America’s best public schools RANKED: The 20 secret suburbs YOU need to move to for a great taxpayer-funded education
Getting their children into a top-notch public school is a goal for many parents.
Decent public schools can save families thousands of dollars every year and put young people on the path to successful college and work careers.
Niche, a comparison website, analyzed the data and says they should consider Scarsdale, a wealthy suburb of New York City.
The Westchester County city of about 18,000 residents receives an A+ rating for schools, ranking it as the best in the country.
The best public schools are found in the suburbs surrounding New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Austin, Boston, San Diego and San Francisco
Scarsdale, in Westchester County, north of New York City, has some of the best public schools
Many residents move to Westchester to save on the costs of sending their children to expensive private schools.
Yet they ultimately pay in other ways.
Home prices average $1.6 million – six times the national average – and taxes are relatively high.
The next two suburbs with good schools are around Austin, Texas.
West Lake Hills and Rollingwood, both west of Austin, have some of the top-ranked public schools in the country.
A pair of Chicago suburbs – Long Grove and Lincolnshire – round out the top five.
Parents especially want to give their children good education, because reading and writing skills have declined in recent years.
Math and reading test scores for 13-year-olds plummeted during the pandemic, as lockdowns closed classrooms and forced children to study online from their kitchen tables.
Average reading scores fell by four points between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school years, and math scores by as much as nine points, to levels not seen since the 1970s.
Westlake High School campus in one of the affluent suburbs west of Austin
Adlai E Stevenson High School in one of the wealthy neighborhoods north of Chicago
Against this backdrop, Luke Skurman, CEO and founder of Niche, said the quality of the school was a major factor in where parents decided to settle.
“We know that people consider much more than just affordability when deciding where to call home,” Skurman says.
They looked at everything from “neighborhood diversity and weather conditions to career opportunities and the quality of schools.”
His researchers found that the nation’s best public schools were all suburbs of seven major cities.
They are New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Austin, Boston, San Diego and San Francisco.
In addition to Scarsdale, New Yorkers can choose Woodbury, Syosset or Roosevelt, nearby in New Jersey’s Monmouth County.
Niche uses public data from the Department of Education, the US Census Bureau, the National Center for Education Statistics, and other sources.