Expansion Management Magazine has awarded Fayette County Schools its blue ribbon ranking.

The magazine, one of the world’s leading site location and facility publications, evaluates school systems mainly on their test scores and graduation rates. Fayette’s blue ribbon ranking places it in the top 33 percent of the 2,800 secondary school districts that were ranked nationwide.

Expansion Management Magazine is a monthly publication aimed at executives of companies who are actively looking for a place to expand or relocate their facilities within the next one to three years. The magazine rates school districts through its annual Education Quotient (EQ) as a way of providing its readers with a basis for comparing the type of work force they are likely to encounter in various communities around the country. This year’s EQ looked at all secondary school districts in the United States with an enrollment of at least 3,300 students.

The EQ is calculated on a weighted scale that measures how well students learn and how many stay to graduation, the community’s financial commitment to education and the community’s adult education and income levels.

Unlike many other educational ratings, which equate excellence to the level of public funding received, the EQ focuses primarily on results. Although it includes data on spending, teacher salaries and the socioeconomic background of the surrounding communities, by far the most important factors are the test scores and the graduation rates.

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