How Michigan’s Schools Stack up Against the Rest of the Nation, According to New Study

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Article courtesy of Lingoda. 

• Michigan is one of the worst states for education, placing last with low scores in socioeconomic factors (34.42) and academic performance (43.21).
• The Wolverine State has one of the lowest public high school graduation rates for economically disadvantaged students (70%).
• At the other end of the study, Massachusetts is the state with the best school system, with the highest average ACT score in the country (26.40).

Michigan is the state with the tenth-worst school system in the U.S., according to a new study.

Online language learning school Lingoda gathered data from the National Center for Education Statistics to analyze 25 factors across four categories, including academic performance, access to education, school safety, and socioeconomic support.

Some of the individual factors analyzed were graduation rates, public expenditure per pupil, percentage of students suspended, average undergraduate tuition fees, and more. An average index out of 100 was calculated based on the average scores of all four categories, with the states then ranked from highest to lowest.

Table: The 10 states with the worst school systems in the U.S.

Elsewhere, Massachusetts topped the study, with a score of 74.43 out of 100. The state received the highest scores in academic performance (86.89) and school safety (90.52). Students in Massachusetts tie with Connecticut for the highest average ACT scores (26.40), while also ranking highest for average Grade 8 mathematics and reading scores, with 283.47 and 268.01, respectively.

The remainder of the 10 best states was made up of New York, Connecticut, Maine, New Jersey, Virginia, Wisconsin, Vermont, Iowa, and California. New York proved best for socioeconomic factors like public expenditure on student support, food services, and transportation per pupil, while Maine and Vermont rated highly for educational access and resources.

Felix Wunderlich, Founder of Lingoda, commented on the results of the study, “Out of the 10 states in the top ranking, seven can be found on the East Coast, suggesting that this region of America offers the best education and school systems.

“Interestingly, Massachusetts comfortably beats all other states in the study, despite places like New York providing much more funding to support schools and students. This highlights the importance of more than just funding for education systems to excel, including external resources like public libraries and financial elements like teacher salaries.

“In fact, the study highlights an interesting pattern between high ACT scores and student-to-teacher ratio. Of the five states with the highest average ACT scores, four of them also have some of the lowest student-to-teacher ratios, showing how smaller class sizes and more individual attention may lead to better academic performance.”

Sources:

• The National Center for Education Statistics

Methodology:

• To build the rankings, we looked at 25 different factors, ranging from average SAT scores to the percentage of students suspended in each state, using data from the National Center for Education Statistics. From there, we created index scores and broke them into four main categories.
• Each data point was cleaned and standardized on a 0–10 scale, with 0 representing the lowest value seen across states and 10 the highest. For measures where a higher number reflected a negative outcome, such as dropout rates, we flipped the scale by subtracting from 10 so that higher scores always meant better performance.
• All 25 factors were then weighted based on their importance within the overall analysis. Following this, they were divided into one of four categories: Academic Performance; Educational Access & Resources; Socioeconomic Factors; and School Environment & Safety. The total weighting for each category is as follows:
  • 8 Indicators – 34.5% – Academic Performance