City: Cincinnati, OH

Category: Health Care

Telephone: (513) 386-6000

Description: When choosing a school district, parents will want to consider many factors, such as per-pupil spending, student/teacher ratio, average daily attendance rate, dropout rate, and student body size. Parents will encounter the Ohio Ninth Grade Proficiency Test because a student must pass all five sections of this test (writing, reading, math, science, and citizenship) to receive a high school diploma; this is a closely watched barometer of a district’s academic standing. Students have 11 chances to pass the test and may even continue taking the test after finishing their senior year of high school.The Ohio Department of Education also mails school district “report cards” to two million parents of Ohio schoolchildren. The report cards (fair’s fair, the kids have to endure them too) measure attendance rates, graduation rates, school funding, test scores, and other data. In Greater Cincinnati, the Lakota, Madeira, Indian Hill, Forest Hills, Mariemont, Sycamore, Loveland, Mason, Milford, and Wyoming districts met all 18 performance standards—scoring in the top of the state’s 600 districts.In Kentucky, the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) has had a major impact. The state religiously tracks the performance of educators and students and reports back to parents with a system of measures that can be quantified and understood.