Analysis: Louisiana public schools are third-worst in the U.S., who's No. 1?

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WalletHub crunched the numbers to rank the best and worst school systems in America, and Louisiana came in at third-worst in the personal-finance website's analysis of test scores, teacher certification, bullying rates, and more.

This analysis focused not only on academic outcomes or school finance, but also looked at performance, funding, safety, class size, and instructor credentials to determine which are the top-performing school systems in America, according to the company.

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WalletHub compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia across 32 metrics. Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the highest quality of public K–12 education.

Overall, Louisiana came in at 49 out of 51, ranking higher than Alaska (50) and New Mexico (51) with a total score of 34.09. Louisiana's ranking for "quality" was the same at 49th, but it fared better in "safety," ranking 40th in that category.

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The Bayou State's public school system also tied with West Virginia at 48th for math test scores and ranked 47th in reading test scores, according to the website's report released Monday.

Fewer than 40% of Louisiana students met the benchmark set by the state (a score of Mastery or above) on the English section of the most recent LEAP test, according to data from the state Department of Education.

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That figure is lower for economically disadvantaged students (31%), minority students (28%), students with disabilities (13%), and English language learners (9%).

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In the WalletHub analysis, Louisiana also ranked 47th nationally when it comes to median ACT score, dropout rate, and percentage of licensed/certified public K-12 teachers.

Seven percent of teachers in Louisiana classrooms in 2019-20 were not certified at all — in addition, to the 16% (7,278 teachers) who were teaching classes outside of the fields they were certified to teach, according to LDOE's annual educator workforce report.

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In the category of pupil-teacher ratio, Louisiana came in 46th and then 43rd in the percentage of "threatened/injured high school students." That's a separate category in the report on Bullying Incidence Rate, in which Louisiana ranked 22 out of 51.

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The highest spot in any of the rankings in the report for Louisiana was 16th for median SAT score. In 2020, Louisiana's participation rate in the SAT was 5%. The ACT is the preferred college entrance exam in the southern state.

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