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MIAMI RANKS #1 FOR RETURN ON EDUCATIONAL INVESTMENT, BEST IN THE NATION A recent study has shown that Miami, Florida has the highest rate of return on educational investment among the 90 largest cities in the United States. The study was conducted by WalletHub, a national financial website for consumers and small business owners. Miami-Dade County Public Schools’ (M-DCPS) education spending showed higher efficiency than large cities across the United States, including New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, as well as major Florida cities including Tampa, St. Petersburg, Orlando, Jacksonville, and Fort Lauderdale. “This is welcome news that reflects the hard work of Miami-Dade County Public Schools’ teachers,” said Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. “In spite of the challenges of poverty and language, students are receiving a sound education at a reasonable cost to taxpayers.” Through a series of reorganizations, the District’s downtown staff was cut by more than 57 percent, with many educators returning to teach in classrooms. Despite the cuts, the District continued to improve academically, and was awarded the 2012 Broad Prize for Urban Education, the nation’s highest K-12 education award, which is nicknamed the Nobel Prize of Education and honors the school district that best closes the achievement gap for minority students. “It is WalletHub's distinct pleasure to congratulate Miami on being named the U.S. City with the Most Efficient Education Spending. Miami rose to the top of this list of the country's 90 most populated cities due to its combination of high average test scores and low education expenditures per capita,” the network said in a statement. “The Miami-Dade County Public School district has clearly discovered a winning recipe for addressing student needs in an economical fashion, and that certainly deserves to be recognized and emulated around the country.” Two massive back-to-back audits of more than $500 million in federal funding resulted in no findings. Following a recent external audit, the district received the most favorable opinion based on its financial statements, indicating that healthy financial accounting practices were followed and that the District operated in an extremely fiscally responsible manner. M-DCPS has received certificates of excellence from the Government Finance Officers Association for 29 years and from the Association of School Business Officials for 30 years. In addition, in 2012, the school district was also presented with the coveted Award for Excellence in Financial Management by the Council of the Great City Schools. The Study Wallet Hub noted that the quality of education varied drastically from city to city. Public school budgets rely on local taxes, and disparities in those funds can spur income inequality as students reach adulthood, a Harvard University and National Bureau of Economic Research study concluded. Researchers found that school-district quality reflects the amount of tax dollars the community can pump into local economies. Each city’s aggregated standardized test scores in reading and math for grades 4 and 8 were divided by its total education spending per capita. The data was then normalized by four key socioeconomic factors: poverty rate and median household income single-parent families and the percentage of households that do not speak English. # # # 15-DGD/190/JJS
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