We are constantly hearing news that education budgets are being cut and that our children are getting less and less education each year. It is a bit more complex than that. Education budgets for public schools are mostly funded from local taxes, which unfortunately means that in certain counties and cities, the budget is simply much lower than in others.
Another issue is that the local as well as state budgets are getting tighter and tighter, while the spending per pupil has grown by almost 100% in the last three decades. It becomes more obvious than ever that it is important that the city authorities know how to spend the money that they do get for public education.
WalletHub has, to this end, done a study which is supposed to tell us which cities do this the best and which do this the worst, by coming up with a return on investment value which is then used to rank the cities.
The formula for this entailed taking the aggregated standardized test scores in math and reading for grades 4 and 8 and then dividing them by the total education spending per student. This was then normalized by four socioeconomic factors which also had to be entailed in the final result. The results are here and they may be a bit surprising.
For example, the city that has done best according to WalletHub is Miami, FL which is in the first place, followed by Grand Rapids; MI, Richmond, VA; Mobile, AL; Tucson, AZ; Detroit, MI and Fort Lauderdale, FL.
At the bottom, we have Rochester, NY as the city which handles their education budget the poorest, with the following cities being just a bit better: Yonkers, NY; Springfield, MA; Buffalo, NY; New York, NY; Bakersfield, CA, Worcester, MA and Riverside, CA.
