Michigan Public School Systems Among The Worst In America

One of the biggest decisions that a parent gets to make is where their child goes to school during their K-12 years. Elementary and middle school options are normally more plentiful but as you grow older the selection slims, and you're left to choose between a couple of private schools and 1 or 2 public schools. For some families, school options are a deal breaker because of their beliefs in the education system.

Some parents place such an emphasis on academics and the school environment that they have moved into a better area or state for better education or have even caused their children stress from the pressure of feeling like they have to succeed in school. All of this leads to the inevitable fact that not all school systems are created equally and that some states have better school systems than others. As a graduate of a public school system in Michigan, I'm not proud of our ranking compared to the other states in the country.

There are a handful of differences between private and public schools, but the main contrast is that private education requires tuition while public schools are free to attend. So, ranking private schools against each other doesn't show the same discrepancies that comparing public schools shows. There are a number of reasons why a public school system would be better than another.

WalletHub compared the public-school education system for each of the 50 states in America and ranked them from best to worst. They were ranking the school systems based upon safety and quality but through 32 different factors such as but not limited to:

• graduation rates
• math test scores
• reading test scores
• existence of digital learning plans
• bullying incidence rate
• youth incarceration rate
• number of school shootings

Looking at some of the metrics I figured that Michigan would do fairly well in these rankings amongst the other states and I couldn't have been more wrong. Michigan was ranked 36th overall which places the Mitten state in the bottom 3rd of the country for public school education quality and safety.