The 100 best school districts according to Offspring Magazine (Sep/Oct 2000) included college towns across the country. In fact, 61 of the 100 are college town K-12 districts.

[Editor's Note: Also see K-12/University Partnerships page in CollegeTownLife.com.]

Nationally, when children's education is a consideration, more people are choosing where to purchase a home based on school district. The information is readily available on the Internet, but the secret of finding the best district for your family involves more than simply looking at the top state ratings in your area (looking at test scores alone gives you, for all practical purposes, a list of the wealthiest communities in your search region).

Some of these "Top 100" districts will not show up in the top tier of the Web sites that only show No Child Left Behind test results (although their dedication to moving all children forward has not changed since the Offspring article was published). The diversity of the district (mixed income levels) plays a role in that. For an excellent, insightful explanation see the 2/4/07 Washington Post article : How Not to Choose a School

Offspring worked with SchoolMatch (www.schoolmatch.com) using student score criteria, cost of living, academic performance and academic expenditures to develop a more complete overview of school districts. These are districts that give you the most bang for your housing/K-12 public school education buck. They also tend to have more heterogeneous student populations, exposing students to the diversity they will encounter as adults living in a 21st Century democracy.

The results:
"The first and most notable observation: Run, don't walk, to the nearest college town... College towns naturally breed communities that put education first... More important, aggressive districts take advantage of a neighboring college's vast resources." Those resources also include a wealth of off-school time programming in sports, culture, and educational enrichment for K-12 students. Also, with service learning becoming more common for universities, college student volunteers often play a major role in K-12 school-day tutoring.