by house price to arrive at the intersection of price and quality. The winner? Champions Local Schools in Warren, Oh., a small town north of Youngstown that combines top-notch schools with an almost unbelievable Zillow Home Value Index of $40,300.
Our adjustments hit hard in states like California, New York, and Michigan, which have large urban areas with many struggling schools. High SAT and ACT test participation also tends to lower grade point averages. So don't rely on these lists alone to choose a new place to live. Better yet, pick a state or region and head over to SchoolDigger to see how individual school districts rank.
Hover over the colored areas below to see the best school districts with home prices less than twice the area median. This measure still gives the advantage to cheaper inland states, but highlights school districts that are affordable by regional standards.
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Tim Mayes
