School District Ranking Methodology

In order to better understand how a school district can support a teacher, we must first define the areas where teachers need support. The first is class size, the higher the overall student-teacher ratio the less able a teacher is to focus on each student's needs. The second area is administrator and support staff availability to teachers for all their classroom and teaching needs. The third and final area measures student proficiency levels on state examinations, which provides insight on the overall learning environment provided by the school district for students of the community. By analyzing and scoring these three areas we are able to provide an overall ranking of school districts in each state.

Our ranking methodology started with obtaining school district data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Common Core of Data 2013-2014 (http://nces.ed.gov/ccd/ccddata.asp) and U.S. Department of Education EdFacts Data Files 2012-2013 (http://www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/edfacts/data-files/index.html).

Once all the district data was obtained, the school districts with the following characteristics were excluded:

• Nonoperational agencies as reported in data files
• Special or non-traditional agencies as defined by NCES (Agency Type Codes: 4-8)
• Agencies where all associated schools are charter schools
• Agencies where total number of full-time equivalency teachers was less than 100
• Agencies where total number of students was less than 1000
• Agencies where total number of schools was less than two
• Agencies where total number of support staff was zero
• Agencies that did not report student proficiency levels on state examinations

The rankings were based on the combined score of the three equally weighted areas as detailed above, these areas were:

1. Student/Teacher Ratio
2. Teacher/Support Staff Ratio
3. Combined RLA & Math Student Percent Proficiency

Once the school district agency filter process was applied, the ranking process proceeded as follows for each state separately:

1. School districts that operate as a Supervisory Union (e.g. NYC Schools) had all the data from its local school district components combined and the Supervisory Union was represented as a whole.
2. The agency with the best student-teacher ratio of the state was given a score of 100 and other school district agencies were scored as a percentage of this score.
3. The agency with the best teacher-support staff ratio of the state was given a score of 100 and other school district agencies were scored as a percentage of this score.
4. The agency with the best combined RLA & Math student percent proficiency scores was given a score of 100 and other school district agencies were scored as a percentage of this score.
5. The three equally weighted area scores were then averaged to produce a final overall score.
6. Overall scores were then sorted and listed from the highest to lowest.

The table below lists information by state, including the number of school districts analyzed and the number of top ranked districts.

We do realize that there is far more to consider in defining which school district provides the best support for teachers, but we believe that providing this information can help highlight the need for teacher support across the country.

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