It's really not the school that determines outcomes but the home life. You have a lot of kids in LAUSD who have no real role models at all in their lives and come home to terrible situations every day, which makes the school district look bad but its not really something the school district has any power to solve short of offering boarding school for at risk kids.

That has nothing to do with the schooling and everything to do with the homelife these impovershed students experience after the bell rings. If you are a good role model to your children they will do fine in public school and not join gangs or drop out like those whose only role model is their cousin who got out of prison and is trying to recruit them into a gang.

I disagree with that metric, because many students should not finish high school — I think the graduation rate is too high in every state. I would compare states based on testing performance, keeping in mind California’s demographics and the absurdly high number of kids who don’t speak English at home.

I should say I think its schools are fine, rather than great.

By that website, the lowest ranked state is California (83% graduation rate), the second lowest ranked state is...Texas (84% graduation rate). So...California is slightly worse than Texas on schooling?

I wonder if something else is going on for California and Texas to rank behind Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana? I'd bet that the issue with the standard of measure, not the actual quality of education.

Hell, in SF that first bit doesn't even help, due to the broken lottery system here. It's probably the main reason why there are so few children (by percent) in SF when compared to other cities. Parents make the logical decision to move out of SF when their kids become school-age because they have near-zero control over the school their kids end up at. Alternatively, they put their kids in private school, which is out of reach cost-wise for many families.