WalletHub survey puts Kansas in top half of states for schools

With the start of school less than a month away, the personal finance website Wallethub released its 2019’s States with the Best & Worst School Systems ranking this week.

“Kansas ranked 20th overall, in the top half, which is definitely good news,” said analyst Jill Gonzalez. “We looked at both quality and safety in terms of public schools K-12.”

The quality measure looked at educational outcomes.

“We looked at everything from the projected high school graduation rate increase, dropout rates, math and reading test scores, SAT/ACT scores, all of these things, especially from a performance measure,” said Gonzalez. “Kansas did particularly well in having the 4th highest median SAT score in the country.”

Safety measures dealt a lot with potential school violence and other illicit activity.

“This had to with the share of high school students with access to illegal drugs, participating in violence, armed high school students, number of school shootings and bullying, both on-campus and cyberbullying.”

WalletHub compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia across 29 key metrics. Massachusetts was the top state on their survey. New Mexico was the worst.