LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — The Las Vegas area ranks second to last, behind only Honolulu, Hawaii, in a newly-released report of the 50 "best and worst" largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. for "school quality."
The report was published by the policy think tank Thomas B. Fordham Institute with support from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.
The organization says it aimed to measure school effectiveness by looking at student progress over time in several areas including academic growth and graduation rates, and used data from the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA) and the Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate data from the U.S. Department of Education’s EdFacts data collection.
The overall rankings show the top spots went to:
1. Miami, Florida
2. Memphis, Tennessee
3. McAllen, Texas
4. Atlanta, Georgia
5. Indianapolis, Indiana
The bottom five include:
46. Salt Lake City, Utah
47. Baltimore, Maryland
48. Raleigh, North Carolina
49. Las Vegas
50. Honolulu
The report's analysis for Las Vegas reads:
Among the four factors included in the rankings, the Las Vegas Metro performs relatively better on Metro Improvement (controlling for demographics), where it is still below average nationally. The metro performs relatively worse on Cohort Academic Growth, where it is below average nationally.
Read the full report and more about the methodology here.
