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Getting their children into a top-notch public school is the goal of many parents.
Decent public schools can save families thousands of dollars each year and put young people on the path to successful college and 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 people earns an A+ rating for its schools, ranking it as the best in the country.
The best public schools are located in the New York City suburbs, 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.
Still, they end up paying in other ways.
Home prices average $1.6 million (six times the national average) and taxes are relatively high.
The next two suburbs with excellent schools are located around Austin, Texas.
West Lake Hills and Rollingwood, both west of Austin, have some of the highest-ranked public schools in the country.
A pair of Chicago suburbs (Long Grove and Lincolnshire) round out the top five.
Parents are especially interested in their children receiving a 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, when lockdowns closed classrooms and children had to study online from the kitchen table.
Average reading scores fell four points between the 2019-2020 and 2022-23 school years, and math scores fell nine points, reaching levels not seen since the 1970s.
Westlake High School campus in one of Austin’s affluent west suburbs
Adlai E Stevenson High School in one of the wealthy neighborhoods north of Chicago
In this context, Luke Skurman, CEO and founder of Niche, said that school quality was an important factor in determining where parents decided to settle.
“We know that people consider much more than affordability when deciding where to call home,” Skurman said.
They looked at everything from “neighborhood diversity and weather conditions to career opportunities and school quality.”
Their researchers found that the best public schools in the country were in the 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 opt for Woodbury, Syosset, or Roosevelt, which is nearby in Monmouth County, New Jersey.
Niche uses public data from the Department of Education, the U.S. Census Bureau, the National Center for Education Statistics, and other sources.