Insights—Cities and States by School Quality

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School quality—there's something that doesn't even occur to people until they reach a certain age, and after that it's absolutely indispensable. School quality is a factor that's fun for data analysts because it's not totally correlated with things you might expect, such as home affordability, crime rates, or income levels. There are plenty of otherwise below average cities that have cultivated great schools, and many wonderful cities where the schools come up a bit short.

Okay, let's dive into the analysis. We'll start with aggregated data at the state level, then work our way down to city by city data.

Here are the states with the highest school quality (calculated as the average for cities in that state with over 50,000 people). States with fewer than ten cities in the dataset aren't included, since it's no fair comparing one city to multiple.

Here are the states with the lowest school quality with the same calculations as above used.

States with the most cities achieving a 10/10 rating:

There are 86 cities achieving a 10/10 rating, which is a bit too many to print here, but it's fascinating that 60% (52/86) occur in the three states of California, Illinois, and Texas.

Since we need to narrow down these 86 somewhat, let's just limit to a 150,000+ population. Here are all the bigger cities, then, that get a perfect score:

• Irvine, CA
• Plano, TX
• Chandler, AZ
• Fremont, CA
• Frisco, TX
• McKinney, TX
• Overland Park, KS
• Cary, NC
• Bellevue, WA

Interestingly enough, the city in this list with the highest population is Irvine, which only has 305,000 inhabitants. It seems like smaller cities are better for school quality. Also interestingly, none of the cities are in the Northeast, which is often associated with preppy academia.

The tidbit that only really small cities achieve great school scores brings up another question: how do America's really big metropolises rank? To answer that, we'll take all the cities with over 500,000 people, a total of 29, and rank them from best schools to worst.

One last thing. As our own exploration of home price's correlation with other factors indicates, better schools mean higher home prices. They are both coincident with other factors such as higher incomes, lower crime, and higher property taxes (themselves directly springing from higher home prices) and sometimes a direct cause: how many times have you heard a realtor say "that house is in a nice school district, that's why it's more expensive"?

You can see where we're going with this. What are some of the exceptions that prove the rule? What cities are affordable to live in yet have great schools?

For this exercise we'll only use cities with a school ranking of 9 or better. Only around 22% of cities in our dataset score this high. We'll use a home price cutoff of $350,000, slightly better than the median value in our dataset. We get a surprising 21 results, which you may want to commit to memory to avoid going broke when you have kids:

It's amazing how geographically segmented this list is. Nearly every city is in the Midwest, and the West Coast and Northeast aren't represented at all.

For recommendations on where to move based on school quality as well as many other factors, take our quiz!